Abstract
When this debate topic was first conceived for the regular programme of the 70th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, the focus was on the most recent impactful incident for scientific collaboration: Brexit. Accompanied by larger trends towards more nationalistic political (and thus research) agendas, and more isolation in a growing number of countries world-wide, these challenges alone would have been sufficient to discuss the state and role of international scientific collaboration.
With the corona crisis, this debate has gained a whole new spin: Collaboration and exchange of knowledge may be the key in the race for a vaccine, and it may pave the way for a new level of open, collaborative science. Defeating this purpose are discussions about which nation should have first access to the vaccine or attempts to buy vaccine research start-ups to secure a national supply.
The panel will debate how international scientific collaboration can work in our current times: What are its pitfalls, how do they relate to political agendas, how can they be financed, how are they setup most productively?
Panellists:
- Yeka Aponte, Chief, National Institute on Drug Abuse, Neuronal Circuits and Behavior Unit, USA
- Barry C. Barish, California Institute of Technology, USA
- Toby Brown, Deptartment of Physics & Astronomy, McMaster University, Canada
- David J. Gross, Chancellor's Chair Professor of Theoretical Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, USA
- Sir Konstantin S. Novoselov, National University of Singapore, Department of Materials Science & Engineering, Singapore
- Sir Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Structural Studies Division, United Kingdom
Moderator: Jan-Martin Wiarda, Journalist & Freelance Writer
