Question: What laws would you change in order to improve how the scientific experiments in your field are carried out?

Adam Washington answered on 11 Nov 2019:

The changes I would make are, frankly, a little selfish, but they touch on the larger point that Varun is making about the international nature of science.

Every year, we do an experiment that requires a special piece of equipment from the USA. It’s the only one of its kind in the world, but it’s also only useful at a facility like ours. As a result, they send it to us each year. It’s quite sensitive and gets damaged in transit every single time. We repair it, perform the experiment, and send it back. When it arrives in the USA, they find how it was damaged on the route back, fix that damage, then start preparing to send it back to us.

It would be much easier if we just left it here. It wouldn’t get damaged twice a year by being banged with fork lifts. We wouldn’t be paying thousands of pounds and tons of carbon to fly it over an ocean and back. Without the constant need for repairs, we could probably do our work on it for times faster. They’re happy for us to borrow it for as long as we want, but they are required to only “loan” it. They can’t give it to us. The problem comes that, if we bring it into the country for more than a year, we have to pay an import fee on it, which we’re not allowed to do on things that we rent. Only things that we buy. Thus, the accounting rules, import codes, and scientific funding requirements of two nations conspire to repeatedly send this box back to a lab where it cannot be used. Fixing any of those would improve the global rate of scientific output.