When this debate topic was first conceived for the regular programme of the 70^th 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

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