UK immigration rules too strict, says Nobel prize winner

Nobel Prize winner John O'Keefe warned that Britain's restrictive attitude to immigration could damage its ability to attract top scientific talent into the country.

O'Keefe, who has dual British and American citizenship, was part of a three-person team awarded the Nobel prize for medicine yesterday for their discovery that a part of the brain acts as an internal GPS system, helping us to navigate.

Professor O'Keefe said that Britain's immigration policy was "a very, very large obstacle" to Britain attracting the best young scientists hoping to live and work in the UK, and could stand in the way of important research.

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O'Keefe moved to University College London after beginning his career in Canada.

As part of his new role as the head of the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, a new research centre for work on neural circuits and behaviour at the university, O'Keefe will have to recruit 150 neuroscientists, and he says he expects immigration rules to be a "large obstacle" in that task.

"I am very, very acutely aware of what you have to do if you want to bring people into Britain and to get through immigration," O'Keefe said. "I'm not saying it's impossible, but we should be thinking hard about making Britain a more welcoming place."

David Cameron has set a target of reducing net migration to less than 100,000 by 2015, while Home Secretary Theresa May has spoken about bringing it to tens of thousands, the BBC reports.

O'Keefe said science must be allowed to continue its work unhindered by national borders. "Science is international, the best scientists can come from anywhere, they can come from next door or they can come from a small village in a country anywhere in the world, we need to make it easier," he said.

"Britain punches way above its weight in science and I think we need to continue to do that and anything that makes it easier to bring scientists in will be very welcome."