Today over 500 people across the U.K. and Israel will go to hospital having suffered a heart attack. Around seven in 10 will survive but with irreparable damage to the heart and no cure apart from a transplant, only possible for a lucky few because of the shortage of donors. That is why Israeli and U.K. scientists are coming together to find new ways to mend broken hearts.
And it is not just heart disease – the U.K. and Israel are pushing the boundaries on a range of the world's most debilitating diseases and shared challenges.
That is why some of the best minds from around the world came together on U.K.-Israel science day, marked on March 5 – to celebrate the achievements of U.K.-Israel science collaboration and look to even more in the future.
There is a huge amount for the U.K. and Israel to celebrate. We're both global leaders in science and innovation, have world-class universities and a disproportionate share of Nobel prize winners. But it is not just the fact that we both have these things. We also quite literally share them through the flows of researchers, technology and partnerships between our countries.
In the past five years, some 8,000 scientific publications were co-authored by a U.K. and Israeli researchers making the U.K. Israel's third-biggest scientific partner. This year over 1,000 researchers will be involved in the programs run by the British Embassy and the British Council in Israel. And we know that there are many others.
We also share the understanding that the more there is the better. The international standing and performance of our science sectors are critical for our future mutual prosperity and will best thrive through international collaboration. The levers and sources of science and innovation increasingly know no international boundaries.
We have also chosen to pool our collective brains and together take up some of humanity's great challenges. This year hundreds of U.K. and Israeli scientists are getting together to find ways to research and tackle issues from antimicrobial resistance to post-traumatic stress disorder, and from crop resistance to climate change to water scarcity and pollution. The list of challenges we share is long, but not as long as the ingenuity of U.K. and Israel scientists to solve them.
And for the past five years, more than 1,000 scientists from 120 U.K. and Israeli institutions have been working together through BIRAX – the British-Israel Research Exchange – to tackle major global diseases such as diabetes, Parkinson's and cardiovascular disease.
This year, at the U.K.-Israel science day, we launched a major new BIRAX initiative for the next five years to tackle the challenges of aging. Our great triumph of vastly improved life expectancy is becoming a shared challenge. In the U.K. there are now more people aged 60 and above than under 18 and the population over 75 is projected to double over the next 30 years. In Israel, the elderly population in 2015 was 833,000, this is expected to double to 1.64 million by 2035.
This will brings huge change and challenge with ever greater pressure placed on our health and welfare systems. U.K. and Israeli scientists will work together to look at a variety of medical conditions and the aging process such as arthritis, frailty, diabetes, and neurodegenerative conditions, and the use of big data to support personalized medicine for aged patients.
These are big challenges, but we have a natural partnership to push forward on them together and definitely some powerful collaborations to celebrate at future U.K.-Israel science days. This will bring together scientists, the partners from Israel and the U.K. who support collaborations, and members of the U.K.-Israel Science Council, the august body that steers our collaboration. We are celebrating the science and innovation relationship that we have built and the shared desire to do more and work together to increase our collective endeavor so not only help our science and innovation sectors prosper but also to tackle together some of the world's challenges
And this is all definitely worth raising a glass for.
