{"id":14275,"date":"2015-08-28T00:13:01","date_gmt":"2015-08-28T07:13:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=14275"},"modified":"2015-08-27T10:07:55","modified_gmt":"2015-08-27T17:07:55","slug":"researcher-moves-to-london","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2015\/08\/28\/researcher-moves-to-london\/","title":{"rendered":"Researcher moves to London"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/b>The Canadian government\u2019s policies toward local research and innovation are being streamlined with industry, making it so researchers are no longer free to look outside the box. This is one of the reasons Dr. Robert Brownstone gives for his decision to leave Canada to live in England and teach at the University College of London.<\/p>\n

\"photo<\/a>
Dr. Robert Brownstone (photo from Dr. Robert Brownstone)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Brownstone, who was born and raised in Winnipeg, has spent most of his research career in Canada. He is a neurosurgeon who has treated people with movement disorders, pain and epilepsy, and who researches neural circuits that control movement. Prior to recently leaving the country, he was working as a professor of surgery (neurosurgery) and medical neuroscience at Dalhousie University.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile it could be argued that there have been no cuts to the Canadian Institutes and Health Research (CIHR), funding has been flat (which is in effect a cut) and funding has been directed to specific programs (which is a cut to investigator-driven fundamental research),\u201d said Brownstone in an interview with the Independent<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Minister of State (Science and Technology) spokesperson Scott French challenged this claim, however. \u201cSince being elected in 2006, our government has made record investment in science, technology and innovation to push the frontiers of knowledge, create jobs and improve the quality of life of Canadians \u2013 including providing over $1 billion in funding toward neuroscience research alone,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

French added that CIHR directs two-thirds of its funding envelope to basic or discovery science to strengthen Canada\u2019s position as a world leader in health research.<\/p>\n

\"photo<\/a>
Dr. John Bergeron (photo from Dr. John Bergeron)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

McGill University\u2019s Dr. John Bergeron \u2013 researcher, professor and chair of anatomy and cell biology for 13 years \u2013 explained the issue using a hockey analogy. \u201cFor whatever reason,\u201d he said, \u201cwe decided that talent and accountability to genuine discovery would not be part of our funding mechanism. That decision was made by administrators and, in my mind at least, it\u2019s sort of like saying, \u2018We\u2019re going to get the best logos in hockey and that will make us win the championship, the NHL cup, or whatever.\u2019 And saying, \u2018We don\u2019t need talent…. We just need to look good on camera.\u2019 Of course, that\u2019s not sensible.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bergeron acknowledged that generous sums of public money are targeted for research and development. However, he said that an accountability mechanism should be considered to see if that money is targeting talent that generates genuine discoveries.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy any deductive measure, Canada is not doing well,\u201d said Bergeron. \u201cThe most recent is the latest rankings of research universities (viewable at shanghairanking.com). We\u2019ve had zero Nobel Prizes in medicine since our one and only award in 1923 (for the discovery of insulin). All big pharma pre-clinical research labs have left Canada and we have only one living Lasker Award winner \u2013 James Till of Toronto.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is the university presidents and heads of our funding agencies who have failed the Canadian taxpayer. It is young, genuine talent that is needed across Canada, and the lack of accountability of our university presidents and heads of funding agencies is what is holding us back.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bergeron said we are shooting ourselves in the foot by funding research without having an infrastructure to apply the discoveries and reap the rewards of our efforts. \u201cOne of my goals is to try to use the Merck labs, get them going to put together a world-class institute to exploit genuine discoveries that are made here in Canada.\u201d<\/p>\n

As an example, Bergeron pointed to the work of McGill University Canadian-Israeli educator Dr. Nahum Sonenberg.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith Dr. Sonenberg\u2019s basic science discovery, he went from figuring out all of the machinery involved in making proteins to stumbling across the fact that if you target a small molecule with some of the proteins he\u2019s discovered, it improves memory. So, colleagues in the U.S. and Britain teamed up with biotechs and big pharmas and have now used this discovery to develop drugs to treat senility, Alzheimer\u2019s, memory loss.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is going to be a market creating hundreds of millions of dollars that we\u2019re not going to exploit [in Canada]\u2026. We don\u2019t have any infrastructure to do this, all because these crazy administrators know nothing about what real discoveries have been historically.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bergeron sits on grant panels for the European Commission that provide 10 million euro grants a year, as well as U.S. funding agencies panels that give out more than a million dollars in grants per year.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you\u2019re in Canada, the average grant in the last competition for the open operating grant averaged out to about $125,000 a year per investigator,\u201d said Bergeron. \u201cThat\u2019s serious taxpayer money, but it\u2019s not competitive with what\u2019s going on in the rest of the world. We\u2019re spending over $30 billion a year in research and development, yet we don\u2019t use peer review. Funding decisions are made by administrators that know nothing about discovery.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"photo<\/a>
Jim Woodgett (photo from Jim Woodgett)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Jim Woodgett, investigator and director of research of the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute at Toronto\u2019s Mount Sinai Hospital Joseph and Wolf Lebovic Health Complex, also said that funding has been stagnant in recent years and that restructuring at CIHR has resulted in further hoops researchers need to jump through to access funding.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo access funds here, in Canada, you have to bring to the table equivalent funds from other sources,\u201d said Woodgett. \u201cThey can be philanthropic sources, etc. These types of programs, the government has been quite keen on promoting as a means of leveraging additional support. And some types of research just don\u2019t have that kind of accessibility or the researchers don\u2019t have accessibility to those matching funds, so that does become a bit of a limiting problem.\u201d<\/p>\n

Woodgett said there needs to be a balance, and better ways to access funding that do not require fundraising. \u201cYou need to balance discovery research and applied research, otherwise what happens is you just dry up after awhile,\u201d he said. \u201cAll the ideas dry up and there\u2019s nothing then to translate into applied research.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can argue you should spend 10 percent of your funds on discovery and 90 percent on applied \u2026 and say that the private sector shouldn\u2019t be funding basic science … they should be only funding applied science.\u201d<\/p>\n

Internationally, many government-supported research funds go toward the discovery end of the spectrum. Canada needs to do the same if it wants to retain top researchers, said Brownstone.<\/p>\n

Acknowledging that he is not a politician nor an economist, he said, \u201cI feel there is intrinsic value in knowledge or a knowledge economy. Good things come from knowledge. Just look at leaders in the field, like Switzerland and Silicon Valley, unlike oil economies, such as Saudi Arabia.\u201d<\/p>\n

As far as creating change and reinventing research in Canada, Brownstone said, \u201cChanging culture is hard, but it can be done with leadership. Look at [U.S. President John F.] Kennedy and landing a man on the moon.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rebeca Kuropatwa<\/strong> is a Winnipeg freelance writer.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Canadian government\u2019s policies toward local research and innovation are being streamlined with industry, making it so researchers are no longer free to look outside the box. This is one of the reasons Dr. Robert Brownstone gives for his decision to leave Canada to live in England and teach at the University College of London. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[4424,4423,4428,4426,4427,4425,2225,1881],"class_list":["post-14275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-national","tag-anadian-institutes-and-health-research","tag-cihr","tag-jim-woodgett","tag-john-bergeron","tag-nahum-sonenberg","tag-robert-brownstone","tag-science","tag-technology"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14275"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14275\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}