Canadian investigators lose major perq

Senior Canadian biomedical researchers can no longer hope to top off their salaries with a 5-year, $70,000 annual investigator award. The award program, considered an important incentive to keep Canada's best midcareer and senior investigators from being lured by institutions in the United States, has been cut from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) budget just 2 months before the next round's application deadline.The CIHR, a rough analog of the US National Institutes of Health, was created in 2000 and inherited the decades-old investigator award program from its predecessor, the Medical Research Council of Canada. But the program has always been shoehorned into the CIHR budget because the awards were multiyear grants, while CIHR budgets are approved on an annual basis. "I don't write the budget speeches, I'm not the minister of finance," said CIHR President Alan Bernstein. "In fact, I don't know who the next minister of finance will be or when the next budget speech will be, and we have to make decisions for next year."Canada is about to get a new prime minister, Paul Martin, and with a new cabinet will come a delay in the budget.The CIHR started out in 2000 with an annual budget of C$360 million, now up to C$620 million, making Canada's medical research budget the fastest growing in the world. With a reputedly research-friendly Paul Martin at the helm, Bernstein thinks the long-term prospects for a C$1 billion budget are promising. But with next year's budget still in question, the CIHR took this time to get back to what Bernstein calls its "core business" of funding operating grants. Only after that, said Bernstein, should the CIHR fund career awards.There are just 127 such investigator awards, and any applicant had perhaps a 1 in 10 chance of receiving one. Still, their symbolism was crucial to keeping senior investigators in Canada, according to Eliot Phillipson, chair of the Department of Medicine of the University of Toronto. Phillipson's commentary in the Canadian Medical Association Journal criticizing CIHR's move was countered by Bernstein's defense of the decision.Phillipson is especially concerned about retaining clinical researchers—MDs who carry out academic research. Over half of them at the University of Toronto do research on the basic cellular level, but because of their medical practices, they "know which questions to ask," Phillipson told The Scientist. "I've had researchers in my department come up to me and say, 'Even if the odds were 1 in 10, I'm willing to take my chances,'" said Phillipson. "I have several people who, to my mind, would with no question be competitive and would get those awards, but now we're saying as a society we're not interested in supporting you."Phillipson believes that if the purse strings had to be tightened for a year or so, it would have been better to cut back a bit on operating grants. "Mostly, investigators are pretty creative at finding other sources or getting by with somewhat less in their budgets," he said. "They won't admit to it. Nobody will say it publicly. They don't like it. I don't like it either, but I don't know anybody that went out of business because their operating budget was cut back temporarily by 10%. But if a US institution picks off one of our investigators, we've lost them." The CIHR notes that some of the support the investigator awards provided will be replaced by other, more extensively funded programs, such as the Canadian Research Chairs Program that will fund 2000 new research faculty positions in all fields, not just biomedical research, by 2005. And, if somehow Canadian universities can adequately provide for their clinical researchers for the next year or so, further help may be on the way. A CIHR working committee is looking at structuring a support program especially for clinical researchers, assuming adequate funding is available in late 2004, 2005, or 2006.

Canadian investigators lose major perq

Salary supplement for senior researchers dropped from CIHR budget

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