Canadian Researchers Fret About Funding

Melvin Silverman, professor of medicine at the University of Toronto, recently got a call from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. The CIHR surveyor asked the scientist who would benefit from his studies of diabetes and membrane function, and what the intermediate and final outcome of the work would be. To Silverman, the questioner had asked him to justify the funding of basic biomedical research according to its direct community health benefits, rather than its scientific significance. Silverman answered "undiplomatically," he says, calling the questions "ignorant." Yet, the survey reflected the mandate of the new CIHR: to serve the country's diverse population and balance social and behavioral science revelations with basic discoveries in the lab. "It's a dance with the devil," he worries. "Interdisciplinary research is where things are at, at the cutting edge of new knowledge. The problem is money, and when there's a money problem, the jealousies of different departments dominate.... At the end of five years we could end up having a lower budget." Money problems actually prompted the creation of the new CIHR in June 2000. That year, a consortium of scientists, physicians, academics, and industry representatives scrapped the former Medical Research Council, which funded only biomedical research, and replaced it with the CIHR, a complicated new funding agency. The goal: to help the country compete with what many in Canada consider the extravagantly funded US National Institutes of Health. But after its first full year of operation, the CIHR has failed to mollify researchers worried about losing talented junior scientists to the United States, and it has created a new concern: that basic researchers will have to compete harder with politically more palatable groups for funding in their own country. "The mold of the basic scientist is not one where he's thinking of the political—who he has to persuade politically to do what he wants to do," says Bruce Waygood, coordinator of health research at the University of Saskatchewan. "It would be a disaster to research if we forced people to be that way; it's not that kind of intellectual activity that we are involved in.... Governments and politicians are much more comfortable with the softer side of health research." Researchers Frustrated The Canadian Parliament's unprecedented boost to life scientists has even proven unpersuasive to critics such as Waygood and Silverman. In December, the federal government added $75 million (Canadian) to the 2001-2002 CIHR appropriation, boosting the annual budget to $561 million. But the total federal contribution falls below the institution's goal of devoting to research 1% of the country's national healthcare expenditure by 2004. "When the CIHR was created, we hoped to have more money, but the money didn't come," says Jean-Paul Collet, associate professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at McGill University, and director of the randomized clinical trials unit at Jewish General Hospital. "There was a great deal of frustration, not just in me, but in the full community of research." Courtesy of CIHRUphill Battle: Alan Bernstein says the CIHR has not imparted the message that basic research is still valued even when funding multiple disciplines. Alan Bernstein, CIHR president, counters that money devoted to basic life science research and its share of the total budget has increased as the average grant to individual researchers has risen from $75,000 to just above $100,000. Still, Bernstein acknowledges that he has failed to assuage critics in his own profession. "We have not done a good job of getting out the message that even though we have been able to expand the mandate ... to fund research in the social sciences and humanities, we also have increased the value of grants 40% over a short period of time," he says. The Canadian Parliament's willingness to fund basic science extends beyond the CIHR: In addition to funding the institutes, the government has contributed $300 million since 2000 to the newly created Genome Canada, a nonprofit agency that oversees genome research, and $200 million in a one-time lump-sum payment to universities for research equipment and materials. An additional $120 million for 2001-2002 supports 97 new Canadian research chairs in all academic fields. With so much political support for health research, contends David Andrews, vice president of the Canadian Biochemical Society, scientists should focus on adequately funding their projects rather than on who gets more money. "The whole idea of trying to make it 'us-and-them' with the social sciences is a mistake," maintains Andrews, professor of biochemistry at McMaster University. "They can have the same funding, more funding, or less funding than people in basic research, as long as you first fund the basic research at a level that the pipeline is maintained." Keeping Up with the NIH Maintaining the discovery pipeline requires retaining young scientists, a goal Canada has failed to achieve. A January 2001 study showed that in 1997, 19 Canadian physicians left the country for every new health researcher who relocated from another country; by 1998, 12% of the 1995 doctorates (one half of the highest-ranking students) had immigrated to the United States. Pharmaceutical companies have also fled the country in the wake of the government's campaign to promote generic substitutes for high-cost patented drugs and therapies—and the CIHR funds an aggressive university-industry program that gives a subsidy to company research projects in academic institutions. Still, biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, and the young scientists who could work in them, have plenty of reasons to migrate south. US government expenditure on basic research—$23,000 million in 1997—dwarfs the amount spent in Canada—$1,700 million.1 More recently, a report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates that the Canadian government spent $419 (US) per capita on research and development in all fields in 1998, compared with $893 spent by the US government.2 But structurally the two organizations differ—the CIHR provides principal investigator salaries only under the most competitive individual grants. Universities, not the CIHR, pay the indirect costs for lights, heat, air conditioning, and janitorial services. But according to a 1999 report by Heather Munroe-Blum, vice president for research and international relations at the University of Toronto, this subsidy has failed to keep pace with the rising cost of research overhead. "We are calling [the subsidy] a down payment on indirect costs, about 20% of the current support to research," Munroe-Blum says. "We are aiming for 49 cents on the [research] dollar." CIHR operates no research campuses like those of the NIH. Instead, 13 virtual institutes, based in academic centers, span priorities as diverse as the Institute of Aboriginal Peoples' Health and the Institute of Genetics. Scientific review boards distribute funds among four priorities: biomedical research, clinical biomedical research, health services and policy, and population health. "We want to integrate talents and skills," says Barry McLennan, chairman of the Coalition for Biomedical and Health Research, and dean of research at the University of Saskatchewan, who participated in the CIHR's design. "It's not business as usual, it's a whole new way of funding health research." For Want of Dollars Scientists acknowledge that advances in biomedical research demand a multidisciplinary approach, particularly if the country aims to attract more pharmaceutical companies. "We have to start taking a look at the cell from a holistic point of view," says Steve Pelech, professor of neurology at the University of British Columbia, and president and CEO of Kinexus, a Vancouver-based biotechnology company. "We are on the cusp of a dramatic change and paradigm shift in research," Pelech observes. "It's kind of like systems biology and we are not well trained for it. The only way to do systems biology is to have high-level grants and support and high-level industrial connections." Silverman, of the University of Toronto, says that, as a physician and a researcher, he embodies the idea of multidisciplinary science. But he contends that prior to the creation of the CIHR, biomedical research, as funded by the MRC, enjoyed an exclusivity that protected it somewhat from competitive skirmishes for federal funds. The broadening of the funding priorities pits basic research in a public battle against the social sciences and other priorities that the public may more easily understand, he says, and that's what has basic scientists so nervous. "Everyone feels very vulnerable in all dimensions," says Silverman. "If you truncate the funding, or make wrong decisions, you start to lose young people. You don't even know who you've lost." Paula Park can be reached at ppark@the-scientist.com. References 1. H. Munroe-Blum, "Growing Ontario's innovation system: the strategic role of university research," 1999, www.library.utoronto.ca/rir/report/index.html. 2. Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, "OECD in figures: Statistics on the member countries," 2001.

Canadian Researchers Fret About Funding

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