Canada's major funding agencies, the Medical Research Council (MRC) and Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), will instead have to make do with grant funds frozen at last year's level and a 5 percent decrease in administrative budgets over the next two years. And Canadian scientists say that the southward migration of talent will continue unabated.
MRC and NSERC provide funding for universities and research laboratories, roughly equivalent to the roles played by the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation in the U.S. A third agency, the National Research Council, funds and operates 16 research facilities across Canada and faces similar cutbacks.
"They're now separating the cream from the cream," says MRC spokesman Neal Morris, adding that, as it is, only one of every five applications for research grants deemed worthy by an MRC peer-review system can be funded. U.S. researchers fare a bit better at NIH, ...
