HarperVille
Yesterday, in Macleans, Paul Wells made the case that Stephen Harper's government is killing Canadian Science, by comparing where we are headed with what is happening South of the 49th.
.....I'm always baffled when, after one of my columns on the importance of aggressive federal support for science and technology in Canada, I get a flurry of emails from readers who argue that it's socialism, or bad federalism, or a waste of money for the feds to be in the science game. "Leave it to the market," the refrain goes. "The way the Americans do."
"Well, first of all, the Americans don't," Alan Bernstein told me the other day. "The Americans invest way more than any other country on science. And way more per capita than any other country."
Bernstein is the president of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, a keystone of Canada's research effort since it was founded in 2000. But compared to the Americans, Bernstein has done his work at bargain rates. It's an oranges-to-apple-pie comparison, but Bernstein figures the CIHR has less than one-third the budget of its rough U.S. equivalent, the NIH -- even if you take population differences into account.
All of which I cannot quibble with. And Dr. Bernstein is doing his best.
But that is an historical comparison.
Because the way I see it, if Mr. Harper continues on his current path, he will actually be chasing Mr. Bush down the scientific rabbit hole.
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What the heckfire am I talking about?
Well, science geeks measure the health of granting programs on the basis of their 'funding rates'.
And I have had experience with such rates on both sides of the border.
In fact, when I came back to Canada to set-up my own lab back in the age of Clinton, people said I was crazy to leave the US because, at the time, the National Institutes of Health (the NIH Bernstein mentioned above) was funding grant applications at the rate that sometimes approached 30%, which means that almost one in three scientists got the money they asked for. This might seem harsh, but it is actually very good - it keeps the competitive juices flowing while simultaneously funding both good/new and mature/blockbuster stuff. Which is what you need, because almost inevitably, it is the new/good research that ultimately gives rise to the mature/blockbuster (just Andy Fire, one of this year's Nobel Prize winners who had this crazy idea when he started that something arcane called small interfering RNA might be interesting; it has since become a boon to people like me who want to efficiently manipulate genes in mammalian cells rather than fruit flies).
On the flipside, when I left the U.S., Paul Martin's austerity measures were gutting Canada's old Medical Research Council (which has since become Mr. Bernsetein's CIHR, also mentioned above) and funding rates were significantly less than at the NIH. And even more troubling, the size of the grants was piddling, such that even if you got one it was very difficult to do the research you had proposed
However, by the time small Paul became PM a few years later the situation, as Wells describes in his piece, had vastly improved in Canada.
And at the same time things had reversed under Mr. Bush. U.S. NIH funding rates sank dramatically, so much so that they now often dip down into single digits (ie. 1 in 10 applications funded) while Mr. Bernstein's Canadian CIHR moved up to the high 20's.
As a result (and this is no joke), by 2003 friends and colleagues who once thought I was crazy to return to Canada began calling me from places like the Bay Area, New England and Grand Forks North Dakota, to ask if I knew about any jobs up here.
But all that is starting to change now as the latest predictions due, apparently, to Mr. Harper's dereliction of evidence-based science, are that CIHR funding rates will soon all to 15-20% .
Which is very troubling indeed, because when you get down to levels like that you begin to cut out all the 'good' science that has not yet reached 'blockbuster' status.
And when you do that you can kiss innovation good-bye.
Not to mention a whole generation of new scientists, because it is the young folks that have the most difficulty getting those first grants. And if they can't get grants, fewer and fewer of them will return to Canada after they have fanned out all over the world to get the best training possible as post-doctoral fellows.
But perhaps I'm being too pessimistic about an emerging Harper-induced brain drain.
After all, based on how things have gone so far, it might not be unreasonble to speculate that there will soon be a huge market for 'faith-based' scientists.
OK?
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