Will It Be Good or Bad for Science?
05/05/11 15:22 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Submitted by S. Pelech - Kinexus on Thu, 05/05/2011 - 15:22.
For a small country population-wise with about 34 million people, Canada has performed quite well in its contribution to the advancement of international science. This is despite the fact that it invests about 6-time less per person for biomedical R&D than in the United States. Overall government investment in science in Canada has not really differed that much between the Liberal and Conservative Parties when they have been in power in the past few decades.
The main problem facing biomedical researchers in Canada is that over the last decade, federal and provincial governments have invested heavily in infrastructure and the hiring of additional high quality scientists, but they have not really increased their support of the operational costs associated with these initiatives. Consequently, it is similarly difficult for Canadian researchers to obtain grant-in-aid support as is presently being experienced by our American counterparts with the NIH.
Some special research initiatives such as Genome Canada have received high government support, in this case with the promise that this would galvanized genomics research on a path to commercial development. Although this has been a clear failure, the Conservative government has remained committed in supporting Genome Canada in its latest budget proposal. However, such diversion of precious research dollars away from more productive research avenues has most likely contributed to the decline of the biotechnology industry in Canada and the plight that most Canadian biomedical scientists face today in getting support for their research.
The lion's share of Genome Canada's spending in the past decade has gone to sequencing the genomes of diverse exotic species, some of which are still not available to the broad scientific community after many years. With the plummeting cost of genome sequencing over the last decade, and the gene sequencing frenzy that has taken hold world-wide, it appears that Genome Canada has primarily invested in creation of assets with rapidly diminishing intellectual property value. It is time for Genome Canada and similar organizations around the world in other countries to go beyond the genome and more seriously promote proteomics and translational research. Genome Canada and the Canadian Institutes for Health Research for Genomics could start by at least changing their names.
Link to the original blog post.
For a small country population-wise with about 34 million people, Canada has performed quite well in its contribution to the advancement of international science. This is despite the fact that it invests about 6-time less per person for biomedical R&D than in the United States. Overall government investment in science in Canada has not really differed that much between the Liberal and Conservative Parties when they have been in power in the past few decades.
The main problem facing biomedical researchers in Canada is that over the last decade, federal and provincial governments have invested heavily in infrastructure and the hiring of additional high quality scientists, but they have not really increased their support of the operational costs associated with these initiatives. Consequently, it is similarly difficult for Canadian researchers to obtain grant-in-aid support as is presently being experienced by our American counterparts with the NIH.
Some special research initiatives such as Genome Canada have received high government support, in this case with the promise that this would galvanized genomics research on a path to commercial development. Although this has been a clear failure, the Conservative government has remained committed in supporting Genome Canada in its latest budget proposal. However, such diversion of precious research dollars away from more productive research avenues has most likely contributed to the decline of the biotechnology industry in Canada and the plight that most Canadian biomedical scientists face today in getting support for their research.
The lion's share of Genome Canada's spending in the past decade has gone to sequencing the genomes of diverse exotic species, some of which are still not available to the broad scientific community after many years. With the plummeting cost of genome sequencing over the last decade, and the gene sequencing frenzy that has taken hold world-wide, it appears that Genome Canada has primarily invested in creation of assets with rapidly diminishing intellectual property value. It is time for Genome Canada and similar organizations around the world in other countries to go beyond the genome and more seriously promote proteomics and translational research. Genome Canada and the Canadian Institutes for Health Research for Genomics could start by at least changing their names.
Link to the original blog post.