Canada’s knowledge economy: not so much

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 at 1:20 PM - 95 Comments

It’s always good to compare hope against achievement. One of the first big things the Harper government did after it had delivered on (four of) its five election-year priorities in 2006 was to release, in 2007, its Science and Technology Strategy. Our text today comes from that document — especially this paragraph, which came in its own little box to show how important it was:

“At a time when Canada’s overall productivity gains are below those of other trading nations with whom we compete, the need to encourage greater private-sector S&T investment is a national priority.”

Got it. And how’s that working out? Today Industry Canada’s Science, Technology and Innovation Council released its second benchmarking report, two years after the first. This compares Canada’s performance on various research and innovation-related measures to global trends. And today’s report is pretty brutal. On the specific “national priority” I quoted above, here’s the tale of the tape:

“From 2006 to 2009…Canadian business expenditure on R&D declined in inflation-adjusted terms.”

But that’s just the beginning of it. As the Globe wrote this morning based on a leaked copy of the report (sigh), “Canada ranked worse or stagnated in 18 of 24 benchmarks tracked by the council since its 2008 report.” Here, through the magic of cut-and-paste, is what that looks like on paper:

There’s a second page of those down arrows in the report after this one. Continue…

The quiet cuts

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 10:23 AM - 9 Comments

Chris Cobb finds a 20% cut to the budget of the National Research Council.

Although the cuts at NRC are “significant,” added Corbett, the issue is less about numbers and more about expertise. “If you have a rocket scientist going out the door, you can’t replace that person with an insect scientist,” he said. “It’s a pretty specialized field and that’s the part the government doesn’t appear to understand.

“The government is putting its fiscal policy ahead of everything and ordering all the science-based departments and agencies to cut,” he said. “And they are having a hell of a time doing it. On one hand they are trying to deliver the programs they are mandated and legislated to do, but on the other hand they are having to make some serious choices. It looks like one essential program will live at the expense of another.”

The murky world of academic ghostwriting

By Julia Belluz - Friday, May 6, 2011 at 12:05 PM - 8 Comments

Photograph by Flickr user striatic

When Barbara Sherwin, a McGill University psychology professor, became embroiled in a ghostwriting case in 2009, many wondered how an esteemed academic—one who dedicated her life to researching the relationship between hormones and cognition—could be accused of attaching her name to an article she didn’t write.

Her alleged transgression came to light in a class-action suit involving 8,400 women against the drug company Wyeth (now part of Pfizer). Lawyers representing the women, who claim they were harmed by their hormone replacement therapy (HRT) drugs, discovered that scientific research papers extolling the virtues of the treatment while downplaying potential harm appeared to have been written, not by the academics who signed their name to the papers, but by writers hired by the pharmaceutical company. Continue…

Fat could repair wounds and burns

By Celia Milne - Thursday, November 18, 2010 at 12:00 PM - 3 Comments

Julie Fradette (left) works with colleagues at LOEX to isolate stem cells | Jérôme Bourgoin/Université Laval

Her friends jokingly call her “the fat lady.” That’s because Julie Fradette’s dream is to extract stem cells from fat, coax them in her lab to divide and grow, create all-natural three-dimensional soft tissue, and have surgeons use it in people’s bodies. She’s done all but the last. When that happens, a new breast could be built or a gaping wound filled without any synthetic material whatsoever—just the person’s own cells. “That’s the beauty of it,” says Fradette. And using adult cells avoids the question of embryonic stem cells, the source of a lot of the controversy.

Fradette, a researcher at the cutting-edge Laboratoire D’Organogénèse Expérimentale (LOEX) at Université Laval in Quebec City, is a world leader in creating three-dimensional soft tissue that is completely autologous, meaning from the self. Her colleagues at LOEX use stem cells—mostly harvested from skin—to produce new skin, blood vessels, ligaments, bronchi and corneas. And other groups have taken fat and re-injected it elsewhere in the body—to fill in facial wrinkles, for instance. Fradette is unique in using fat stem cells to create larger chunks of tissue.

Her experiments use fat that has been cut or liposuctioned from people’s bellies and butts at nearby clinics. (The donors have consented to have their fat used.) But one day, she hopes to rely on a patient’s own fat cells. “It is possible to harvest your stem cells from fat even if you are thin,” she explains. “We have a lot of it, and it’s so accessible.”

Continue…

Shh . . . they can hear us

By Josh Dehaas - Thursday, November 4, 2010 at 3:40 PM - 0 Comments

GETTY IMAGES

In the basement of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Woods Hole, Md., researcher Aran Mooney spent much of the last year lowering squid into metre-long tanks, attaching electrodes to them and blasting noise through the water. “Squids are fun little animals to work with because they’re so basic and primitive,” he says. “They’re almost like little wind-up toys. If you put one in a tank, it will just keep swimming and hitting its head on the wall of the tank over and over again.”

Primitive they may be, but Mooney’s research has settled the debate over whether Loligo pealii (think calamari) are sophisticated enough to hear. For decades, marine biologists wondered about that, but no one knew of a sedation method that could keep the animals alive long enough for in vivo tests to prove it. Squid don’t respond to dolphin clicks, so it was assumed they could not hear at all. It turns out dolpin clicks are just at the wrong frequency.

Squid may not be as good at hearing as humans (who can hear up to 20,000 hertz), but Mooney has shown they can detect low frequencies (up to 500 hertz) like the wave of a hungry whale swimming at them. And although the squid “ear” doesn’t likely share a common ancestor with our own, it works similarly enough that Mooney believes the research can have human applications. (Squid are already used to research human neurology, simply because they have large, primitive structures.) Mooney says hair cell loss is a key reason we as humans lose hearing. “We could look in squid and maybe find a way to maintain or regenerate them,” he says.

Continue…

Brain food I: the post-doctoral trap

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, July 6, 2010 at 8:26 PM - 0 Comments

Let’s take Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s announcement today at Perimeter Institute in two parts.

The PM announced $45 million over five years (that’s kind of like $9 million a year, but not quite because there’s a ramp-up from zero to full cost) for 700 so-called Banting Post-Doctoral Fellowships. There was some chatter on Twitter that this is a re-announcement of something that was in the spring budget. In fact, I said as much myself. The opposition Liberals quickly sent me the same talking point. But I’m not one for dwelling on such things. When governments announce the allocation of funds they’d earmarked in a budget, to me that’s essentially just a confirmation that the budget meant something real. And indulging in games of “he announced it before!” is one way to avoid discussing the merits of the actual policy.

So on to the actual policy. The federal science and technology strategy as it has evolved through the governments of Mulroney, Chrétien, Martin and Harper is by now so elaborate that it’s getting into areas most people won’t even be familiar with. What the heck is a post-doc? Of course Wikipedia has an answer, but it’s essentially a way station between graduate research — Master’s and doctoral-level scholarship — and a full career in science. The Banting post-docs seek to attract the best fledgling researchers from Canada and abroad and launch their careers well. At $70,000 a year, they’re quite generous.

But here’s the thing. Continue…

Hey look: Just on the off-chance that luring extraordinary scientists is a GOOD idea…

By Paul Wells - Friday, May 21, 2010 at 8:42 AM - 26 Comments

From the print edition, my column on the Canada Excellence Research Chairs, in which I acknowledge only in passing the concerns about how all the recipients are men. After three days of blanket coverage of that angle, I’m sure my column will seem hopelessly obtuse to many. But I wanted to use the space Maclean’s gave me this week simply to explain what the program is, and why it will have effects on several campuses that go well beyond the parachuting of some exotic hothouse flower into a cloistered perch. No, in every case that I looked at on Tuesday, the arriving CERC will be joined by colleagues in place and by new hires, new equipment, grad students and post-docs — 19 little colonies of well-funded, very ambitious talent on 19 13 campuses (Laval, Waterloo, UofT got two CERCs each; the University of Alberta got four). There’s room for criticism, but it seems to me that we should start from a basic understanding of this program’s goals and the effect it’s already having.

Today's a big day in Canadian science

By Paul Wells - Monday, May 17, 2010 at 8:46 AM - 25 Comments

Today on campuses across Canada, university officials and Conservative politicians will be announcing the first winners of the Canada Excellence Research Chairs competition. Sometimes referred to by academics as the “uber-chairs,” the CERCs seek to add an extra layer of, well, elitism (and believe me, I mean that in a good way) on top of the hundreds of federally-funded Canada Research Chairs who’ve already transformed Canadian research.

The goal of the CERCs is to give 20 chairholders and their research teams up to $10 million each for seven-year research programs. That’s a lot of money and, I suspect even more important, a solid long-term commitment to do good science without having to spend half your time doing grant applications for next year. The program is explicitly designed to draw international along with domestic talent, although one of the interest twists is that for the preliminary, short-list round, universities submitted research projects without saying who they had in mind to do the work. (I bet that in most cases, they knew precisely who they had in mind, but I’d be curious to hear if there were exceptions. “Pick us! We want to do photonics! Quick, do you know anyone who does photonics?“)

The selection board for this project is a Who’s Who — Rob Prichard, Margaret MacMillan, a former RIM principal, the president of a big Asian university — and the review panel designed to actually sift the short list is even more international in composition. Close observers of the whole thing will notice that, between the selection board and the review panel, a fast one has already been pulled, so that while the first is heavy with social sciences and humanities experience, the second has only engineers, physicists, chemists and molecular biologists. There will be other reasons to quibble about the results (the news release I’ve seen says Tony Clement will announce only 19 winners in Toronto this morning; I wonder what happened to the 20th? I suspect I’ll keep wondering). But since I doubt you’ll be hearing anywhere else today about the very existence of this program, I thought I’d at least note for you that it’s happening and that, to me, it’s good news.

I’ll update after the winners are announced.

Peering into tomorrow, blind as a bat

By Paul Wells - Thursday, March 4, 2010 at 4:41 PM - 104 Comments

“Let’s be clear,” Jim Flaherty told a news conference during today’s budget lockup for journalists. “This is a tough budget.” Several journalists watching in the room next door burst out laughing.

Like its predecessors, the 2010 budget (“Leading the Way on Jobs and Growth” — the rhetorical inspiration here comes for once not from Australia, but from Paul Martin circa 1994) features a few killer charts that seek to tell the whole story. One of the big ones this year is titled “Rapid Decline In Deficits.” It begins with a rapid increase in deficits, from $5.8 billion in 2008-2009 to $53.8 billion in 2009-2010, wafting gently down to $49.2 billion in 2010-2011, then to $27.6 billion, $17.5 billion, $8.5 billion, and finally to $1.8 billion in 2014-2015. Hey, that’s a rapid decline in deficits.

Continue…

Cards to play, chips to use

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, November 9, 2009 at 10:29 AM - 68 Comments

Reluctant partisan Mike Duffy explains the necessity of his travel on the public dime.

“You look at Holland College in P.E.I., they got $8.5 million this year,” said Duffy. “People say why do you travel? It’s because you need cards to play and chips to use.”

Duffy builds his chips up by traveling to MP’s ridings, meeting people, giving speeches and making friends.

“So I’m going to ask the minister of science Gary Goodyear to look favourably upon Holland College. He has a zillion applications and I say, ‘gee Gary, would you take a personal interest. I think it has merit. Will you look at that and see what you can do,” said Duffy. “So when Holland College comes up they get $8.5 million. They’re going to build some new buildings, take down some substandard housing and rearrange things and do it in a way that will substantially change your impression of Charlottetown.”

Can higher ed reach higher?

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, July 22, 2009 at 1:18 PM - 48 Comments

There’s a paradox to being the president of a large Canadian university: on most days you get to feel more influential and more powerless than most people can imagine.

In next week’s Maclean’s, we’ll talk with the presidents of Canada’s five largest universities about the challenges they face, and what they think needs fixing in our university system. It’s first worth examining, however, just how big a footprint these five make in Canada, and how Canadian universities in general stack up internationally. The institutions in question—the University of British Columbia, University of Alberta, University of Toronto, McGill University, and the Université de Montréal—are an elite bunch. They have nearly 22 per cent of Canada’s undergraduate student enrolment and produce nearly 45 per cent of the country’s doctorates. Continue…

The Harper government: Good for science

By Paul Wells - Friday, June 19, 2009 at 6:01 PM - 39 Comments

Last year two Canadians, Tony Pawson and Charles Taylor, won Japan’s Kyoto Prize, which has nothing to do with climate-change treaties but has been, for more than 20 years, that country’s most prestigious award for great thinkers. Charles Taylor you may know: he’s the McGill University philosopher. Tony Pawson is a Distinguished Investigator — I’ve only now learned he’s no longer Director of Research, and I suspect he’s greatly pleased to be out of that job — at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto. I’m told by people who know this stuff better than I do that his research on how cells communicate with one another may already have won him his Nobel — there is, as you can imagine, a long lag between discovery and recompense in this line of work.

Anyway, Pawson’s Kyoto Prize Lecture (.pdf) includes this eloquent plea for governments to leave scientists alone, as much as possible, to think in surprising ways and follow uncertain paths:

Remarkably, the basic science that has been pursued over several decades into the nature of cell communication, and the mis-wiring of signaling pathways in disease, is starting to yield new targeted therapies that are changing the way that we treat cancers for the better, and will be applicable to many human ailments. Although these are early days, I believe that this progress underscores the importance of giving free rein to human inventiveness. It would have been hard to predict that work on a curious chicken virus would have ultimately led to new ways of thinking about how human cells are organized, and to new drugs to treat one of mankind’s most persistent enemies. Governments increasingly want to see immediate returns on the research that they support, but it is worth viewing basic science as a long-term investment that will yield completely unexpected dividends for humanity in the future.

You know where this is going. The Harper government ran Pawson out of town. Nickle-and-dimed him to death. Discovered that cell biology is part of the devil’s work because its mechanisms evolve, and performed an exorcism.

Not really.

Continue…

Conference Board Recalls Research

By Andrew Potter - Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 12:56 PM - 8 Comments

From their website:

The Conference Board of Canada has recalled three reports: Intellectual Property Rights in the Digital Economy; National Innovation Performance and Intellectual Property Rights: A Comparative Analysis; and Intellectual Property Rights—Creating Value and Stimulating Investment. An internal review has determined that these reports did not follow the high quality research standards of The Conference Board of Canada.

Here’s the story

Naylor on the knowledge economy

By Paul Wells - Thursday, May 21, 2009 at 2:04 PM - 20 Comments

David Naylor, the University of Toronto’s president, delivers a speech on research, innovation, and Canada’s business culture that’s eerily similar to a column I published last week. Drawing from some of the same sources I used, Naylor makes a few points that should simply become common currency among people who want to discuss how Canada can use ideas to improve its economic performance:

• The post-recession economy will have lower global growth potential than the pre-recession economy. So it’s important not to forgo potential productivity gains.

• Canada has a long history of forgoing potential productivity gains.

• It’s tempting to be complacent about our level of educational attainment. We have high post-secondary-education participation rates only because we have a lot of people in community colleges. Our university attendance is middle-of-the-OECD-pack and our grad-school attainment sucks.

• Science, engineering, technology and math aren’t the only useful disciplines of study. The humanities and business education are important too. Just ask Jim Balsillie.

• It’s important, not only to have broad-based research funding, but special incentives to attract leaders in their fields. In that regard, “Hat’s off on this score to the federal government for introducing 500 new Vanier Scholarships for doctoral students. Valued at $50,000 per year, and desiged to compete with Rhodes and Fulbright scholarships, these top-tier awards for domestic and international graduate students send a very positive signal about Canada’s commitment to nurturing outstanding talent.”

• “We can and must get the three federal Granting Councils back on a modest growth trajectory” to insure all those shiny new taxpayer-funded labs are used to full capacity by the best investigators. But it’s business performance of R&D, not university research, where Canada seriously lags.

• The biggest challenge isn’t this or that program or institution, but a risk-averse culture that has to change.

Unsure where to fit this on the all-important Starbucks-to-Tims spectrum

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, May 5, 2009 at 2:23 PM - 30 Comments

I return from New Orleans, about which more later, to discover that there has been almost no coverage of the Prime Minister’s recent foray into the realm of the hyper-intellectual. (UPDATE: The Ottawa Citizen’s national editor will be cranky for weeks unless I point to Joanne Laucius’ typically elegant roundup.) I refer, of course, to recent announcements about the Canada Excellence Research Chairs and the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarships. These new initiatives by the Harper government are designed to add another layer of possibility to Canada’s universities — a top echelon, certainly not large in number, of global-class researchers and graduate scholars.

Neither program fits the narrative the Globe has begun to pursue, with real energy, which is that plucky researchers are standing up to face this Neanderthal government, which Doesn’t Get Science. To say the least, there’s something to that narrative. But neither is it that simple. Drift, listlessness, boneheadedness in some areas is matched by real thoughtfulness in others. Here are last week’s developments.

The Excellence Research Chairs, or CERC, provide for up to $1.4 million a year for seven years to fund (a) a lead investigator and (b) a specific research project, for up to 20 such researcher/projects across the country. The goal is to get the best researchers in the world, frankly without particular regard to whether they’re Canadian. Some will be, most won’t. This has caused some grumbling among Canadian university teachers. University administrators I’ve spoken to, not surprisingly, are less eager to grumble. Last week the first-tier competition winners were announced. They’ll now be winnowed down to a final pool of grant recipients. The projects being proposed are formidable: McGill wants to do research into pain, Alzheimer’s, and a new-generation Internet; Western has somebody in mind for a green energy project; Calgary wants to “quickly” implement carbon capture and storage.

The Vanier Scholarships are designed, frankly, to resemble the Rhodes Scholarships: a mix of foreign and Canadian top-tier young scholars, pursuing specific programs of research at Canadian universities. This year’s crop of 166 scholars will, again, not fundamentally change the nature of Canada’s campuses, where tens of thousands of students are pursuing their educations. But the program ensures that the very best from abroad will give Canada a look, while Canada’s best can excel at home. (This year’s crop contains far more Canadian than foreign students. Frankly I hope that’ll change over time.)

Some of the recipients’ programs of study would make James Lunney blush: Canadian Nathaniel Sharp will study mutation rates in fruit flies at UofT, while New Zealander Richard Fitzjohn has another evolution-related course of research planned at UBC. Other Vanier Scholars don’t seem entirely motivated by PMO talking points. James Nugent’s research proposal for the UofT department of geography is entitled “Changing the Climate: Neoliberalism, Global Warming and Canadian Labour-Environmental Alliance Building.” Oralia Gomez Ramirez wants to study the organization of Mexico City sex workers at UBC (well, she wants to do the studying at UBC. The sex workers aren’t organizing at UBC. Well, maybe they are, but… oh, you get it). And onward: Inuit participation in climate-change activism, “a case study of gay-straight alliances in Ontario schools,” “an empirical investigation of sexual reoffending” — it’s so refreshing to see this government associated with anything empirical when it comes to crime — early diagnosis of breast cancer, the history of female Protestant missionaries in 19th-century China and Japan, habitat selection of woodland caribou (that’ll be Tal Adgar, from Israel, studying at Guelph), the politics of marriage in Turkey. Recipients get $50,000 a year for up to three years of study.

Again: these are new initiatives by the Harper government. They are not uncontroversial. They benefit small groups of winners, and if you don’t like that sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you won’t like. But I think they’re damned interesting and I’d hate to see them ignored.

Talk it out

By macleans.ca - Monday, February 16, 2009 at 2:57 PM - 1 Comment

Feel upset? Let it all out, says Matthew Lieberman, a neuroscientist at UCLA. His research has revealed that putting feelings into words activates a part of the brain—the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex—capable of regulating emotion, thus helping to put a “damper” on them. His work is the first to demonstrate the neural basis for the therapeutic nature of “talking something out.”

Wired

Big ideas come from blue rooms

By macleans.ca - Friday, February 6, 2009 at 8:10 AM - 0 Comments

Blue isn’t just the colour of a sad mood, it could also make us more creative, according to a research by University of British Columbia scientists. After studying 600 people, they found that when words are images are displayed on a blue background on a computer screen, subjects scored better on tests that required imagination. When they were on a red background, people performed better on accuracy, attention to detail and memory. If you want employees to give their best at a  “brainstorming session for a new product” or to come up with an innovative solution, then “you should put people into a blue room,” says Juliet Zhu, an assistant professor of marketing at the business school at the University of British Columbia, and a lead author of the study. The findings build on a body of research examining how colours influence our thinking and processing of information.  

The New York Times

Drive less, live longer

By Jason Kirby - Monday, October 27, 2008 at 11:58 AM - 2 Comments

Part of our story on the Joy of Frugality in the latest issue of the magazine looks at the question of whether economic downturns can actually be good for your health. Several researchers, including Christopher Ruhm at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, have dug into the numbers. And they’ve found that yes, recessions (in the short term at least) can make you live longer. Continue…

Megapundit: Climate change—like Y2K, only warmer

By selley - Wednesday, July 2, 2008 at 1:33 PM - 0 Comments

Must-reads: Dan Gardner on Y2K+8; Colby Cosh on gun control.

On Americans, Canadians, and guns
Why we don’t have a well-armed militia, and why maybe we should.

“We are fond of interpreting [Canada's and the United States'] different gun cultures as the product of their origins,” Colby Cosh writes in the National Post, but as recently as 100 years ago, the differences were few and far between: “a housebreaker or robber in Canada could then still expect to be greeted by the nose of a revolver,” and concerned homeowners could purchase their weapon of choice by mail order. The fact that US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s amazing defence of the handgun (e.g., as opposed to a rifle, “it can be pointed at a burglar with one hand while the other hand dials the police”) now “seem[s] to float to us from some alternate universe very far away” is proof, says Cosh, of how “small social differences … can be exaggerated by means of policy within just a few generations.”

The Toronto Sun‘s Peter Worthington, meanwhile, trots out all the usual statistics to show that gun control doesn’t work, including the fact that the murder rate in Washington, D.C. went up after the city instituted the handgun ban that was overturned by the Supreme Court last week. We wholeheartedly support Worthington’s campaign against Toronto mayor David Miller’s hopelessly facile anti-gun campaign, but as usual with these arguments, it’s really just a big mess of chicken and eggs. For example: is Arlington, Va.’s miniscule murder rate in comparison to Washington’s a byproduct of its relatively high rate of private gun ownership, or its relatively rich and well-educated populace? (Answer: it depends whether the gun control opponent is trying to argue that gun ownership reduces crime, or that criminals, not law-abiding gun owners, are the real and only problem.)

Continue…

Hope for the blind

By Kate Lunau - Tuesday, April 29, 2008 at 1:55 PM - 0 Comments

Dr. Robert Koenekoop of Montreal Children’s Hospital calls it “one of the most significant advances in human history in the field of medicine.” Using gene therapy, scientists have succeeded in providing partial vision to patients who were almost blind due to a condition known as Leber congenital amaurosis, which is characterized by blindness from birth. It means scientists might finally “be able to treat a complicated retinal disease that we thought only ten years ago was untreatable,” Koenekoop said on CTV’s Canada AM.

Three patients (two women, aged 19 and 26, and a man, 26) were involved in the study. Researchers injected millions of copies of a working gene under the retina in the back of their eyes, treating only one eye on each (the worst), to compare against the unaffected eye. All three of them (who apparently had “severely abnormal vision” before the study began) can now read several lines on an eye chart, and can see better in dark spaces (results were published in The New England Journal of Medicine). No serious side effects were reported, although one patient did develop a hole in his retina—but it didn’t affect his eyesight.

As trials continue, nine individuals aged 8 to 27 will be enrolled; researchers believe the treatment could potentially give near-normal vision to children born blind.