MRC increase raises morale

DIANA GRIER AYTON | Paul Martin's budget has given some medical researchers a glimmer of hope. The beginning of this week was the deadline for applications to the 1998-99 Medical Research Council grants competition, and with a further $40 million in the kitty, the possibility of a research project being turned down in this round has been reduced by about 9%. Last year's competition results were announced just before the budget, and the national success rate for applications was 20%. McGill and its affiliated hospitals traditionally do very well, and 44 of the projects submitted were funded, while another 40 were turned down. The federal budget boost means that a number of rejected projects (14 of them at McGill), will now receive funding. But the problem, critics say, is that it's no longer a question of sorting the wheat from the chaff. All the projects submitted to the MRC met the highest international standards of excellence. Another difficulty was that with successive cuts to its own funding in recent years, the council had had to spread its resources too thinly, according to Dr. Richard Murphy, director of the Montreal Neurological Institute. "The MRC was trying to fund as many grants as it could, so it cut the amount of money it normally gave each investigator. That means that even when someone received an MRC grant, it was such a small grant that they had to make applications to other funding sources to keep their labs going. Hopefully this new money will allow the MRC to start giving out much larger grants than they've been able to for the last three or four years." Dr. Robert Mackenzie, associate dean of medicine (graduate studies and research), coordinates McGill's MRC grant applications, and says he hopes this marks the end of "the downward spiral." He adds, "Going into this year's competition, every-one is feeling just a little bit better. I think morale has definitely been lifted." Medicine professor Dr. Alan Tenenhouse, who heads a planned multi-year study of osteoporosis in Canada, is reapplying to the MRC in the hopes that the agency will now be able to save his project. The Canadian Multicentre Osteoporosis Study (CAMOS), involving 10,000 subjects and 11 universities and research centres, got off the ground with a grant of $2.5 million from a federal agency, the National Health Research and Development Program (NHRDP), and funding from industry partners. Then the NHRDP funding dried up last year. Investigators were told to apply to the MRC for the $3 million they needed to carry on, but the MRC didn't have it. As of April 1, the entire project goes on hold. Tenenhouse knows his study may not be funded this time, and blames the government for its failure to see the importance of research. "What I don't understand is that everybody yells about unemployment, and there is no comprehension of the link between research, economic independence and jobs. We're going backwards. "Don't get me wrong. I am very happy the MRC budget has increased. From what I understand, they gave back enough money that we will now be at the level we were at in 1994, and that this will carry on until at least the year 2000. But in 1994, we were last among the G7 in spending on research." Both Mackenzie and Tenenhouse point to the U.S. as a model for this country. The Americans were already contributing significantly more money per capita than Canada to research funding ($66.64 vs $8.23) when the president announced recently that the amount would be doubled. Says Tenenhouse, "When Clinton arrived in Congress to deliver his state of the union address, sitting in the first row next to Mrs. Clinton was the head of the National Institutues of Health. I don't think the head of the MRC ever sat anywhere, close to anyone!" And both researchers say it's a problem in the Canadian attitude. "Canada takes the approach 'Let the States do it, and we'll benefit too,'" says Tenenhouse. "The other thing is that most of the establishment supporting research are people with clearly vested interests. With our pseudo-elevated moral position, we see that as being bad. As far as I can tell, the only people who can yell rationally and intelligently for improvements to something are people who know something about it." Mackenzie says scientists are unaccustomed to explaining the importance of what they do to people in government. "Researchers don't want to do that, but it takes a monumental effort -- people sending thousands of postcards and letters -- to bring about change. We were dangerously close to a critical situation." Mackenzie does say there has been money poured into the development end of the R&D equation, but what we need now is to restore the balance. "Especially in Quebec, there is plenty of capital available to bring products to market. It's like the Silicon Valley era in medical technology. But companies are not willing to go fishing and fund basic research. Why should they? As somebody said, 'We have the pipeline in place, but nobody's looking for oil.' Only government can pay for that."