An All-Star Panel Is Going to Tell Canada How to Fix Its Science Funding

On Monday, Canada announced a massive review of how it funds basic science research. An all-star panel, including Nobel laureate Art McDonald and BlackBerry co-founder Mike Lazaridis, will take a look at how billions of dollars are spent. Importantly, the six-month review will happen independently from the federal government.

Canada's scientific community is facing all kinds of pressures. Young scientists say they've been shut out of a lot of the federal funding that's available, putting their careers in jeopardy. And the community is still recovering from the Harper years, when government scientists were often banned from speaking publicly. There are also big questions about where to strike the balance between basic research, and the industry-funded kind.

Meanwhile, the Arctic is melting. The climate is changing. New technologies, like gene editing and quantum computing, could completely overhaul the way we live.

Really, a review like this couldn't come soon enough.

Who gets money to do science is an important question, and a new study in the journal PLOS One gave reason to believe that science funding doesn't always happen on an even playing field. Dennis Murray of Trent University looked through 13,526 grant proposals to Canada's Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), and found that applicants from smaller universities were less likely to get money through its Discovery Grant program, which covers research expenses like salaries, supplies, and travel to conferences.

Many of Canada's young researchers, meanwhile, feel the deck has been stacked against them in favour of more established ones, who might be seen as a safer bet within a system that has limited money to invest, despite an infusion from the Liberals. Science Minister Kirsty Duncan, who's a scientist herself, seems painfully aware of this group's struggles. "Some aren't getting their first grant [until they're] 41 or 43," she told me. "We want to hear directly from our research community about where are the gaps and challenges, and how can we do this better."

Duncan has been meeting with young scientists across Canada about these issues—and many of them speak highly of her, and count her in their corner. So it's a bit disappointing that no early career scientists are represented on the new panel (although it is balanced by region and gender). "We did have a head scratch about how to manage that," former University of Toronto president David Naylor, who's chairing the panel, told me.

He hopes to get early career scientists' perspectives through targeted focus groups, he said.

Some of the problems faced by Canada's research community are a result of a rapidly changing landscape. Research here is funded through three major granting councils that each has a different mandate. The emergence of newfangled fields like "nanobiotechnology" or tissue engineering is putting that model to the test, Naylor said.

"There's a growing convergence of disciplines," he said. In fact, a lot of the most exciting research today is hard to label as belonging to just one specific field or discipline. And that creates another hurdle when figuring out who should fund this important work, and how.

As part of its review, Naylor told me, he aims to consult with the public.

And that, in particular, sounds like a great idea. There's still a deeply rooted distrust for science among some people, who might dispute that vaccines will protect themselves and their children from harm, or that climate change is real. Meanwhile, science journalism is being eroded. Science itself is under the microscope more than ever, as it faces a reproducibility crisis (scientists are finding that published results can be difficult, if not impossible, to replicate) and questions about the peer review system, which has come under increased scrutiny.

Creating a little more transparency around basic research and how it's funded could go a long way to easing some of those pressures. If we can hope for anything to emerge from this review, maybe it's that—to shine a little sunlight on the process.