The province’s advanced education minister made a remark the other day that caught my attention. Amrik Virk said the province has funded $300 million worth of research projects at B.C.’s post-secondary institutions, and the public deserves access to this work.
Virk is planning a digital library to make that material available. Good first step. But let’s take this a notch further.
Shouldn’t we also have a say in the kind of research that is pursued? After all, we’re paying for it.
The classic answer, graven in the heart of university professors everywhere, is that academic freedom forbids such interference. They have the sole right to determine their fields of interest, and subject to funds being available, pursue them.
Now I’m not suggesting some kind of star chamber, where faculty members are raked over the coals by crotchety inquisitors. We recall how that worked out for Galileo.
But it’s a fact that huge sums of money are spent on research across the country, with virtually no co-ordination or priority setting.
In many fields, I doubt most of us would mind. Was Immanuel Kant right about the categorical imperative? Yes, but so what.
Did the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty have something relevant to say about the practice of nursing? No, but who cares.
However, there are fields of study where the public interest is definitely engaged. Cancer research, and more broadly, health-care research, come instantly to mind.
There are 17 medical schools in Canada, all of them government-funded and each with its own research agenda. There are at least another dozen public-sector institutes that do serious work in the health field.
Is any of this co-ordinated? Only to a modest degree. Some funding agencies, such as the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, do try to steer research into productive channels.
And there are occasional federal/provincial collaborations to attack issues such as surgical wait lists.
But there is no pan-Canadian mechanism to hammer out a consensus, assign tasks, share results (heaven forfend) and set aside other interests in favour of pursuing an agreed-on plan of attack.
Consider the greatest co-ordinated research effort of all time — the Manhattan project. Those guys came up with a nuclear weapon from scratch in three years. It was done by signing up hundreds of scientists, co-opting private business and exercising some top-down leadership.
Imagine if we concentrated one-tenth of that focus on finding a cure for cancer.
Could it be done? The obstacles are formidable. A sizable share of research work is undertaken because it piques somebody’s interest, or there is available data at hand.
Far too often, the driving impetus is to get something in print, not to advance critical knowledge. Professional journals are full of trivial variations on already published work.
And even if, by some miracle, a co-ordinated national strategy were agreed on, Canada has too few experts trained in cutting-edge fields to implement it.
There are more than enough bright graduate students who could be steered into the requisite areas — epidemiology, cardiac care and oncology. But same story. That would take leadership and cross-country buy-in. And there is none.
Yet the decoding of the human genome puts medical science at the same point physics had reached in 1942, when the Manhattan project was launched. The time is ripe for a concerted national effort to direct health-care research.
Will that happen? Only if the 10 provinces and Ottawa act in unison.
Virk put his finger on a key point when he invoked the public interest in support of his plans. Perhaps he can be persuaded to extend that line of thought just a little further.
