Guest of Honour Presentation:
by
Dr. Alan Bernstein
President
Canadian Institutes of Health Research
October 23, 2003
Toronto, Ontario
Good evening, Members of the Gairdner Family, Gairdner Awardees, the Gairdner Medical Advisory Board, colleagues and friends, ladies and gentlemen.
It is an extraordinary honour for me to be your guest this evening, particularly when I look at previous honorees - to name but two - Henry Friesen, distinguished scientist and distinguished President of the former Medical Research Council for 10 years and the guiding visionary that led Canada through the wilderness to the creation of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR); and last year's Guest of Honour, Sydney Brenner, Gairdner Awardee, Nobel Laureate, and raconteur extraordinaire.
I would like to begin by extending my own congratulations to the 2003 Gairdner Awardees. You are exemplars of the very best in health research - elegant science that has advanced profoundly our understanding of human biology and human health and disease.
Your contributions illustrate an important maxim of science - that the highest aspirations of scientists are both to advance our understanding of the world around us and to apply this new understanding to improve the human condition.
Thirty years ago, in May 1973, a meeting titled, "A National Symposium on Health Research Priorities" was held at McGill University. I wasn't there as I was a very young postdoctoral fellow in England at the time, but read about the proceedings recently in a Report that is well known here in Canada, titled:
"A New Perspective on the Health of Canadians", tabled by Marc Lalonde, then Minister of National Health and Welfare for Canada.
At that meeting, three broad conclusions emerged that have as much resonance today as they did 3 decades ago:
Furthermore, the Lalonde Report stated that "it will be necessary for researchers in all fields to develop a unity of purpose which has often been lacking."
Finally, the Lalonde Report made the following interesting comment: "Balancing the need to respect the independence of researchers with the need to relate research to health problems is a question of continuing debate".
All of the above, of course, lie at the very core of CIHR's vision - the words have changed from, for example, human biology, environment, lifestyle and health care organization to CIHR's four pillars of health research: biomedical, clinical, health services and population health research - but the meanings are the same.
And the issues highlighted in the Lalonde Report - the xenophobia between the academic disciplines and the tension between bottom-up and top-down setting of research priorities - are still with us today.
But, I believe that we have made considerable progress since that meeting at McGill. Young people in particular, are embracing the changes in how we do research and how we organize the research enterprise with great enthusiasm.
CIHR, with its integrative vision, and an explicit mandate for knowledge translation, was created at just the right time.
We are indeed at a unique moment when the spectacular advances being made in our understanding of human health and disease are being fuelled by new ways of thinking, new technologies, new partnerships, and new industries.
The biological, clinical, natural, information and social sciences, humanities and engineering, are all converging around the challenges and opportunities presented by human health and the eradication of disease.
This Tsunami wave of science is already starting to reach the shores of the health system, transforming medicine from a reactive and descriptive art to an activity that will be increasingly proactive, mechanism-based and individualized.
The revolution in health research is also creating transformative new technologies, and industries including biotechnology, medical imaging and health informatics.
The beautiful work of several of this year's Gairdner honorees illustrates the power of merging
the natural sciences with biology.
Even a superficial study of the history of genetics, illustrates the powerful synergies that have resulted when other sciences are applied to biology and human health:
CIHR's thirteen Institutes have recognized that the complexity and scale of today's research challenges require that researchers reach out beyond their own areas of expertise and that we experiment with new models to bring people and sectors together.
In just three short years, we have developed a suite of new research tools and programs designed to build the research teams of the 21st Century, including:
In total, the new problem-based teams and training centres cover virtually every aspect of health research - some examples: Maritime workplace safety, structural genomics and signaling proteomics, the biological, psychosocial and educational aspects of autism, fetal alcohol syndrome, medical adverse events and patient safety, the integrity of Canada's food and water supply, unpaid caregivers, health service delivery to rural and Northern Canada, the impact of genetics and genomics on health care, and identification of the genes for epilepsy, schizophrenia and neuro-degenerative diseases.
These new programs are part of a forward investment of close to $400M and involve literally thousands of individuals working together for the first time.
They represent a new approach to health research designed to bring together researchers, caregivers, policy makers, industry, community groups, and the public to address and solve important health problems.
These programs represent CIHR's answer to the challenges posed in the Lalonde Report 30 years ago - how to bring together the disciplines and approaches required to address emerging scientific opportunities and the complex health challenges of today and tomorrow.
Following an extensive national consultation process, CIHR will shortly release Blueprint - our first Strategic Plan. Blueprint has five key elements:
Blueprint will guide CIHR's response and approach to the creative tensions raised in the Lalonde Report, to build an excellence-based, relevant, inclusive and strategic health research community in Canada.
The contributions and excellence of individuals and individual disciplines are at the foundation of Blueprint, CIHR's strategic plan and vision for health research. Indeed, our single largest investment, currently almost $2.0B, is to fund the research of individual researchers and allow them to pursue whatever they feel is important.
To quote Rita Colwell, the Director of the U.S. National Science Foundation: "Pitting the traditional disciplines against interdisciplinary research is a false dichotomy". Interdisciplinary research is only possible because of the contributions of individuals skilled in the many disciplines now relevant to health research.
Since 1997, the Canadian Government has increased its investment in health research at unprecedented levels in the belief and expectation that these investments will improve the health of Canadians, strengthen our health care system, and fuel the evolution of the Canadian economy from natural resources and manufacturing to one that is increasingly based on the human and knowledge capital that comes from research.
I believe that the spectacular growth of these investments in research - CIHR's budget alone has increased in three years from $360 million to $620 million, will continue if two conditions are met:
If we can deliver on reasonable expectations, and maintain that public dialogue and trust, I am confident that we can convince Canadians that investments in health research are not only wise, they are essential if Canada is to harness the power and pace of science for the future well-being and prosperity of our country.
As Paul Martin, Canada's PM-in-waiting said recently in his address to Montreal's Board of Trade, "Canada must build a 21st Century economy. We have to ensure that Canada is firmly positioned at the cutting-edge of a global economy whose pace is set by new science, new technologies, and most of all by the creativity and ingenuity of individual endeavor".
For who can doubt that health care will be vastly different in 20 years than it is today? And who can doubt that the new insights, technologies, products and services that are coming from health research will largely fuel these differences?
From the fundamental new insights into, on the one hand, the human body as a complex array of molecular interactions, to at the same time, a deepening understanding of humans as social beings whose health is ultimately governed by the complex interplay between the biological, genetic, psychosocial, economic, and environmental determinants of health, research-based advances are transforming how we diagnose, treat and prevent disease and promote health.
Seen in that light, health research truly is an investment, currently costing less per Canadian than what most of us paid to park our cars to attend this wonderful dinner.
Research is a process - a journey - a journey with its own culture and values - values that we need now more than ever.
Research reflects the very best of our humanity - excellence, openness, the valuing of free enquiry over ideology, irreverence, and the importance of young people.
Health research is the common ground that reflects the universal aspiration to a long and healthy life, an aspiration that crosses all political, linguistic and cultural boundaries.
To quote Louis Pasteur: "Science knows no country because science is the light that illuminates the darkness in our world".
I believe Canada has a special responsibility and opportunity in this time of profound change. Our public values are based more on pragmatism than on ideology.
Our geography and the enormous diversity of our people make us a microcosm of the world.
We are, as Chaviva Hosek noted, "large enough to make a difference in the world but small enough to be an incubator for change, to experiment in new ways of doing things".
CIHR is a perfect example of that freedom to experiment - indeed many countries around the world are watching this uniquely Canadian experiment with great interest.
Canada's challenge and opportunity is both to participate in, and benefit from, the advances in health research that will help shape the dynamics of progress globally in the coming decades.
But we must do more than that. Our place in the world must be to help narrow the gap between those that have access to scientific opportunity and those that do not. This is consistent with our historic role as an honest broker, with our national interest and with the widely held view in Canada that good health is a right, not a privilege.
In closing, let me, on behalf of everyone here, thank the Members of the Gairdner Family for keeping James Gairdner's vision burning so brightly, congratulate once again this year's Gairdner Awardees and thank you all for your kind attention.
