Having spent centuries (well, okay, decades - but it felt like centuries!) at the bench in academic and biotech laboratories, and currently being in a position to invest in transformative research in universities, if there's one thing one gets used to it's listening to griping about having to write grants, the outcome of such applications, and even tales of doom and gloom about the entire process itself. That's business as usual in academia.
However, of late, there have been much more turbulent rumblings and aftershocks over dysfunction at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the $1B agency to whom Canadian researchers look for funding primarily of their basic research programs. Such dysfunction has led to usually behind-the-scenes scientists risking their neck by speaking out about the problems, demanding changes.
It takes a deep breath to stand up and shout out that CIHR is screwing up, when one's own laboratory and future may in large part be dependent on CIHR funding - but that's exactly what some scientists are doing - which inandof itself is a sign of how desperate the situation has become. Back in 2015, stem cell bigwig Michael Rudnicki did just that, going as far as to suggest that not only should heads roll at the agency but that Alain Beaudet, its president, should be replaced.
“I can tell you that the vast majority of Canadian scientists think Alain Beaudet should be replaced with more progressive leadership."
This is a highly vocal and unusual move to bite the hand that feeds one, but it seems that he has the backing not only of some very prominent Canadian scientists, but the rank and file as well. In fact, in many ways it is the rank and file (more junior, less well established researchers, and female scientists, in particular) that have been hit hardest, and it is only right and proper that some big names step up to the plate and lend their weight (and relative security) to the debate.
Daniel Durocher
There has to be accountability for this catastrophe. The honorable thing is for A. Beaudet to resign.
This recent exchange on Twitter between one of the story's top protagonists (big Jim Woodgett) and a (relatively) more junior (but no less highly esteemed) colleague, both of Toronto's Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institiute, is quite telling indeed. Both individuals have done rather well in Canada's research system, but both are quite clearly outraged by what has transpired at the hands of Beaudet, who by the way had his positioned renewed for five more years by the exiting Harper government last April.
Such conversations were of course commonplace back in the day, but that was back in the day before social media existed and one's comments were essentially coffee area chatter, and anything but public. In today's world things have changed, and scientists (perhaps unexpectedly but not totally surprisingly) are not only on social media, but are using such platforms to reach out, vent or even to rebel, for the whole world to see.
Beaudet's reforms, particularly the change-up of the classic (beloved?!) peer review process, are viewed by almost one and all as an unmitigated disaster. Under enormous pressure recently, due to a massively supported open letter to Health Minister Jane Philpott from Woodgett and some 1300 scientist supporters, CIHR agreed to meet with Canadian researchers to hear their concerns. But somehow, Beaudet's statement that "CIHR cannot be successful unless it has the confidence of Canadian researchers" comes across more as a swansong (if not an outright admission of defeat) than anything else.
"Them's retirement words, buddy!"
As if removing the face-to-face aspect of peer review was not bad enough, and with grant success rates hovering around the 15% mark, CIHR rather unbelievably added more salt to the wound and more saltpetre to the flames this past week with yet another simply shocking screw-up. Last Thursday CIHR released results (a day early) on its website for a recent competition, but while informing various scientists of the funding decision, they also named the reviewers of those grants and revealed confidential comments they had made; this might even be an inglorious first in CIHR history, but even (or especially) if it's not, it is one contemptible cock-up.
This monumental blurting out of confidential information will probably have more impact in Canada than Hillary Clinton's personal email server had on the United States! Complete anonymity is vital to the peer review process for both grants, and publications arising thereof, and now both the grant reviewers and the scientists they commented on know that the other knows. You can just imagine the repercussions of that, and how it compromises the integrity and functionality of the CIHR reviewing and granting process.
What is there left to say? I don't hear anyone defending CIHR, or Beaudet especially, for whom the writing must surely be on the wall. If you lose the support of the scientific community, whose research is funded by taxpayers, and those scientists are taxpayers themselves, and things go from rumblings in the dark room all the way to social media and onto public forums and letters to the health and science ministers, then the government simply has to step in and realign the use of hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers hard-earned money with the values and ambitions on which that government was elected. Trudeau's - not Harper's!
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