Naylor Report

Speaking two years after he and his colleagues warned about flat-lining investments in research, ��Ƶ President Emeritus Dr. David Naylor recently reiterated the need for continued support of science to ensure the country’s future prosperity.

An article this week in University Affairs recounted a keynote speech in which Naylor urged the scientific community to be in “permanent campaign mode.” The summit, held last month in Ottawa, was organized by the Canadian Consortium for Research, an umbrella group representing 50,000 researchers and 650,000 students at universities, government labs and the private sector.

“We have thousands of people dying of measles because ignorance is an epidemic,” said Naylor, who led a blue-ribbon panel that looked at the state of science funding in Canada and made sweeping recommendations for reform.

“Anti-science, anti-research views are a contagious, malign force in the world. Research is about the entire country’s future – public, private sector and civil society. It’s about talent, not technology. It’s about people, not patents. It’s about creating a critical capacity in young people and not about commercialization.”

Basic research 'at the root' of innovation in Canada: U of T's Molly Shoichet

Christopher.Sorensen — Fri, 14 Sep 2018 19:48:19 +0000

Basic research 'at the root' of innovation in Canada: U of T's Molly Shoichet

Christopher.Sorensen Fri, 09/14/2018 - 15:48

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U of T University Professor Molly Shoichet emphasized the importance of funding basic research at an Economic Club of Canada panel discussion (photo by Chris Sorensen)

Chris Sorensen

Topic

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

Artificial Intelligence

Molly Shoichet

Technology

Canada is well on its way to becoming a country where knowledge and ideas, not oil or timber, are its most important resources – but there’s more work to be done before we truly become an innovation nation.

That was the message delivered by ��Ƶ researcher and former Ontario chief scientist Molly Shoichet and two other post-secondary heavy hitters – Martha Crago, McGill University’s vice-principal of research and innovation, and Paul Davidson, president of Universities Canada – during an Economic Club of Canada event today.

Shoichet, who holds a University Professor designation in U of T’s Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, noted “things are really happening” in cities like Toronto and Montreal, which have both seen huge investments by Silicon Valley heavyweights and multinationals in recent years.

However, she cautioned the current tech boom – much of it focused on artificial intelligence and its myriad applications, from medicine to transportation – wouldn’t have happened without strategic government investments in fundamental research decades ago.

“It’s really important to recognize that research is at the root of innovation and commercialization,” Shoichet said during the lunch-time panel discussion.

“If you don’t invest in that research, we won't have those innovations and there won't be anything to commercialize.”

All three participants in the event, titled “Research, Innovation & the New Economy,” lauded the federal government for launching a federal panel in 2016, led by U of T President Emeritus Dr. David Naylor, to review how basic science is funded in this country, and for responding to its findings with significant investments in fundamental research in its most recent budget.

Davidson, for his part, said visits to campuses of Universities Canada’s 96 member institutions left him with the impression that serious progress is being made. In particular, he cited growing efforts to foster collaboration between universities and business, as well as between universities themselves, through vehicles like the federal government’s supercluster initiative.

He also noted Canada is making progress when it comes to promoting equality, diversity and inclusion throughout the country’s higher education system.

“You can’t have excellence unless you’re inclusive,” he said. “That’s a big shift [in thinking].”

Yet, despite the changes, the panelists stressed the need for Canada to continue improving the country’s research and commercialization infrastructure, while simultaneously working to instil a culture of innovation among Canadians.

Crago, one of nine members on Canada’s Fundamental Science Review panel, emphasized the importance of continuing to fund young researchers in future budgets.

“What is working in this country is students are learning research and innovation by doing it,” Crago said. “They are the engine.”

She added Canada could also use more of a risk-taking culture like the one found in Israel, which has built one of the most successful tech sectors outside of Silicon Valley.

Shoichet, meantime, suggested there is a need for more research and development jobs in Canada, particularly in key sectors like pharmaceuticals. There was also a lengthy discussion about the best way for universities to work with both giant multinationals and small- and medium-sized businesses and startups.

One audience member – OCAD University President Sara Diamond – suggested Canada could do a better job at leveraging Canada’s strengths in fields like design, as well as arts and humanities more generally, to create an innovation sector driven by more than just pure science.

Agreeing, Crago pointed to the video game sector in Montreal, which is anchored by firms like France’s Ubisoft.

“They’re hiring all these people out of the humanities,” Crago said, “because they are among the most creative thinkers.”

Davidson concluded the discussion with a warning about complacency. He cited a 2017 survey by the Pew Research Centre that found nearly 60 per cent of Republican Party supporters believed U.S. colleges and universities were having a negative impact on America.

Just think of what these institutions have done for a country like the U.S., in terms of knowledge and innovation, over the past 70 years, Davidson said.

“All of that is at risk if we take it for granted.”

More funding for 'open' grant competitions needed to realize bold discoveries: U of T researcher

Christopher.Sorensen — Mon, 07 May 2018 17:35:53 +0000

More funding for 'open' grant competitions needed to realize bold discoveries: U of T researcher

Christopher.Sorensen Mon, 05/07/2018 - 13:35

Cutline

Mark Lautens is a University Professor in the ��Ƶ's department of chemistry (photo courtesy of Mark Lautens)

Topic

Chemistry

Further boosting grant funding of basic scientific research, as recommended by Canada’s Fundamental Science Review, would allow younger scientists to take bigger risks in pursuit of bolder discoveries, ��Ƶ researcher Mark Lautens tells the Hill Times.

Lautens, a University Professor in U of T’s department of chemistry, told the Ottawa-based publication that “wide open” funding competitions are desirable because they allow researchers' applications to be evaluated based purely on scientific merit as opposed to government priorities.

“When you have a wide-open competition, there’s not somebody in the background saying, ‘this is what we want you to find,’” Lautens told the bi-weekly newspaper.

Lautens’ remarks appeared in a story in which researchers lauded the 2018 federal budget's investment in science and looked at potential next steps when it comes to fulfilling the recommendations put forward last year by the blue-ribbon panel chaired by U of T President Emeritus Dr. David Naylor.

The panel, which analyzed the way research is funded in Canada, found per capita investment in fundamental science slumped in recent decades and recommended a comprehensive blueprint for making Canada a global research powerhouse.

Read the full Hill Times article

David Naylor upbeat about research funding in Canada, gives kudos to students and researchers for #SupportTheReport

noreen.rasbach — Thu, 26 Apr 2018 18:34:59 +0000

David Naylor upbeat about research funding in Canada, gives kudos to students and researchers for #SupportTheReport

noreen.rasbach Thu, 04/26/2018 - 14:34

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U of T President Emeritus David Naylor led the nine-member Canada's Fundamental Science Review panel (photo by dave via Flickr)

Jennifer Robinson

Topic

It has been a remarkable year for Dr. David Naylor, president emeritus of the ��Ƶ.

A year ago, as chair of the nine-member Canada’s Fundamental Science Review panel, he unveiled a blueprint to strengthen the foundations of Canadian research at the request of federal Science Minister Kirsty Duncan. That review – the first of its kind in over 40 years – helped contribute to a historic bump in research funding contained in the recent federal budget.

He was also recently awarded the 2018 Henry G. Friesen International Prize in Health Research by the Friends of Canadian Institutes of Health Research for “major scholarly and policy contributions with a profound influence on health service delivery, public health and health research funding.”

U of T News sat down with Dr. Naylor, who also served as the dean of the Faculty of Medicine before being appointed president in 2005, to discuss what’s next for him and to get his thoughts on the importance of health experts engaging with the public, the power of grassroots activism and the status of research in Canada.

What does winning the 2018 Henry G. Friesen International Prize in Health Research mean to you?

First, it’s a humbling honour to receive an award named for Dr. Henry Friesen – a great scientist who became a research leader with remarkable vision and persuasive powers.

Second, this is also an opportunity for me to thank and acknowledge the extraordinary people with whom I’ve worked on a variety of health-related and broader science policy projects over the last 30 years. In a rational and fair universe, this award would be shared with scores of co-recipients.

In the news release announcing this honour, Dr. Aubie Angel mentioned your “capacity to analyze and unravel the complexities of the Canadian health-care system, together with the ability to communicate it eloquently and lucidly.” How important is it for health experts to explain their work to the general public?

It’s very important, but I’d say there’s been a welcome shift over the last 20 years with much better communication by experts and also a dramatic improvement in the quality of health-related and science journalism.

What worries me more these days is the extent to which digital media have enabled charlatans to promote bad ideas – ranging from anti-vaccination falsehoods to bogus treatments for a wide range of conditions. We’re in a very challenging period of widespread populist sentiment and “truthiness.”

Experts are often viewed skeptically as just another group of vested interests. We don’t help our cause when our critiques of junk science come off as smug or patronizing.

I suspect the long-term solution is a stronger public grounding in critical thinking and scientific methods at every stage of education. But for now, experts need to find ways to set the record straight in a respectful and balanced way that doesn’t further alienate fellow citizens whose disillusionment with the status quo drove them in the first place to embrace “alternative facts” about health and illness.

Speaking of digital media, you were active on social media last fall and earlier this winter to encourage people to #SupportTheReport. What did you make of the grassroots campaign?

Being part of that grassroots campaign was an exhilarating experience because of the wonderful convergence of researchers from different institutions, career stages and disciplines.

Some colleagues have generously suggested the Fundamental Science Review report and recommendations were crafted in a way that made it easy for there to be a consensus in support of its implementation. It’s actually more the other way around. Our recommendations tracked closely not only to the analyses undertaken by and for the panel, but also to the phenomenal suggestions for improvement that we received from hundreds of research stakeholders.

Within weeks of the report’s release in April 2017, it became clear the major stakeholder organizations were standing down advocacy for specific priorities and instead getting behind the case for broad reinvestment to restore the foundations of Canadian extramural research.

That cause got additional momentum with the publication of an excellent report from the Global Youth Academy released in the summer of 2017. Two outstanding mid-career Canadian scientists – Julia Baum of Victoria and Jeremy Kerr of Ottawa – oversaw that independent analysis, and it yielded findings highly consistent with those of the Fundamental Science Review report.

Another unusual and very influential part of the campaign was strong engagement by countless front-line researchers and research leaders. Institutional executives and leaders of umbrella associations are highly credible advocates, of course, but the most authentic spokespeople on these matters are colleagues who dedicate their waking hours to doing research and mentoring research trainees.

How important were students in galvanizing the research community into action? And how did using your dog for your humorous posts come into being? People loved that dog!

The activism of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers may well have been the single most important factor that tipped the balance in favour of action and investment by the government of Canada.

The #Students4theReport initiative in its various forms – postcards, letters, visits to decision-makers, social media presence – is what brought home to federal politicians the hard reality that the future of Canadian science and scholarship was being put in jeopardy by gross underfunding, uneven grant-making policies, the proliferation of boutique initiatives, administrative inertia and weak governance.

As to Oscar the border collie, I have no idea why our family pet kept taking over my Twitter account, digging material out of my computer and posting irreverent commentary.

He’s a stubborn and highly literate canine, so I gave up and just went along with it. That’s why Oscar’s photo, not mine, turns up @cdavidnaylor.

Oscar sniffed out buried slide library of #supportthereport. Online x 48h at https://t.co/4p9sksml9K Please download & share freely pic.twitter.com/pQvBIeOSlS
— David Naylor (@cdavidnaylor) November 6, 2017

The federal government has said its recent budget contained a historic amount of funding for basic research in Canada. The funding was welcomed, but the government has yet to act on all of the recommendations in the Fundamental Science Review panel’s report. Are those recommendations now considered dead or is work continuing to ensure a fuller implementation? Is research now really on a better trajectory?

Budget 2018 was a giant step forward. It set a new course qualitatively for how the government of Canada intends to approach the extramural research realm, one that I think was widely welcomed by the research community.

I would also say the government of Canada responded in some way to the vast majority of our recommendations. Obviously, there were financial shortfalls.

The biggest source of concern to me is the pace and endpoint for new investments in funding to open grant competitions. I think the science minister and finance minister have received the same message from the research community at large, and I would be surprised if adjustments were not made on that front over the next couple of years.

In the case of personnel support for graduate students and trainees, the relevant Fundamental Science Review panel recommendation ostensibly went unfunded, but on page 89, the budget reads: “Over the next year, the government will be doing further work to determine how to better support students, the next generation of researchers, through scholarships and fellowships.” That’s a clear and encouraging signal.

Another recommendation that I believe is still alive was for creation of an improved oversight body to keep an eye on federal extramural support for research and innovation.

The government has already acted on our recommendation to wind down the Harper-era Science, Technology and Innovation Council and accepted our proposal in principle.

However, politicians and public servants are always a bit skittish about setting up high-profile standing committees that might issue reports that embarrass the government of the day. I would not be surprised then, if the new body’s mandate and authority ends up more limited than would ideally be the case – or if that one got postponed until after the election.

One recommendation that may be semi-comatose relates to federal grants to institutions that cover the so-called indirect or institutional costs of hosting research programs. We recommended a significant increase and got zero response. I now doubt there will much movement on that recommendation until the institutions, provincial governments and the government of Canada get together to figure out a fair cost-sharing formula. I hope that happens in the near future as part of renewed federal-provincial collaboration on research strategy – something we also flagged as necessary to optimize the national research eco-system.

Last, I’m encouraged by the fact that a five-year framework was delineated. Some pessimists have argued the five-year plan means research can’t get more support until Budget 2024, but I think that’s way off base.

The government has clearly shown a willingness to listen, act and invest. As I see it, the research community now has a multi-year period in which to continue making its case with a view to closing some of the gaps that remain.

And even if the government were to change after the next election, the two opposition parties have both signalled a favourable view of the Fundamental Science Review panel report and the direction taken on research in Budget 2018.

In short, more needs to be done to improve administration and governance of federal supports for research, and more investment is definitely needed. But extramural science and scholarship in Canada are in a much better place than was the case a year ago.

Are you currently conducting research, and if so what are you working on?

I don’t think what I do could really be called “conducting research” – it’s more like a random exploration of many areas of interest, all pursued in the company of smarter people who are doing most of the heavy lifting.

Among other topics, current meanderings include the Canadian content in the Gairdner prizes for health research, a review of the applications of deep learning in medicine/health care, analysis of the evolution of the federal share in funding provincial and territorial health-care spending and an exploration of the interplay of biological, behavioral and environmental risk factors for cognitive decline among Canadian seniors.

In closing, I understand the Friesen award comes with the expectation of the winner giving a talk. Do you have any ideas yet on what you'll talk about, or where your presentation will take place?

There are two components. One is a visit to Ottawa in November, with a mix of presentations to the Ottawa health research community and at the Canadian Science Policy Conference. That’s also an opportunity to meet with senior public officials and ministers. The other involves site visits to several universities across Canada. I’m still thinking through titles and topics.

The timing of the Ottawa visit is also auspicious. November 2018 is just about when Budget 2019 will be firming up. As you can imagine, I will take every opportunity on that visit to make the case for stronger federal support of extramural research – and Oscar will be barking in the background.

Natalie Zemon Davis on the importance of curiosity in humanities research

geoff.vendeville — Wed, 20 Dec 2017 18:06:37 +0000

Natalie Zemon Davis on the importance of curiosity in humanities research

geoff.vendeville Wed, 12/20/2017 - 13:06

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Historian Natalie Zemon Davis at her home in Toronto (photo by Laura Pedersen)

Geoffrey Vendeville

Topic

City & Culture

History

Humanities

Faculty of Arts & Science

Historian Natalie Zemon Davis has long been a nonconformist. In the 1950s, when it was fashionable to study the ideas or great figures of periods like the Enlightenment, she focused on the illiterate working classes – for her dissertation, she wrote about the printers and artisans in 16^th-century Lyons. Some of her contemporaries might have bristled at her unconventional approach, but she persisted and earned international acclaim.

In 2010, she won the Holberg prize, worth more than $760,000, awarded by the Norwegian parliament. She is “one of the most creative historians writing today,” the award citation says. Three years later, she received the National Humanities Medal from U.S. President Barack Obama.

How did she come to look at aspects of the past that were overlooked by other historians? Daring, a sense of wonder, passion – all these traits are essential to any kind of research, Zemon Davis says in an interview at her Toronto home. “That’s really something quite important: the unexpected, the surprise that satisfies or nourishes one’s curiosity,” she told U of T News.

But researchers in any discipline would have trouble innovating or addressing gaps in their field without support. Zemon Davis has joined a chorus of experts, including Nobel Prize-winning chemist John Polanyi, urging the Canadian government to move on the recommendations of Canada's Fundamental Science Review. A panel, chaired by U of T President Emeritus Dr. David Naylor, calls for a $1.3-billion boost in funding for university-based research over four years – an increase they say amounts to only 0.4 per cent of the government’s annual budget.

"The panel recommends the support of work that is not necessarily able to be commercialized right away or right away translated into something practical," Zemon Davis says. "It recommends the support of the work of young people who might be overlooked in the quest for number of publications. It supports the work of Indigenous people and especially the life and past of Indigenous people in Canada. These are marvelous ideas."

Interested in publicly funded research in Canada? Learn more at U of T’s #supportthereport advocacy campaign

Academic research often has benefits that go far beyond a circle of experts. In addition to writing books, Zemon Davis has brought her work to a wide audience through film and theatre. In 1982, she consulted on the French movie, The Return of Martin Guerre, starring Gérard Depardieu. She wrote a book on the subject, the tale of a 16^th-century French peasant who abandoned his wife and lands – and returns later to discover an imposter has taken his place. “It’s such a dramatic, surprising story, so full of visual possibilities,” she told The New York Times in 1983. “I just thought, ‘What a marvelous way to bring this story to millions of people.’”

This year, she advised the Lebanese-Canadian playwright Wajdi Mouawad on his latest production, Tous des oiseaux, which opened in Paris’s Théâtre national de la Colline to glowing reviews. The play was inspired by Zemon Davis’s book Trickster Travels, a biography of al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Fasi, a 16^th-century Muslim diplomat captured by Christian pirates, imprisoned by the pope, baptized and allowed to pursue a life of scholarship as a Christian.

Her research career may have taken a vastly different turn had she and her husband, math professor Chandler Davis, not received a surprise visit from the U.S. State Department long ago. During the Red Scare of the 1950s, the FBI traced a pamphlet criticizing the House Committee on Un-American Activities to the Davises.

Zemon Davis holds a copy of “Operation Mind,” the pamphlet criticizing the House Un-American Activities Committee, which got her in trouble with the FBI in the 1950s (photo by Laura Pedersen)

Agents came to their door and seized their passports. “All I remember is that it was frightening and crushing because I was three months pregnant with our first child, and I didn’t need this,” she recalls. Without her travel papers, she couldn’t return to the archives of Lyon to continue her research. Her husband was jailed for six months and, after his sentence, no American university would hire him. They were offered jobs at U of T in the 1960s. Zemon Davis taught at University of California Berkeley and Princeton before returning to U of T.

She didn’t let these events derail her career. Although the FBI could prevent her from going to France, they couldn’t stop her from completing her dissertation using materials in American rare book libraries.

“How the FBI Turned Me on to Rare Books” Read Zemon Davis's article in The New York Review of Books

Decades later, when she was fêted at the White House, the irony wasn’t lost on her. “The justice department building wasn’t that far away,” she says.

Whatever obstacles were thrown in her path, she says the love of her topic kept her going. “It’s the work, the theme, the people you’re writing about which are important,” she says. “If you keep working on it, and finding you’re getting results, then you just go for it.”

Public funding is needed to support the next generation of scientists: U of T's Mark Lautens

Romi Levine — Tue, 19 Dec 2017 18:53:30 +0000

Public funding is needed to support the next generation of scientists: U of T's Mark Lautens

Romi Levine Tue, 12/19/2017 - 13:53

Cutline

“The most important outcome of scientific research isn't patents or products," writes Mark Lautens. "It's people who can think and solve our toughest problems.”

Topic

Global Lens

Chemistry

Global

Young scientists in Canada are facing serious obstacles when it comes to funding, writes Mark Lautens, University Professor in U of T's department of chemistry, in a Globe and Mail op-ed.

When Lautens was starting out, research funding supported him through his PhD and postdoctoral work in the United States, and funding from Canada's Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) is what ultimately brought him back to Canada.

The funding boost from NSERC allowed Lautens to develop a thriving research program in Toronto, he says.

Now researchers are struggling to get large enough grants while supplies and equipment have increased in cost, writes Lautens, who teaches in the Faculty of Arts & Science.

“This is an enormous waste of talent and potential,” he says. “It is also likely to do multigenerational damage to innovation in all parts of the Canadian economy.”

Lautens' op-ed comes as U of T advocates for the federal government to adopt Canada’s Fundamental Science Review, the report by a panel led by U of T President Emeritus David Naylor. The report calls for a $1.3-billion increase in federal research funding over four years, as well as sweeping changes to how it is administered.

Learn how U of T is advocating for publicly funded research

Lautens writes that Canada is falling behind countries like Switzerland and Germany, and more recently China and Singapore, which have some of the best-funded researchers whose contributions are growing their country's GDPs. Here in Canada, on the other hand, funding is failing to keep up with inflation and applied research is given preferential treatment, he says.

Lautens cites discoveries like stem cells and artificial intelligence as innovations that have been studied for decades but are only now seeing practical applications. They’re proof, he says, of the need to fund basic science and research for the long term.

“The most important outcome of scientific research isn't patents or products,” writes Lautens. “It's people who can think and solve our toughest problems.”

Read the Globe and Mail op-ed

U of T’s Ron Buliung helps make kids' trips to school more active and accessible with help from public funding

Romi Levine — Mon, 18 Dec 2017 19:28:01 +0000

U of T’s Ron Buliung helps make kids' trips to school more active and accessible with help from public funding

Romi Levine Mon, 12/18/2017 - 14:28

Cutline

U of T Professor Ron Buliung studies kids' school transportation habits (photo by Romi Levine)

Topic

City & Culture

Faculty of Kinesiology & Physical Education

Geography and Planning

Graduate Students

U of T Mississauga

Ever since he was a child and first learned how to ride a bike, it’s been hard to slow down Ron Buliung.

Now a professor of geography and planning at U of T Mississauga, Buliung is an avid cyclist. He is also committed to finding ways to help kids become more active.

For almost a decade, with the help of public funding, Buliung has been looking at how children get to and from school.

“I wanted to hear the voices of kids and help to bring their voices into the conversation about city-building in Toronto, but also across the region,” he says.

Backed by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Heart and Stroke Foundation, Buliung and two U of T researchers from the Faculty of Kinesiology & Physical Education, Associate Professor Caroline Fusco and Professor Guy Faulkner, talked to kids and their families across the Greater Toronto Area about the social and environmental factors that affect school travel. (Faulkner is now at the University of British Columbia.)

“We think about childhood as the time in your life when you learn foundational skills,” says Buliung. “There's an opportunity there for children to engage with their environment in different ways and acquire the skills that allow them to incorporate, if it's physically possible, walking, cycling and other things into the set of alternatives that are available to them for moving around.”

His research into kids’ commutes continued with funding from Metrolinx, Southern Ontario’s transportation planning agency. The study showed that more than twice the number of students are now driven to and from school compared with 25 years ago.

Read about the Metrolinx study

Metrolinx is aiming to get 60 per cent of kids to walk or bike to school by 2031 – a goal Buliung’s research will help to achieve.

“This research increased our understanding of children’s mobility needs and barriers, helping Metrolinx and its partners to knowledgeably focus programs in the right areas,” says Leslie Woo, chief planning officer at Metrolinx.

Buliung’s research also provides evidence that assists the Toronto District School Board’s promotion of safe, active and sustainable school travel, says Ryan Bird, TDSB’s manager of corporate and social media relations.

“We know that those who use active and sustainable modes of transportation experience benefits to mental and physical health and well-being, are better prepared to learn and work and are more connected to their communities,” he says.

Buliung says he wants his research to continue to inspire change in cities.

“To the extent possible, I'm trying to produce knowledge that can be the foundation for constructing interventions and policies to make our cities better for people.”

But in order to build that foundation, researchers like Buliung need public funding to support their work, as outlined in Canada’s Fundamental Science Review report by a panel led by U of T President Emeritus David Naylor.

The panel of experts provided the Canadian government with a list of recommendations on how to support the country’s academic researchers, which includes a $1.3-billion increase in federal research funding over four years.

Interested in publicly funded research in Canada? Learn more at U of T’s #supportthereport advocacy campaign

While public funding can lead to amazing discoveries, Buliung says it is also crucial for launching the careers of graduate students.

“The bulk of the funding is going towards supporting our future generation of scholars or the next generation of city planners or people working for transportation consulting firms,” he says.

Timothy Ross, a PhD student working alongside Buliung, says federal funding was a definitive factor for whether or not he would study at U of T.

“If I didn't have it, I likely wouldn't be here – plain and simple,” says Ross, who received a graduate scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). “It's a serious issue that needs a lot of attention, and I certainly don't want to see public funding go away.”

Buliung and Ross attach a camera to Buliung's daughter's wheelchair (photo courtesy of Ron Buliung)

Supported by the SSHRC Insight Development grant, funding from the Norman Saunders Complex Care Initiative at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, and funds from U of T Mississauga’s Research and Scholarly Activity Fund (RSAF), Buliung's and Ross’s latest research looks at the school travel experiences of kids with disabilities and their families.

For Buliung, it hits close to home. When his daughter Asha was 11 months old, she was diagnosed with a genetic neuromuscular disease called spinal muscular atrophy.

Now six years old and in first grade, Asha rides the school bus in her powered wheelchair.

“She has a lot more autonomy than many 12-year-olds – out of necessity but wow, that's just amazing,” says Buliung.

Asha uses the camera attached to her wheelchair. Research participants were encouraged to document their day in pictures (photo courtesy of Ron Buliung)

Ultimately, Buliung wants his research to help make the lives of families like his more manageable.

“These are families that are doing all kinds of additional work to do very simple things, and they are time-pressed, they are stressed out,” he says. “Let's try to streamline things so families can spend time doing other things.”

This can be as simple as providing schools with a checklist of the equipment and school supplies a child with physical challenges needs to bring home with them so parents don’t have to drive back and pick up missed items, says Buliung.

“It doesn't have to be about building bridges, it can be about something as basic as that,” he says.

Any small changes that come as a result of research today can make a big difference in the long run, he says.

“A piece of basic research may become part of everyday life 25 years from now."

James Till on how 'serendipity' and public funding made possible the discovery of stem cells

geoff.vendeville — Fri, 15 Dec 2017 21:38:26 +0000

James Till on how 'serendipity' and public funding made possible the discovery of stem cells

geoff.vendeville Fri, 12/15/2017 - 16:38

Cutline

The public should support basic science because “it’s the beginning of everything else," says James Till, co-discoverer of stem cells. “What you do with a discovery is create potential for further development." (photo by Laura Pedersen)

Geoffrey Vendeville

Topic

Our Community

Global

Subheadline

Till, who identified stem cells with Ernest McCulloch in the 1960s, calls for greater government investment in basic science

James Till and his colleague Ernest McCulloch were researching the effects of radiation on bone marrow tissue in lab mice when they made an astonishing discovery.

One Sunday when McCulloch went to the lab to take a routine sample, he noticed bumps on the spleen of a mouse, clumps of cells that emerged after it had been injected with marrow. He counted the bumps and found that the number was directly related to the number of marrow cells that had been transplanted.

“When I came in Monday morning,” Till recalls in an interview with U of T News, “he came down the hall to my office waving this piece of graph paper saying, ‘You’ve got to see this!’”

Till and McCulloch, scientists at the Ontario Cancer Institute, were wary of jumping to conclusions, so they described their findings in 1961 as “spleen colony-forming units.” In later years, they and their collaborators were able to establish that what they had observed were stem cells, and to explain their properties. Their work opened the door to new research with the potential to reshape health care and cure ailments ranging from blindness to cancer.

“For a long time, Till and McCulloch’s discovery didn’t get the attention it deserved,” James Price, president and CEO of the Canadian Stem Cell Foundation, told The Globe and Mail this year. “But they set the stage for all the current stem-cell research, and helped make Canada a magnet for talent and investment in biotech.”

Their research has already paved the way for life-saving treatments, such as bone-marrow transplants to treat cancer.

And their discovery has helped build up regenerative medicine into a global multibillion-dollar industry. By 2021, the market is expected to grow to US$38.7 billion worldwide.

Writing in the journal Nature Medicine in 2005, the research duo said their pioneering work on stem cells shows the value of basic science. “We weren’t deliberately seeking such cells, but, thanks to a felicitous observation originally made by McCulloch, we did stumble upon them,” they write. “Our experience provides yet another case study of both the value of fundamental research and the importance of serendipity in scientific research.”

Without public funding from the likes of the Defence Research Board and Medical Research Council, Till says his research with McCulloch – who died in 2011 – would have been impossible. “We needed a lot of mice, and they were expensive,” he recalls.

Interested in publicly funded research in Canada? Learn more at UofT’s #supportthereport advocacy campaign

His comments come as the government weighs the recommendations of Canada’s Fundamental Science Review panel, which was led by U of T President Emeritus David Naylor. The panel of experts called for a $1.3-billion boost in federal research funding over four years and changes to how it is administered.

In the interview, Till says the federal government and the public should support basic science because “it’s the beginning of everything else."

“What you do with a discovery is create potential for further development,” Till says. “But you have to do the steps in between.”

In 2005, their work was honoured with the Lasker Award, sometimes called the American Nobel. They were both named Officers of the Order of Canada and inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame.

But if it wasn’t for the support of the federal government, things might have turned out differently, Till says. “Without the support of that first bursary from the National Research Council, I probably wouldn’t have gone on to have a career in research at all.”

Till was born on a farm in Saskatchewan, near the Alberta border. He studied physics at the University of Saskatchewan before obtaining a PhD from Yale. As memories of the atomic bombs dropping on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still fresh, Till says he gravitated toward biophysics. “It’s challenging from an intellectual point of view, but it also has the potential to be helpful, which was the kind of motivation I wanted,” he says.

He came to ��Ƶ as a post-doctoral researcher. He was reunited with his former master’s supervisor Harold Johns, who recruited him to the research staff at the Ontario Cancer Institute at Princess Margaret Hospital. McCulloch was part of the biology group.

Till and McCulloch are sometimes described as a scientific odd couple because of the differences in their expertise and temperament – Till, the physicist from the Prairies, and McCulloch, a hematologist from Toronto.

“We became friends quite quickly,” Till says.

From their lab benches in the 1960s, they could not have anticipated the vast implications of their discovery. And the full impact of their work may not be known for some time still.

“I believe stem cell research will continue to achieve unexpected things, and that’s the only prediction I’m willing to make,” Till told Maclean’s in 2012. “It will be unexpected because that’s how science functions.”

No more tears: Publicly funded research by U of T's Anna Taddio is taking the pain out of vaccinations in Canada and around the world

Christopher.Sorensen — Fri, 15 Dec 2017 15:46:46 +0000

No more tears: Publicly funded research by U of T's Anna Taddio is taking the pain out of vaccinations in Canada and around the world

Christopher.Sorensen Fri, 12/15/2017 - 10:46

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Anna Taddio, a professor at U of T's Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy and a senior associate scientist at SickKids, researches childhood pain. Her vaccination recommendations have been adopted in WHO guidelines (photo by Chris Sorensen)

Topic

Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy

Global

Health

Research and Innovation

It was in the neonatal intensive care unit at Toronto’s SickKids Hospital in the late 1990s that Anna Taddio witnessed the consequences of infant pain first-hand.

The ��Ƶ childhood pain researcher says newborns would frequently start crying as soon as nurses approached their incubators – particularly those who had been in the unit for an extended period.

“It’s almost like they anticipated something bad was going to happen,” says Taddio, a senior associate scientist at SickKids and a professor at the ��Ƶ’s Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy.

“And that’s probably because you were about to do something unpleasant – you didn’t go in there just to cuddle them.”

The observation was later affirmed by a 2002 paper, one of nearly 200 Taddio has authored over two decades, that showed babies pricked with multiple needles within the first several hours of being born reacted much more strongly to a standard screening test that involved drawing blood. Other research showed that negative health care experiences early in a child's life – involving needles or other painful procedures – could haunt them as they grew older.

Making needles and vaccinations more tolerable became a focus of Taddio’s ground-breaking pain research, the vast majority of which was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, or CIHR. Both are critical preventative medicine tools and represent most people’s first interaction with the health-care system, helping to shape long-term attitudes about it in the process.

Taddio's work is already having a big impact. In 2015, vaccine-administering recommendations developed by her team were written into Canadian clinical practice guidelines. Several were also adopted the same year by the World Health Organization.

It's yet another example how investing in fundamental research can dramatically improve the lives of Canadians and others around the world. Moreover, Taddio's research underscores the importance of adopting the recommendations of Canada’s Fundamental Science Review, which was led by U of T President Emeritus David Naylor, and calls for a $1.3-billion increase in federal research funding over four years, as well as sweeping changes to how it is administered.

Why? If CIHR's public funding didn't exist, Taddio may never have had the opportunity to conduct research into a problem many in the medical community previously believed was a non-issue – to the extent they thought about it at all.

A child is vaccinated in North Darfur in 2012. Recommendations by Taddio's team were adopted by the WHO three years later (photo by UNAMID via Flickr)

Statistics show that roughly one out of every four people is scared of needles, albeit to differing degrees. And Taddio estimates that as many as 10 per cent of people avoid getting vaccinations because of a fear of needles or concern about injection pain, a situation that poses an obvious personal and community health risk.

What's more, those same fears can prevent people from going to doctors for other routine procedures and tests until it's too late.

Taddio explains that we have a medical culture that has historically viewed needles and vaccinations, and the pain associated with them, as a necessary evil – something that patients must simply grin and bear.

“Most needle fears develop between the ages of four and eight, and it’s usually in the context of a bad procedure where somebody held you down and you were struggling,” she says, noting that about half of all people who are scared of needles and vaccinations had a negative childhood experience.

The rest is due to simple apprehension. “Somebody scares you – or you see somebody else, say you see your brother get a needle – and it’s very traumatic,” says Taddio. “Then you become very afraid.”

Taddio speaks from both professional and personal experience. She recalls taking her eldest son to a Toronto clinic for a blood test when he was four. The nurse jabbed his arm, missed the vein, and jabbed again as he struggled and screamed.

He understandably left the clinic with a fear of needles, Taddio says.

But it doesn't have to be this way.

Taddio's work has shown a number of relatively simple measures that can be taken to reduce the pain and fear associated with vaccinations. They include: injecting the most painful vaccine last during a series of injections; ensuring older children and adults are sitting upright; breastfeeding infants before or after the injection; and using topical anesthetics.

Taking steps to acknowledge children's pain and distracting them during injections can also be effective.

“Many people are afraid of needles and so avoid getting vaccinated, which is such an important preventative intervention,” says Professor Heather Boon, the dean of the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy.

“Dr. Taddio’s work helps us understand why that fear develops so we can take simple steps to prevent it.”

Taddio began looking at childhood and infant pain back in the 1990s and was immediately struck at how little research existed on the subject. “People laughed at me,” she recalls. “They thought it was much ado about nothing.”

When it came to infants, she recounts the prevailing thinking at the time as follows: It’s too difficult to assess pain in babies because they’re incapable of communicating; even if their nervous systems are developed enough to feel pain, they’re too small to be administered drugs without side-effects; and, regardless of how much pain they feel, it doesn’t really matter because there are no long-term consequences.

Needless to say, Taddio found such justifications wanting, particularly when it came to “invasive” procedures like circumcision.

“If you were doing something like that in an adult, there’s just no way you would just strap someone down and proceed,” she says. “So I would watch these procedures and these babies were just crying – they had so much pain they would actually stop breathing.

“I thought, ‘This is ridiculous.'’’

So Taddio, who did her PhD in pain management at U of T, began researching ways to reduce the suffering of babies undergoing circumcision and the safety of associated drugs. Then something unexpected happened while she was working on a study that looked at topical anesthetics and children receiving vaccines. She found, to her surprise, boys often had a higher pain score than girls, which, initially, made little sense.

“We later had this a-ha moment which was: Their experience with pain is different because boys are more likely to have been circumcised than girls,” she says.

The finding was bolstered by looking at the differences in pain scores between circumcised and uncircumcised boys in the same study, and another longer-term study that tracked boys who had been given an anesthetic during circumcision and those who hadn’t.

Interested in publicly funded research in Canada? Learn more at U of T’s #supportthereport advocacy campaign

Taddio continued her research in a similar vein until 2007, when she decided to do a survey on vaccinations in Greater Toronto to see how her work and that of fellow pain researchers had influenced clinical practice.

It hadn’t.

That’s when Taddio decided to add translational research to her fundamental research. She assembled an interdisciplinary team of clinicians, scientists and policy-makers from across Canada to promote better pain care during vaccine injections. They called the initiative Help ELiminate Pain in Kids, or HELPinKids for short. “I thought it would be a good gateway to talking about pain,” she says.

The HELPinKids team published its first clinical practice guideline on reducing vaccine injection pain in 2010 in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. In 2015, they published an updated and expanded guideline in the same journal. Taddio was also invited to Geneva the same year to present at the WHO, which later adopted about half of the recommendations (some, like the use of topical anesthetics, aren’t applicable in developing countries because of the high costs).

Taddio stresses that her research, and the global vaccine guidelines that ultimately sprung from it, were heavily reliant on public funding. “I primarily depended on CIHR because I couldn’t have the work associated with any conflicts of interest,” she says. “That was really important for the guideline panel, who are all working with governments.”

Even so, she says it remains difficult to get funding as a pain researcher, a field that she describes as relatively un-sexy.

“What I achieved with the money I received is actually amazing,” she says, adding that the full adoption of the Naylor report’s 35 recommendations would likely make it easier to attain funding.

The problem of pain and vaccinations is hardly fixed. Despite her research, Taddio says health-care delivery has been slow to change and pain management is still not optimally incorporated into medical procedures – a point that was hammered home when staff at a local hospital politely refused to give her needle-wary son a topical anesthetic before administering an injection.

“People were telling me not to use it because it didn’t work and I was like, ‘Uh, no. I will show you the paper.’”

Anna Taddio is creating tools that can be used to help children deal more effectively with pain during vaccination campaigns in schools (photo by Chris Sorensen)

With the guidelines now in place, Taddio intends to continue with her pain research and find ways to generate further awareness. She’s now focusing on vaccination programs in schools, which represent many children’s first interaction with the health-care system without the assistance of their parents.

One strategy involves creating an easy-to-remember acronym to remind children their options when it comes to vaccination. For example, they might request being vaccinated in private rather than in front of peers, or they might bring a video game or smartphone into the vaccination room to serve as a distraction.

“In the past, we’ve burdened the health-care provider with everything,” says Taddio. “But I think it’s better to show the kids and then they can choose how to best cope.”

In the end, Taddio says it’s all about medical community acknowledging the existence of pain and working with patients to reduce its impact during injections and other procedures.

“Treating pain has many benefits,” she says. “It not only prevents unnecessary suffering, it ensures we are delivering the best care possible, improves everyone’s satisfaction with the experience, and improves health because people are more likely to participate in positive health behaviours like getting vaccinated and going to a doctor to get a blood test to look for high cholesterol and these sorts of things.”

U of T wraps up successful #SupportTheReport postcard campaign

rasbachn — Thu, 14 Dec 2017 05:00:00 +0000

U of T wraps up successful #SupportTheReport postcard campaign

rasbachn Thu, 12/14/2017 - 00:00

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Professor Walid Houry and his group in the Faculty of Medicine show their signed #SupportTheReport postcards (photo by Angelika Duffy)

Jennifer Robinson

Topic

Our Community

Biochemistry

Jackman Humanities Institute

Graduate Students

Molecular Genetics