The Past Speaks

The federal government recently announced the names of the holders of the 19 new Canada Excellence Research Chair (CERC) chairs. The chairs program was designed to allow Canadian universities to capture top international scientific talent. Each chairholder gets a budget of $10 million a year for up to seven years. The chairs are coming to Canada from the United States, Britain, France and elsewhere, a welcome reversal of the normal stream of good researchers who leave Canada for US universities. Brain scientist Adrian Owen, who is moving to the University of Western Ontario, is pretty typical of the new chairs. He is profiled in this short video.

For press and blogosphere reaction to the CERC program, see here, here, here, and here.

There have been several criticisms of the CERC program.

1) There is the right-wing criticism that this isn’t a good use of taxpayers’ money. Scientists who want money for research should rely on private donations. We should put this money into tax relief for hard-workin regular Canadians, not money for eggheads. [NOTE: when they were in opposition, Conservative MPs used to make fun of some of the research topics funded by the government, reading a highly selective list of funded topics out into Hansard].

2) None of the 19 chair recipients are women.

3) None of the new chairs will be taking up jobs at Montreal universities. The program was biased against Quebec.

4) That the $190 million for the new chairs isn’t that much money in the grand scheme of things and the Harper government has actually reduced funding for research in real terms. See here.

Let me reply to each criticism in turn.

Criticism 1. Investing in basic science is a very good use of tax money. Much of what the federal government currently spends money on right now is useless and should be cut (I’m thinking of the “Canadian military” and a host of acronyms). Funding science, however, is one of the things governments should do.  The funds that went into Stanford University’s electrical engineering department produced a massive return for society — the area near Stanford became the centre of the global electronics industry, known today as Silicon Valley. Provided it is done correctly, government funding for research can have massive social benefits. Check out this book:

Criticisms 2 and 3 are attempts to politicize decisions about how research funds are allocated.  All of the research shows that government funding for research and development is most likely to produce positive outcomes when political factors are left out of the equation. The last thing we need is for politicians to manipulate the research funding process so as to put cash into their own ridings.  Industry Minister Tony Clement deserves credit for not bucking to political pressure and assigning these chairs with electoral considerations in mind.Of course, it helps that there aren’t any universities in his riding of Parry Sound-Muskoka! He can afford to be impartial about which universities can get the cash.

Similarly, taking gender, hair colour, province of residence, religion, etc, into account would distort the process and undermine the argument about social benefits that I have made in replying to Criticism 1.  The issue of discrimination against women in science is an important one, especially since the academic culture in some important science producing nations is still very sexist. (I’m thinking of Japan here, although none of the 19 chairs is coming to us from that country) That being said, there are a whole host of other reasons may be underrepresented at the peak levels of science. I’m not a scientist and thus can’t speak authoritatively on issues of sexual differences, but I know that respected scientists are divided on the issue of whether innate differences between men and women may influence their career paths. See here.  There is no reason to suppose that the population of leading scientists will represent the general population, since leading scientists are, almost be definition, eccentric oddballs. In many cases, the top people in many fields are driven people whose obsession with research may border on OCD.  Top scientists are more likely to be men because they are willing to be forgo a normal family life. In fact, it is likely that the top performers in science and other competitive fields are disproportionately gay men, since they have the freedom from childcare duties that allows them to spend all of their waking hours in the lab, practicing the violin, or whatever it may be. This doesn’t mean that the top researchers are necessarily happier people than second-tier academics (in fact, I suspect otherwise), but they do produce more science, which is the commodity that taxpayer is buying with this program.

Let me make the following historical analogy. During the Second World War, the US government assembled a team of top physicists to try to make an atomic bomb. This team was decidedly unrepresentative of the US college-educated population, let alone the US population in general. It was disproportionately foreign-born and Jewish. Would anybody now argue that it would have been in the interests of the United States to have imposed a quota so that, say, a certain number of Baptists from Tennessee would have to be hired as scientists by the Manhattan Project?  I know that the analogy between peacetime and wartime science isn’t perfect, but I think you see the point I am trying to make.

Ground Zero After First Atom Bomb Test

Criticism 4: good point. Canada spends only 1.6% of GDP on R&D, whereas the United States spends 2.5%.  The more generous funding of science in the United States appears to translate into a greater output of quality scientific articles (quality being defined by citation counts). 4.5%% of the most-cited scientific publications are by Canadian authors, whereas 49% of the most-cited publications are by Americans.  This suggests that in per capita terms, the United States produces more somewhat scientific research than Canada. See here.