Researchers struggle as Ottawa scales back funding
ANNE MCILROY
From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
February 16, 2009 at 9:42 PM EST
After federal funding dried up, one of Canada's top researchers had to scramble to find private donations to continue an ambitious experiment that aims to identify children most at risk of developing serious cognitive and behavioural disorders.
At the same time, the researcher, McGill University's Michael Meaney, was asked to establish a similar research program in Singapore, but with roughly eight times the government funding.
The contrast highlights the difficulties even the best Canadian scientists face as federal spending for research is scaled back in Canada but increases in other countries.
Dr. Meaney and his colleagues have gained international attention for their work investigating the biology of resiliency, the combination of genes and environmental factors that allows some children to emerge relatively unscathed from impoverished, stressful childhoods while others develop problems. They are tracking 500 mothers and their children for the Maternal Adversity, Vulnerability and Neurodevelopment project, or MAVAN.
Pregnant women in Montreal and Hamilton, Ont., were recruited starting in 2004. Some suffer from depression, or live in poverty, or both, which means they have a higher risk of having children with learning difficulties or behavioural problems. Others are part of a control group.
The women volunteered early in their pregnancy, and the oldest children in the study are now five years old. The mothers and their growing children visit the researchers for regular in-depth assessments.
DNA tests have identified the children with genes linked to attention problems or to aggressive or anti-social behaviour. But which of those children will develop problems? Does it depend on whether they had a low birth weight because their mother was stressed during pregnancy? Or is it a matter of the kind of care and nurturing they received after they were born?
The initial findings are groundbreaking, Dr. Meaney says.
But federal money, $4-million over five years, ran out in April. By then, a funding crunch was already limiting the scope of the work of many medical researchers across the country. The recent federal budget, with its $147.9-million in cuts over three years to the granting agencies that fund university-based research in Canada, will make it even harder for scientists, Dr. Meaney says.
Those cuts come as other countries, notably the United States, are pumping money into science. The final U.S. stimulus bill that President Barack Obama is expected to sign Tuesday in Denver contains $10-billion (U.S.) for the National Institutes of Health, the main funding agency for medical research in the United States.
Dr. Meaney now spends three or four months a year in Singapore, where the project modelled on MAVAN is getting $4-million annually to follow mothers and their children and another $1-million to track the same genes in animal studies.
Desperate not to let the Canadian program die, Dr. Meaney turned to private donors, who have asked to remain anonymous. They came up with 60 per cent of the $500,000 required each year to keep following the women and their children for three more years. McGill and Montreal's Douglas Hospital, where Dr. Meaney is based, has pitched in the rest.
The money will allow researchers to follow the mothers and the children, who are now starting school. But Dr. Meaney says it isn't enough to analyze the vast amounts of data generated from brain scans, cognitive tests and videotapes of the mothers and their children interacting during experiments to gauge bonding and attachment.
He says his colleagues in Singapore can't fathom how the Canadians do this kind of work with so little money.
The results from the children's first three years are significant, he says, especially on attention-deficit disorder.
Children who had a number of genes related to the disorder and a low birth weight were showing early signs of attention problems, he says. But children with the same genes, but who had normal fetal growth, were not.
How much weight a baby gains is affected by the health and well-being of the mother, Dr. Meaney says. If a mother is stressed, the fetus is stressed and grows more slowly.
“So what we actually will be able to do is say, ‘Here are the kinds of conditions that presage psychopathology,'“ Dr. Meaney says.
One day, he hopes to be able to accurately describe conditions that increase the risk that a child will have a particular problem by 500, 600 or even 800 per cent.
Dr. Meaney is a research star, a world leader in investigating the interaction between genes and the environment. He and Stephen Matthews, an expert in fetal development at the University of Toronto, lead the MAVAN project. Many of 25 scientists involved are leaders in their fields, including Marla Sokolowski and Alison Fleming at the U of T and Robert Levitan and James Kennedy at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto.
Many will apply for individual grants related to the project from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Two proposals have been awarded funding amounting to $330,000 a year for five years.
Still, MAVAN has been dramatically scaled back, Dr. Meaney says, which has meant cutting three positions that provide skills training for young researchers, and abandoning plans to create four more. Dr. Meaney says it is frustrating that federal politicians don't see the connection between funding science and creating jobs and economic growth.
Gary Goodyear, the federal Minister of State for Science and Technology, has defended the government's commitment to science and its budget.
But sometimes Dr. Meaney says he closes his eyes and fantasizes about moving to Singapore.
“I am committed to Canada,” he says. “I haven't given up the fight.”