The Promise and Glory of Stem Cells

Canada plays in the major league of biomedical research. Our lead funding agency, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, spends just over a billion dollars annually, supporting the projects of upwards of 9,000 researchers across the country. Various other federal bodies, provincial research institutes, private foundations, hospitals, universities and other organizations spend perhaps another billion. The major medical school and hospital complexes in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Edmonton are internationally recognized research centres. In fact, the border hardly matters as researchers and their ideas circulate freely in not only a continental but a global matrix. Everyone’s goal is discovery, and it surely is more important that breakthroughs happen as quickly as possible rather than in any given lab.

But, of course, it is useful to get recognition. We want to know that the...