During the past few years, funding from CIHR has become increasingly biased towards medical and disease research while significantly cutting funding to labs doing basic research on model organisms. As someone who volunteers in a C. elegans lab doing basic research, the impact of these changes are apparent and frankly damaging to the scientific community. Before delving into the allocation of funding, allow me to digress to justify my biased opinion on the matter.

In 2002, H. Robert Horvits, Sydney Brenner and John E. Sulston were awarded the Nobel Prize for their work on apoptosis in C. elegans; a process that applies to virtually every multicellular organism. In 2008, the Nobel Prize was awarded to Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie and Roger Y. Tsien for their work on green fluorescent proteins (GFP). Very soon, the Nobel Prize will be awarded to researchers involved in the discovery and development of CRISPR. The significant impact of all three discoveries on the scientific community are undeniable. Furthermore, all three discoveries were made while conducting basic research, where the intentions for human application were not the first priority, if there were any. Yet every one of these discoveries are considered as breakthroughs in the scientific field that have had and will continue to have applications to humans.

The ultimate goal of almost every study is to improve the quality and the longevity of life of humans. The point here is that basic research should not be ignored and underfunded as they are being now, because like all three examples above, such discoveries will propel our knowledge. Who knows what impact the next discovery made while doing basic research will have on humans. Therefore, it is important to continue basic research to study manipulatable model systems.

One main difficulty of getting funding from CIHR is that proposals are read and reviewed by people of all backgrounds; including those who have no background of the three discoveries mentioned above and their impact on the scientific community, so naturally, they would approve of projects that focus on humans directly. One solution to that would be to inform the public of the importance of these studies.

Excuse the digression

There is no doubt that disease based research should be funded, granted (no pun intended), however I would fund basic research and medical and disease orientated research to almost the same extend because of my background. Coming back to the main topic, I would look at what questions they going to answer or what gaps of knowledge they going to address in their field of research. I would also prioritize research on unexpected epidemics such as the Ebola crisis couple years back.