For anyone in scientific field, being able to read, understand and analyze journal articles is quite an important tool, one that there is not much emphasis in my courses until the last year of my degree. The midterm allowed us to read and understand the paper to the best of our abilities and then tested our knowledge on how much we actually took away from the paper. I would have to say that I was not disappointed with my score, which reflected my reading and analyzing abilities I guess. But I was not super happy about it either. The good news is that such skills can easily be improved by reading more and more papers. Also this is the first class that set up a “journal article” midterm, I have to say I’m excited about the concept; I think its much better than testing our memorization abilities.

For answering this question, I have thought about the frequency of which certain techniques have been used in studies to conduct their findings. And I have come up with discoveries and techniques such as fluorescent proteins, GAL4-UAS system, and finally CRISPR. Since the first two have been around and utilized for a long time now, their applications and significance are quite clear. In some ways, the ways in which we can use fluorescent proteins and GAL4-UAS system has been saturated; in other words, I cannot think of further new applications that we haven’t already done so (frankly, if I could think of any new application for existing techniques, I’d be publishing my paper). Now going back to CRISPR, it’s a new technique has only been implemented recently, yet has been gaining traction at an unbelievable rate. The potentials and applications of CRISPR are mind-blowing, ranging from curing genetic diseases to improving upon the genomes of virtually any organism including humans. It’s a technique that allows the user to act like a ‘God’ of some sort, making specific changes to genomes that evolved for millions of year, in a matter of days or weeks with the introduction of a few cleverly designed constructs. All that being said, before anything, we have to be weary of potential dangerous of such modifications due to our still limited understanding of various systems. It may seem cliché to choose CRISPR as the most impactful discover but I truly believe that it is one of the most significant breakthroughs in science.

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.

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