To Drive Global Innovation, Canada Must Focus on Basic Science

Canada’s National Research Council boldly advertises itself as “advancing mission-driven science and innovation” — to strengthen national security, economic resilience and global competitiveness.

This ambition is difficult to reconcile with a national research system that has, for years, placed too little value on the basic, exploratory, investigator-led science that makes those outcomes possible.

In 2017, Canada’s Fundamental Science Review found that federal funding had shifted too far toward priority-driven and partnership-oriented research. In 2023, the Advisory Panel on the Federal Research Support System made a similar point: mission-driven research depends on the strength of the broader research ecosystem, including curiosity-driven work.

Recent federal investments in research infrastructure, including more than $552 million through the Canada Foundation for Innovation, are important. They help universities, hospitals and research institutions acquire laboratories, equipment and facilities to conduct world-class research.

However, a healthy research ecosystem also needs stable and sustained operating support for investigator-led work. This includes the early, uncertain studies that identify tomorrow’s neglected problems before they become today’s policy priorities.

A nation’s ‘scientific capital’

Health research shows why this distinction matters. We celebrate new treatment advances such as CAR T-cell therapy, which genetically engineers a patient’s immune cells to attack cancer. We welcome CRISPR-based therapies such as Casgevy, a gene-edited cell therapy for sickle cell disease and transfusion-dependent beta-thalassemia.

But these advances did not appear fully formed. They were built through years of work in molecular biology, immunology, genetics, chemistry, engineering and clinical science, much of it conducted before anyone could promise a product, a company or a clinical payoff.

That foundation is fragile when it is treated as optional. As American science adviser Vannevar Bush said back in 1945, basic research is the source of a nation’s “scientific capital.” The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) continues to make this case clearly today: public support is essential for research and innovation.

A healthy Canadian research ecosystem cannot survive on the final stages of innovation alone. Of course, it needs applied research, commercialization and measurable impact. But it also requires the earlier, “high-risk” discovery work that expands the horizon of what is possible.

Special calls are not enough

Endometriosis makes the problem concrete: it affects many people in Canada, is associated with pain, infertility and reduced quality of life. Canadian research has reported an average diagnostic delay of 5.4 years.

In fields like this, upstream science is not a luxury. Before better diagnostics and treatments can exist, researchers have to ask basic questions about inflammation, pain, immune function, hormones, nerves, genetics, imaging and disease progression.

As researchers working in reproductive health, we have seen how targeted federal grant calls can elevate under-researched conditions. The National Women’s Health Research Initiative, for example, was designed to address high-priority areas of women’s health and improve care for women, girls and gender-diverse people.

This kind of targeted funding matters. It can create momentum and build networks. But it cannot carry a research system on its own. Targeted calls are often time-limited, theme-specific and shaped by priorities that are already visible enough to attract policy attention.

The case of mRNA vaccines

During the COVID-19 pandemic, mRNA vaccines looked to many people like a scientific miracle delivered at unprecedented speed. But that apparent speed was misleading. The vaccines did not emerge from nowhere.

The 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine recognized Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for discoveries that enabled effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19. Their work helped solve a central problem: how to make mRNA useful as a medical tool without having the body immediately recognize and destroy it as a threat.

Even that breakthrough rested on a much wider scientific history, involving around 50 years of public and private research. Scientists had to understand how mRNA carries genetic instructions, how cells translate those instructions into proteins, how immune systems detect foreign RNA and how fragile mRNA could be delivered safely into cells. None of that work was a vaccine when it began. Yet without it, the vaccine could not have arrived when it was needed.

This is why short-term thinking in science policy is so risky. If research is valued only when it can explain its payoff in advance, systems will gradually favour projects that are safer, narrower and more immediately tangible. That may produce useful results in the short term, but it weakens the broader discovery pipeline over time.

Reliance on other nations

There is a strong economic case for paying attention. A 2024 study of 15 OECD countries found that public investment in research and development had positive and persistent effects on GDP and also stimulated business research and development investment.

Public support for long-term research is not separate from economic strategy. It is part of how countries build it. But the deeper issue is not only economic. It’s whether Canada wants to remain a producer of knowledge or become increasingly dependent on knowledge produced elsewhere.

A country that under-invests in basic research does not stop benefiting from science. It becomes more reliant on other systems to take the early risks, generate the foundational knowledge and shape the next generation of medical, technological and industrial advances. Canada’s Fundamental Science Review warned that continued imbalance in funding would leave the country increasingly dependent on discoveries and ideas generated abroad.

This impacts our health, climate science, energy and emerging technologies. It’s important in terms of how well Canada can respond to future crises. And it matters whether neglected areas of health and science ever receive the depth of inquiry required to produce real change.

Canada must protect upstream research

Canada should not have to choose between useful and ambitious science. These are not opposing goals. They are different points along the same continuum. Today’s basic research becomes tomorrow’s applied science. Today’s obscure mechanism becomes tomorrow’s therapy.

Today’s difficult question may become tomorrow’s platform technology. But only if someone is allowed to ask it.

Canada needs targeted programs. It needs research infrastructure. It needs commercialization possibilities that help discoveries reach patients, communities and markets. It needs sustained investment in investigator-led research.

That means protecting operating grants from erosion, funding trainees and early-career researchers, supporting high-risk work in neglected fields and evaluating scientific value by more than immediate commercial readiness.

This is not indulgence. It is foresight.