Problems with co-funding in Canada.

THE CANADIAN FEDERAL GOVERNMENT HAS prudently invested substantial new resources in research operations and infrastructure, thereby bringing the level of research support in Canada on par with that of most other G8 countries and enabling a world-class research enterprise. Much of this renewed commitment to research, however, is in the form of “co-funded” programs. In Canada, co-funding schemes typically require an equal or greater match of funds from an independent partner, either local, provincial, or foreign governments; private foundations; or industry. In principle, co-funding should leverage funds from other sources and hasten the transition of fundamental research to commercial application. In practice, co-funding can exact a debilitating toll on the research community. Inevitably, co-funding steers resource allocation, as dictated by the partner entity, which may be to the detriment of some of the best science. In particular, co-funding is often biased against fundamental research that is far from commercialization and so at odds with the short-term goals of industrial partners. The vicissitudes of most co-funding sources also severely compromise the sustainability of long-term research platforms. Co-funding is more easily obtained by well-connected investigators able to draw on resources and contacts inaccessible to many of their colleagues, thereby greatly restricting the pool of eligible science. Moreover, the mega-scale mandate of many co-funding initiatives virtually eliminates the individual researcher or small teams in favor of larger, sometimes artificial, consortiums. Perhaps most troubling from a scientific perspective, the criteria for eligible co-funding are inherently subjective. A recent example illustrates the latter point. Genome Canada, the primary Canadian funding agency for genome-scale projects, has winnowed its latest round of team applications solely on the basis of the perceived financial suitability of the cofunding source. To this end, each application required up to 10 times more pages of budgetary justification than the scientific proposal itself. Of ~120 initial proposals, ~30 were culled at an early stage without review at all. Of the 93 full proposals allowed to go forward, almost one-third were eliminated by a panel of accountants based on ambiguous financial criteria and without any consideration of scientif ic merit, with many of the remainder placed in a financially suspect category. The conclusions to be drawn are obvious: In general, grants are best awarded solely on the basis of scientific peer review, and funded in full without matches, strings, or contingencies that depend on outside agents. By eschewing scientific excellence as the pri-