Yes, I completely agree. It is important to understand that applied research is important. Universities across the country, including Queen's University and Western University, are partnering more and more with our community college partners for applied research. That's a fairly downstream activity, but the reality is that to move upstream, as you said, you never know where the next eureka moment will come from. There are the SNOLAB experiments, Queen's University's work with its partners in Ontario and federal government funding, with Dr. Art McDonald and the discovery of what a neutrino is, and what that's leading to in terms of exciting new discoveries and the Nobel Prize for Dr. McDonald.
With regard to the neutrino, hold your thumb up and billions come from the sun and flow through it every second. It's the smallest known piece of matter you can measure. While scientists theorized for decades about this, it was Dr. Arthur McDonald who, seven floors below the ground in the mine in Sudbury—the reason this is in Sudbury is that it's the deepest mine in the world—built a neutrino catcher, a giant basin the size of this room, filled with heavy water that slowed down the neutrinos. He could then measure and prove them.
The spinoffs and the excitement that come from that are tremendous, and it gave training to young people working on it. It's now having effects in industry and finance, so applied work comes from that. It took Art McDonald proving something that no one could see 30 years ago, and it took funding—in this case from INCO at that time, and from the Ontario and federal governments working together—to basically fund someone like Dr. McDonald as the expert. They let him go and do what he knows how to do best.
It's investment in people, experts and Ph.D.s in that field, but you don't know what you don't know, so it's extremely important to give them the room to do their work and to back them through that.