Thank you very much, Chairperson.
I hope I can ask some learned questions. I didn't think I would ever be at a health committee where we'd be talking about Christmas tree lights and how they function. That was very interesting.
It's a bit overwhelming, I have to say. I've been keeping notes and trying to keep up with all of your presentations. I feel as though we've had an hour's crash course in genomes, and nanotechnology, and so on. I absorbed a little bit, I have to say, and I know there are a ton of questions.
What I'm thinking about, though, is this. When we have this incredible research that's going on in various stages—and in some instances Canada is plowing ahead, which is terrific—the issue that keeps coming back to me is what challenges we face in making these incredible new technologies accessible to people.
I think it was Dr. Marra who mentioned the whole issue of personalized medicine; that, for example, access to some of these new drugs, based on personalized medicine and the research you're doing, will change the way we do clinical trials because we'll be down to a micro level. We've just had Dr. Chan tell us about his nanotechnology, and we're talking about 10 or 20 years from now.
The question I have, because we are doing this study, is what is it that we need to be prepared for in advance in terms of applications for what you're researching now? It sounds like we have a bit of a handle on some of it now, but for some of the information you presented, the timeline is much longer. It would be terrible to see a situation where we have made advances and yet we don't have the capacity, in terms of clinical trials or approvals or even accessibility for patients, to actually roll it out, and we end up with a big gap.
I don't know if this is a field that any of you get into. Maybe you're just at the front end, and somebody else does the other end, but you could address that and give us some ideas about what we need to focus on, as a committee, because we'll be writing a report. What is it that we need to prepare for, in terms of policy considerations, for how your research will actually apply and help people in the future? Would any of you like to address that?