Can I can add a couple of things to what David is saying? It's very important.
First, it's not just looking for new technologies. I will tell you that there's an area in which Canada ought to be ashamed, namely, that we do not provide universal newborn screening. More and more countries are moving to that. We could actually detect, at birth, many more of these genetic disorders, many of which can be intervened in at birth to prevent the disease, or at least identify the disease before the family has another child with that same disease.
Yet there is not a universal program. Some provinces do a good job, doing more than 30 diseases; some provinces are still doing as few as four.
Second, because we don't have a national strategy around it, each province is in fact doing its own thing. Here there are two dangerous things. One is that you need a critical number in order to be able to identify these diseases, and even to know what to do with the test. Quite frankly, we're wasting money by having each province do it on its own. We don't need that many newborn screening sites in Canada. We could do a better job and have better use of our resources, as well as be more effective.
There's another thing that we're investing in—I think David knows this—and that's the very good research that's going on towards that whole area of genome sequencing that we know about. There is a prediction that in a very few years, that could become very practical. In one test, you could actually identify a whole host of rare diseases. We are at the forefront of that. How we will use it and how we will apply it and make it available—those will be our challenges.
So on the one hand, I think we're doing a shameful job. On the other hand, we're at the front end of the research.