Thank you.
I am very struck by the similarity between young Canadian scientists hoping one day to win a Nobel prize, and young Canadian athletes one day hoping to win an Olympic gold medal. In both cases, we are talking about extremely competitive, devoted and intense young Canadians, sometimes brilliant, but generally doomed to failure. They will not get an Olympic medal.
The Canadian government, the sport federations, the universities and a host of scientists seem to have difficulty identifying those who are going to bring us honour and investing taxpayers' money in them. We seem to be destined to finish 17 th in the Olympics and to send people without the slightest hope of getting on the podium who come back saying that they did their best and got a better result than they usually do.
In medicine, physics and chemistry, only five Canadians who studied in Canada have won a Nobel prize. France has ten times that number.
Are we really to believe that you have found a way to identify young scientists with a future, the stars, the geniuses, and to invest in them? Or have you in science not just adopted the same culture of mediocrity that the sport federations have adopted?