For the second example, I want to turn to the health sector. It deals with so many...certainly from my city and very close to me. It's the Edmonton Protocol. It involves a researcher named Ray Rajotte, whom some of you may know.
Ray was a graduate of a polytechnic school. He was an X-ray technician, and he then went on to get other degrees at the University of Alberta. He started his research in an old abandoned washroom on the bottom floor of the University of Alberta, and 30 years later he's on the front page of The New York Times. President Clinton is talking about the Edmonton Protocol. By taking islets from a pancreas and transferring them into a patient, you can get that person off of insulin shots.
I had someone actually come up to me and say that my uncle improved their life, and that was a real moment for me. But if I'd said to Ray in 1977, “Ray, you're going to be famous for the Edmonton Protocol on taking islets out of a pancreas”, he would have said that I was nuts, that there was no way he was going there.
It shows the challenge we face as policymakers and parliamentarians. How would you identify a Ray Rajotte in 1977? It's easy in 2005 for us to all stand up and say what a wonderful thing this is, let's fund it. And that's what we did. The federal government stepped in at the end and started funding it, saying “Isn't this wonderful.” But how do you identify that? You are talking about funding basic research over a 30-year period. Maybe that would have ended up producing nothing, but it did end up making a difference in a lot of people's lives.
Mr. McCulloch, I was struck when you talked about big science projects requiring both. One of the reasons it was successful was that Ray had an engineering technical background that allowed him to make different products to actually freeze the islets and then transplant them.
That's a key question for me. How do you recognize that there's a genesis there that could turn into something, allow it to turn into something, but not fund 20 white elephants? It's a real challenge, and I think that's where a lot of our questions are going.
I don't know if anyone wants to address that issue.
Mr. McCulloch, do you want to address that?