This is a recurrent theme as to how much we should support collaborative, large team efforts versus the usual, which we see in our universities and institutions, which is two or three, at most, people collaborating together. The large one, in principle, is an excellent idea. It can take a theme, which can be broader than one person or two people can handle, and it brings in a number of disciplines to attack one problem.
In Canada we have a special problem that makes this a bit more difficult to achieve, and that is that we have relatively few laboratories. It would be very easy, if we were not careful in organizing our large teams, to find that we were putting all the strength into three or four institutions in Canada; the smaller players, so to speak, would lose out. In principle, it's an excellent idea, but it has to be carefully achieved so that we don't lose the impact that the outriders can give. When I mentioned the four things that we now realize we had ignored, that's exactly the sort of thing that has happened as a consequence of the focus. So I'm not against large teams, and obviously they can do things that small teams can't, but I just ask that it be treated with some caution, because if all the money goes into the large ones, the small ones disappear.
And interestingly, so many breakthroughs have happened in small laboratories with two or three players, that are somehow missed, accidentally or whatever, by the large teams, where the focus is very strenuously directed from above.