Not for awareness, obviously, but for the actual research itself...? How much? Any increase is great; I'm not going to say anything bad about that. We are asking for an across-the-board increase of 1%, and that would benefit all research itself. How much would it be just for the neurological diseases? I suppose an extra....
With an average CIHR grant, for example, if you're lucky, you can get about $300,000 over five years. That's a lot; that would set up a new lab like the one I have for a long time. But those are so hard to come by.
On the amount of funding you get, it's kind of the same. It's just that the number awarded is very low. So if it could be bumped up even a percentage point, that would make a big difference. What happens now is you have an idea and you have to go around to smaller, different agencies and hopefully package enough research to go for the big one, and then if you get it you can finish a project and hopefully find something interesting. That is hard to do.
Right now I have a small amount of funding from the CIHR. I'm very grateful for the support from ALS Canada, and I have funding from Switzerland. As a new person, it has been hard to get into the big grants from the CIHR.
I don't know. Just an increase...I can't give you a dollar amount because I don't have a budget.