Thank you, Madam Chair. I'll try to be brief.
First of all, I'll just say at the outset that I agree with what David Johnston just said. Second, I commend the committee for focusing this meeting, at least, on the importance of international moon shots. I say that in light of the ending of COP27, when climate change is very much on everyone's mind.
We all know that the issue of climate change in the world will only be addressed—here I'm quoting Gordon Brown, the former chancellor of the Exchequer in the U.K.—with science and research. Only science and research gives us that hope. In that sense, it's very much like the pandemic that we would like to be through but are still in the middle of. Again, science and research have offered hope, and not just hope, but drugs, vaccines and diagnostics that have really saved the world from this emerging new virus.
Let me go on to a few other things.
I think the pandemic has brilliantly demonstrated what science—working across political and disciplinary boundaries, fuelled by global collaboration and the prior decades of fundamental science—can do in a remarkably short period of time. These RNA vaccines have been unexpected game-changers and have certainly saved hundreds of millions of lives around the world, including probably about a million here in Canada. Climate change will also only be addressed by decades of prior science, powered by global collaboration.
Here, I want to stress the words “moon shot”. Climate change will not be addressed by incremental science. Climate change, like COVID, will only be addressed by moon shot science. That's why I think your choice of that word—to every member of the committee—is commendable. I think it's appropriate.
I want to now address this question: Can Canada contribute to moon shot science? I think this is an important question that this committee and all of us need to deal with. To that, my reply is very clear. There have been two recent moon shots that have changed the world: artificial intelligence and RNA vaccines. I think nobody would argue with those two, actually.
Artificial intelligence, deep learning or reinforcement learning were developed right here in Canada by Geoff Hinton in Toronto with his students and by Rich Sutton and his trainees in Edmonton with his students. The result of that has really transformed the industry of every kind of science and has unleashed trillions of dollars' worth of investments from around the world. That has been a true game-changer.
How did that happen? I know it happened because both Geoff and Rich were working in the States. With regard to your point, Madam Chair, they were thinking of leaving the United States for Canada because of our values, the state of our democracy and the state of our cities. They moved here, facilitated by CIFAR, the organization that I've had the honour to lead for the last 10 years. They moved to Toronto and Edmonton, respectively.
I'll go back to a point that David Johnston made.
Toronto, Edmonton and Montreal—because Yoshua Bengio was one of the trainees that Geoff trained—are now booming as a result of the artificial intelligence boom that was created by the fundamental science that was funded by the federal government through CIFAR and then through NSERC back in the early 2000s. I think there's an important lesson there in terms of what we're capable of and the role of government in catalyzing that moon shot.
The second one is RNA vaccines, and perhaps this is something that committee members are not aware of. Let me go through four really pivotal contributions that Canadians have made to these vaccines.
The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine—which has been administered to more individuals on the planet than any other COVID vaccine—and the Johnson & Johnson-Harvard vaccine used an adenovirus vector technology. That technology was developed by Frank Graham when he was a professor at McMaster University.
Moderna, the brilliant company that founded RNA vaccines, was founded by Derrick Rossi, also a Canadian. He is also a former graduate student of mine, I'm very proud to say.
Lipid nanoparticles, which are essential for protecting the RNA of an RNA vaccine, were developed by Pieter Cullis at UBC. Every RNA vaccine administered on the planet now uses the patented technology that Pieter Cullis developed in Vancouver.
Finally, how the immune system works and the role of sentinel cells presented by the RNA vaccines—the so-called dendritic cells—were first identified by the late Ralph Steinman, who won his Nobel Prize for that work while working at Rockefeller University.
Canadians are capable of doing it.