Thank you very much for giving me this opportunity to present to your committee.
I'm going to talk about the brain, and I'm going to make the argument that our brains are our greatest wealth and Canada's greatest wealth because brains are what allow us to do everything.
There are many diseases of the brain, and I think that interests all Canadians. Just to be clear, all neurodevelopmental diseases, including intellectual disability and autism, which affect 5% to 7% of the population of Canada; all neurodegenerative diseases, including dementia, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's; all psychiatric diseases; and all mental illnesses come from the brain. It's quite clear that there's no Canadian who is not affected, directly or indirectly, by brain diseases.
I've been in this field for a long time. Cardiologists have been doing a great job, and heart disease is declining. Survival is increasing, and I think that's great. Oncologists are also doing a great job, but oncology is complicated, with many different diseases. There are also many cancers that can be either controlled or cured, although there is still work to do, I admit. However, for one organ we've really not done very well, and that is the brain.
There is no drug that reliably slows down the progress of dementia. There are virtually no drugs that we can use to treat the core problems of autism, intellectual disability and so on. The drugs we use in psychiatric illnesses are blunt instruments.
Why is this? Really, the problem is that the brain is very complicated. This is why we haven't been doing so well. You need to understand the system to be able to design smart treatments, and we don't know the system well enough. The good news, though, is that there are revolutionary methods that I could go into detail about, such as single-cell sequencing, imaging, AI and iPSC, and these many different methods and techniques have now made studying the brain much easier and much more possible.
In Canada, there is a very large, very vibrant and very strong neuroscience community, and we punch well above our weight in the world. Not only that, the neuroscience community in Canada is quite unified. In Canada, there's a lot of collaboration and a lot of people working together, and I think that it is exactly the kind of condition you should have for what you call a moon shot. You want a large-scale collaboration. You want a strong cadre of experts and people who are opening up the field.
I heard a little earlier about the brain drain to the United States. I can tell you that in the neurosciences, the brain drain is going in the other direction. We've just hired a few superstars from the United States who have come to Canada because Canada is a good place to work and collaborate, and people work together.
My message is that the brain is super important. It's an area where we are very strong in Canada, and we could make a big difference in understanding the brain and finding treatments for it.
If I do less than five minutes, do I get the extra time later?