Science and Research committee  Of the neurodegenerative diseases, it would be dementia and Parkinson's disease. They're very highly related.

Science and Research committee  I'll give you a concrete example. A woman, a world authority at Yale University, was offered a position as the director of an institute in Germany with a budget of $100 million. When we invited her to come here, she said that here was where she wanted to be. I asked her why and s

Science and Research committee  Maybe I can start. I know this very well. There's a lot of research being done on that in Montreal and in Toronto. There is even a company that has been created. It has been created in the open space. It's called M4K, Meds for Kids, and it's working on development of a potential

Science and Research committee  Yes, we have a tremendous amount of partnerships. I've recruited people who only work there. One of our neurology residents is doing a doctorate with him.

Science and Research committee  There is a lot of excellent neuroscience research being done in many places in Canada. McGill is strong—I thank you for mentioning that—but so are universities in Toronto, Calgary, Halifax and many other places. Over the past years, two things have happened. One is that the Can

Science and Research committee  I do think this notion of open science hits the Canadian philosophy, the way Canadians think—and I'm just saying what I think. We're much more socially driven and more wanting to work together. I mentioned the University of Calgary's nurse science group, called the Hotchkiss Br

Science and Research committee  That's an interesting question. To put everyone on the same page, the philosophy of open science is to quickly share all data, knowledge and materials generated. It would take me more than six minutes to explain it all, but briefly, we've created tools to be able to share infor

Science and Research committee  Absolutely. We saw what happened with COVID‑19. When it hit, people decided quickly that everyone was going to openly share the data and all the information. It wasn't perfect, because some people didn't share their data, but the vast majority did, and that played a huge role in

Science and Research committee  It's the dream of making lots of money. Historically, universities got patents and were supposed to issue licences to generate profits. In reality, it didn't work, because universities do research and train students, but they're not designed to generate profits. Businesses have t

Science and Research committee  I see two possibilities. The first is neurodevelopment. We're beginning to understand neurodevelopmental diseases better and better and we can design treatments. We're seeing the very beginnings of this approach. In this field, an ambitious program would help us find treatments

Science and Research committee  There's no doubt that many technologies are used to do surgery. They're being developed at my institute and elsewhere. This could be an ambitious program, but I'm not an expert in that branch of medicine. For it to be an ambitious program, we would need a critical mass of people

Science and Research committee  Honestly, I'd say we can always do better. On our end, we interact a lot with various groups that do artificial intelligence. It has so many applications and it's an exploding field. At our institute, a group of researchers is looking at multiple sclerosis to improve diagnosis a

Science and Research committee  The current technology is generating staggering amounts of data. Sequencing the first genome cost $30 billion and took 10 years, whereas now it would cost only $800 and take only a day. AI can analyze the huge amounts of data generated in a lab. That's really where it comes in h

Science and Research committee  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