The chemistry sector has much to reflect on, says ACS president William Carroll, and chemists should think about how the industry will look in a decade’s time. A key area to focus on is how the next generation of chemists – the lifeblood of the discipline – will shape the field. They will determine whether the chemistry sector evolves or not.

Carroll is optimistic. A major change is on the horizon, he says, as new graduates are joining young, innovative companies to kick off their careers, rather than following in the footsteps of their predecessors.

A few decades ago, the most desirable career path for a postdoc chemistry researcher led to major corporations such as DuPont, Dow or Exxon. Today, half of the US chemistry graduates entering industry are choosing small businesses, especially chemical-biology start-ups, says Carroll. “People are going to work for companies you never heard of, and those companies will tend to be more entrepreneurial, more innovative, more focused,” he says.

Small but dynamic

An employment survey carried out by the ACS in 2004 showed that firms with fewer than 500 employees took in 51 per cent of new chemistry graduates, whereas those with more than 10,000 employees hired only 22 per cent. Carroll interprets the trend as a sign of how large corporations have cut back their R&D. They are now putting most of their effort into the marketing and distribution of established products with low cost and limited profit margins, rather than hiring young chemists to work on new ideas, says Carroll. He points to small, dynamic companies as the most likely growth area over the coming decade, as they find themselves able to draw on talent that they could not have afforded in the past.

It remains unclear, however, whether this flow of fresh talent will be sustainable, because fewer and fewer graduates are taking up the profession of research chemist. Around 360,000 American students take introductory chemistry every year, but only around 10,000 go on to specialise in the field, according to the ACS. This key problem needs to be tackled if the sector’s fortunes are to improve, says former ACS president Ron Breslow of Columbia University in New York. He blames poor chemistry teaching in colleges and universities, which he believes is a turn-off for students.

“We do a terrible job of convincing them that this is an exciting, interesting field and that they really ought to want to go into it or at least feel positively about it,” says Breslow. “There are many places where we could do a good job of making the image of chemistry strong. What a great opportunity we have right here, and we’re screwing it up.”

Breslow got an insight into the undergraduate experience when his daughter described her first-year chemistry classes at a Cambridge, Massachusetts university he declined to name. “She said it’s like doing your income tax over and over again, trying not to make a mistake.”

First-year university chemistry has become too demanding and specialised, he argues, and so it deters all but those already dedicated. Breslow blames a failure of teachers to import the latest exciting chemistry research into the classroom, which is creating a growing gap between present-day chemistry and what students learn, he says.

Carroll agrees. “You would think that if you were able to organise and teach that course in a way that was inspiring rather than numbing, you might get a bit better yield out of it,” says Carroll.

“We do a terrible job of convincing students that this is an exciting, interesting field”

If the chemistry sector is to turn around, trends like these cannot be ignored, says Carroll, who wants ACS members to focus more on the future of the chemistry industry. Ensuring that chemists have a sense of where they fit into their field and their society is one of the underlying goals of the society, he says. And as the sector goes through some difficult years, this has never been more important. “As we go forward now, [chemists] are going to have to assume more responsibility for their careers.”

The truth is that while Sweden continues to top the world’s list of research-intensive nations by spending 4.3 per cent of its GDP on R&D, more than three-quarters of that money comes from sources outside government. This level of private investment leaves many other nations green with envy, but for the country’s academics, the paucity of the government’s payout is worrying – even though it is the world’s seventh most generous in relation to GDP.

“It’s been, in real terms, a decline in public funding,” says Carl Johan Sundberg, a physician and associate professor at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute (KI). He contrasts Sweden’s situation over the past decade with the growing levels of public support for research in places such as Canada, the US and Australia.

Even at the KI – an internationally renowned institution nudging its 200th year – such support has been steadily declining, and the public proportion is now less than half of the total, Sundberg says. “We are thinking very strategically about other sources of money.”

Sundberg has a front-row view of one of those sources, as investment director of the Karolinska Investment Fund. Established in 1999, this fund nurtures pharmaceutical, biotech, and medical technology companies with strong commercial potential. By 2003, the fund had spawned a venture-capital firm, Karolinska Development, which quickly amassed more than €10 million to sponsor research-intensive start-ups such as Oncopeptides, a KI spin-off developing new cancer-fighting drugs.

For Sundberg, these entrepreneurial undertakings reflect the importance of technological innovation as one of the country’s economic cornerstones. Sweden’s history is packed with scientists and inventors who laid the foundation for enterprises that went on to become household names: appliance pioneer Electrolux, electronics giant Ericsson and drug manufacturers Astra and Pharmacia – which have since merged with multinational interests.

“Basically, people know how to put things into the market,” says Sundberg, noting that though the whole of Scandinavia contains fewer than 25 million people it boasts some 350 biotechnology companies. “That is more than the UK, and a similar number to Germany.”

Biotech bridges

The majority of these biotech firms are nestled on either side of the Øresund, the channel separating the southern Swedish region of SkĂĽne from the Danish capital, Copenhagen. Since 2000, the two have been linked by a remarkable 16-kilometre bridge and tunnel (New ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´, 21 June 2003, p 58). This region, dubbed Medicon Valley, now employs around 30,000 people in various branches of medicine or medical technology. The area is home to five major science parks, along with 26 hospitals, 12 universities and some 60 per cent of Scandinavia’s biotech and pharmaceutical industry.

On the Danish side of the water, a centrepiece of the CAT Science Park is the Risø National Laboratory, which was founded in 1956 and now employs almost 800 people. For Klaus Nielsen, programme leader at Risø’s plant research department, Medicon Valley has now palpably reached critical mass. “Where you have jobs, where you have energy, where you have dynamics – new companies, small start-ups – you get good people,” he says.

“We have the possibility of being an extremely strong research nation”

But Nielsen has a dual role: he is also head of research at the Danish seed company DLF-Trifolium in Ny Østergade. “There’s a great benefit for both parties besides the economical split of costs and split of risk,” says Nielsen. Such public/private collaborations were ushered in by new legislation introduced in the late 1990s, which lowered many of the bureaucratic and financial barriers that had isolated centres such as Risø from partnering firms such as DLF-Trifolium. At Risø the changes have been sweeping, transforming an institution originally set up to study nuclear energy into a multidisciplinary organisation exploring wind energy, systems analysis and materials, as well as botanical work like Nielsen’s.

Yet the example set by Risø remains largely exceptional within the Danish research community, which laments Denmark’s relatively sparse investment in R&D compared with Sweden’s. Only 2.4 per cent of the GNP is invested in this way, and more than 70 per cent of that is private money. Moreover, in spite of high levels of education and an enviable standard of living, some 35 per cent of graduates leave the country, and a third of them have failed to return after five years.

Those figures come courtesy of Erik Sørensen, CEO of the multinational food manufacturer Chr. Hansen, who also chaired a committee examining Denmark’s education and research policy. This summer Denmark’s prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, got an earful of Sørensen’s concerns while touring the company’s Copenhagen headquarters. “If we do not start making the necessary corrections, we are going to lose the battle,” Sørensen told the PM. “Danish and European companies have traditionally been leaders in high-tech and biotechnology, but things are about to change.”

Such calls for corrections are even more strident in Norway, where the latest report from the Norwegian Institute for Studies in Research and Higher Education observes a drop in the country’s overall R&D investment from 1.65 per cent of GNP in 1999 to 1.60 per cent in 2001. Part of this decline, according to University of Oslo neurobiologist Ole Petter Ottersen, is fuelled by the fact that Norwegians tend not to regard research as a way of fostering economic growth – the prevailing mantra in most other developed nations. “We have been too lucky over the years,” he says, noting that the country’s route to prosperity has been eased by abundant natural resources, including timber, aluminium and offshore oil. “There has not been pressure on us to develop high-technology industries.”

Natural advantage

Ottersen heads up his university’s Laboratory of Molecular Neuroscience within the Centre for Molecular Biology and Neuroscience, one of 13 centres of excellence created by the Research Council of Norway in 2002. And he sees real scope for growth in R&D. “We have the possibility of being an extremely strong research nation,” he says, pointing to international surveys that regularly put Norwegians at the top of rankings in education due to the country’s high literacy rate and levels of enrolment at schools and colleges. This fund of intellect, combined with the financial clout Norway derives from its natural resources, should set the stage for dynamic research endeavours.

The 13 centres are one of Norway’s attempts to turn the situation around. They were formed after a 1999 government report spelled out just how anaemic public spending on research had become. Conceived as a network, they are also meant to address another of the R&D challenges faced by Norway: the fragmented nature of its research activities, which are scattered all over the country and often operate independently. “We are an old Viking country, and like the chieftains sitting on every hilltop, we have had the same situation in research,” says Ottersen, bemoaning the lack of communication between individuals and institutions.

The same might be said of many parts of Scandinavia – which is why bodies such as the Nordic Council have started paying closer attention to research. Formed in 1952, the council provides an interparliamentary forum for the region’s five countries (Sweden, Denmark and Norway, plus Finland and Iceland) to discuss matters of common interest. It is now working with the Nordic Medical Research Council and the Nordic Academy for Advanced Study, which provide similar forums for administrators from each country.

These interactions led to the founding of three multinational Nordic Centres of Excellence this year, including one led by Ottersen investigating medical disorders related to water imbalance. For his part, Ottersen sees this new opportunity as yet another sign of the growing cooperation in the region, and in Europe generally. “There are so many attempts to make the different countries pull together,” he says (see New ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´, 27 March, p 50).

Even in Sweden, where R&D efforts would seem to be at fever pitch, Sundberg is no less enthusiastic about the prospects of pooling Scandinavia’s resources in this way. “We look upon the Nordic region as our home base,” he says, adding that people in that region are eager to overturn the stereotype of a high-priced enclave where taxes protect researchers from cheaper global competition. “You get extremely good quality [science] for a reasonable price.” And surely that’s an attractive prospect, no matter who is footing the bill?

To some, the location of this new facility was surprising. Even by Canadian standards, Saskatoon is off the beaten track. But the launch of the new synchrotron epitomises a change of mood in Canadian research, with vastly improved funding and a desire to establish a critical mass of researchers in scientific hubs. But it is no mean feat to forge a strong research identity when there is an economic, scientific, technological and cultural behemoth just south of the border.

The late Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau described the tension between Canada and the US in terms of a mouse trying to sleep next to an elephant. “No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt,” he said in 1969. This sense of a disproportionate relationship with the US continues to haunt the Canadian imagination, not least in science and technology, and Canadian researchers are quick to compare themselves with their overachieving neighbours.

These negative comparisons were warranted in the early 1990s, when financial support for research and development in Canada plummeted. Yet over the past decade, local, provincial and federal government agencies have been spending billions of dollars establishing or sustaining research activities across the country – supporting individuals, public institutions and private firms through an array of funding programmes more elaborate than anything the country has previously seen.

The process that brought a synchrotron to Saskatoon is typical of these new initiatives. The facility will carry out projects ranging from analysis of wood from the 17th-century Swedish battleship Vasa to imaging the ovaries of live bison. Yet this work might not have taken place in Canada at all, given the synchrotron’s price tag of more than CAN$150 million (US$115 million). The money was nearly invested in a US facility, adding a Canadian component to an existing synchrotron – and some critics still think this would have been a more cost-effective option.

Cutler disagrees. “The answer to that is that it won’t build a community,” he says. The synchrotron is more than just a building. It will help develop a world-class scientific network in one of the most sparsely settled parts of North America. And that is just what is happening. When the funding for the synchrotron finally came together four years ago, there were just a handful of researchers in Saskatoon working with synchrotron radiation; today there are more than 65.

This migration contrasts sharply with what was taking place in Canada more than a decade ago, when money for research was scarce. ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´s who wanted to work in the country’s vast Arctic reaches were forced to hitch along with European or US expeditions. The federal government mothballed its deep-sea submersibles, forcing the country’s oceanographers to form an independent company to keep these vehicles operating. As the implications of the cutbacks became more apparent, large numbers of disillusioned scientists, engineers and medical experts headed south to the US.

Crossing the border is often viewed by ambitious Canadians as a necessary step to staying at the cutting edge of their professions. But by the 1990s, the hazards of Canada’s cosy relationship with its neighbour were becoming apparent. Canadian universities were having trouble recruiting and retaining faculty members, and young researchers were finding their careers stalled almost before they started. Canada was in danger of losing an entire generation of researchers.

Faced with the possibility that there might be fewer and fewer Canadians qualified to take part in any kind of domestic knowledge-based economy, the federal government began to take action. By the late 1990s, as complaints from the academic community were reaching a crescendo, surplus budget dollars started to find their way into a series of sweeping initiatives intended to put Canadian science and technology on an entirely new footing.

Fresh money began to find its way into a programme of national Networks of Centres of Excellence that had begun in the late 1980s. The aim of these networks was to break down the distance separating researchers in different locations working on the same research topics. Today there are 22 of these networks, working on problems such as arthritis, genetic diseases, stem cells and the future of the car.

In addition, two new initiatives were set up: the Canada Research Chairs (CRC) and the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI). Together they have attracted investment of some CAN$4 billion in a diverse collection of projects and people, ushering in an optimism among researchers that had been absent for too long.

The CFI set that tone in 1997, when it was created as an independent, not-for-profit corporation with CAN$1 billion to distribute among scientists, engineers and medical researchers across the country. The money could only be used for capital purchases, rather than salaries or operating grants. Funds were also targeted at young researchers, helping to launch their careers by upgrading their laboratories with state-of-the-art equipment.

Funds from the CFI had to be matched by other agencies, so universities began to join forces with provincial governments, which set up their own funding streams to augment the CFI grant. Private foundations and companies with an interest in the research joined in too.

It was this strategy that enabled the University of Saskatchewan to mount the winning bid for the synchrotron. Canadian Light Source, the university-owned firm that operates the facility, secured funding from external partners, including the city of Saskatoon, the provincial hydroelectric utility and pharmaceutical firms such as Boehringer Ingelheim and GlaxoSmithKline, as well as the CFI.

Other CFI-funded enterprises have benefited from the formation of these kinds of alliances. The most impressive collaboration is the one responsible for the Canadian National Site Licensing Project, which brings together 64 of the country’s research universities to purchase electronic subscriptions to scholarly journals as a single block. With CAN$50 million of CFI money to use as leverage, these institutions have been able to drive some hard bargains with academic publishers.

Politicians seemed even more enamoured with the CFI than the research community. Although the CFI was due to be wound up after its initial CAN$1 billion was spent, it has repeatedly seen fresh infusions of capital and extensions to its mandate, which now runs until 2010.

In 2000 the federal government unveiled a new initiative: the Canada Research Chairs. In contrast to the CFI’s emphasis on infrastructure, the CRC was set up to create 2000 research posts, each tailored to an individual’s expertise. One of the priorities of this programme was to lure Canadians back from the US, as well as bringing in fresh blood. About a quarter of the chairs funded so far have gone to people from beyond Canada’s borders, and about half of those are returning Canadians.

Saskatoon has benefited directly from this double lift provided by CFI and CRC, pulling in among others a married couple, Ingrid Pickering and Graham George, whose research careers were well established at the famous Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory in California. They were enticed by separate CRC offers to move to Saskatoon last year.

The ability to attract and retain people in this way is new to the Canadian research landscape. For Arthur Carty, national science advisor to the prime minister, this change vindicates years of hard work and expenditure. “We haven’t completely reversed what you might have described as the brain drain,” he says, “but certainly Canadian institutions are really competitive now and there are some examples of outstanding people who have come to Canada in preference of going to the US.”

The establishment of Carty’s own post testifies to this change – it has been some 30 years since a Canadian leader has had such a science adviser. Carty took up the post in April, just as he was winding up his second five-year term as president of the National Research Council. The NRC, which was founded during the first world war, shares some of the credit for the turnaround in Canadian research fortunes. With headquarters in the national capital, Ottawa, the organisation has some 20 regional institutes and programmes located across the country, each focusing on an area of local strength.

On the Atlantic coast in St John’s, Newfoundland, for example, the NRC’s Institute for Ocean Technology explores subjects such as underwater vehicles and wave-current interaction. Thousands of kilometres to the west on the Pacific coast, the NRC Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Victoria, British Columbia, operates all the Canadian government’s observatories.

Although NRC’s operations suffered from much of the same attrition that afflicted the country’s universities during the 1990s, the advent of the CFI and CRC offered these institutes a means of recovery. As had happened in Saskatoon, local authorities were persuaded that it was a good idea to have a research facility in their backyard and that it was worth paying for the privilege.

“There has been this recognition that community innovation is important, and communities can drive their futures,” Carty says. “Right across the country you’re seeing clusters growing and expanding as communities come together and realise this can help drive economic growth.”

A striking example of such growth can be found in the country’s second largest city, Montreal, which boasts one of the world’s biggest and most dynamic biotechnology communities. The strength of this sector owes much to the founding of NRC’s Biotechnology Research Institute in 1987, which now employs more than 800 people. The Quebec government has nurtured this and other parts of the province’s research economy, guided by a science council set up more than 20 years ago.

The growth of biotechnology companies in Quebec and other parts of Canada, has continued apace. The number of such firms in the country grew from 282 in 1997 to 417 in 2003, and employment has risen to around 8000. But like most countries, Canada’s biotech industry has been hit by the recent economic downturn. In 2003, Canadian biotechnology firms raised less than half of the capital they had raised two years earlier, and the market’s valuation of these firms dropped by nearly a third. Many are looking for new funding streams. For instance, Montreal-based SignalGene, which uses mathematical algorithms to speed up the search for new drugs, sold nearly half its shares to investors in petroleum-rich Alberta, who had an eye to using SignalGene systems to boost the output of oil and gas fields.

The provincial government of Alberta has aggressively promoted research and development for decades. Since the late 1970s, Alberta has collected billions of dollars in royalties on oil sales and steered them toward economic diversification. These investments have produced a major concentration of medical research in Alberta’s two main universities: Alberta and Calgary. Now the province has its sights on a new area: nanotechnology. With the establishment of NRC’s National Institute for Nanotechnology in Edmonton in 2001 – a five-year, CAN$120 million venture – the process of recruiting nanotech experts from around the world is under way. “The key to it all is getting good people in place,” says Bill McBlain of the University of Alberta, where the institute is based.

That same philosophy characterises the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIAR), a “university without walls” dedicated to ensuring that Canada will continue to have more than its share of the best and brightest. The brainchild of a scholar of medieval studies at the University of Toronto, CIAR was established in 1982 with funds of some CAN$250,000 and offices in a small apartment. Although the institute still has little in the way of physical overheads, it now has an annual budget of more than CAN$11 million.

Most of that money goes towards purchasing a unique form of intellectual freedom for some 200 academics across the country. These CIAR members enjoy the rare privilege of having their time and energy literally purchased from the universities that employ them. Freed from teaching and administrative duties, yet secure in their positions, they can dig deeper into research questions.

Almost half of the members CIAR come from outside Canada, although many of them are expatriate Canadians. And when these researchers receive counter-offers from south of the border, CIAR administrators move quickly to find out what it will take to keep each individual in Canada. The answer usually has less to do with money than it does with time, and if CIAR can continue to assure its members the freedom to continue working at the cutting edge, most reject even the most lucrative proposal from a US institution.

This unabashedly elitist approach diverges from a well-entrenched Canadian philosophy of levelling the playing field for all. The country’s three federal granting agencies – the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council – have traditionally avoided dishing out large chunks of their funds to individual projects.

But buoyed by larger budgets, the granting councils have been broadening their funding strategies. Several years ago, for example, NSERC established an annual CAN$1 million prize for an outstanding scholar. The million-dollar prizes signal a new willingness to recognise excellence and to back it up with tangible resources – an outlook that is a feature of academic life in the US. But Canadian policy-makers are keen not to lose sight of qualities that distinguish the country from the US.

“Some of our excellence comes from being Canadian, from the way in which institutional life in Canada proceeds, a live-and-let-live consciousness, and an openness to people from all over the world,” says CIAR president Chaviva Hosek. “The CIAR is a very interesting social innovation which has ended up, in that wonderful way that some Canadian institutions have, delivering more than it was meant to deliver.”

Carty can now point to exactly how much Canadian science and technology is delivering. An article in Nature in July by his British counterpart, David King, comparing the research output of more than 30 countries, showed that Canada produces a large number of highly cited research papers in relation to the amount of money it spends. “We get very good value for our money invested, one of the highest in the world in terms of value per dollar,” Carty says.

Hosek is not surprised by this finding. It confirms her hunch that when it comes to science Canada, gets more than it pays for – a fact that is easily overshadowed by the sheer size of the research enterprise across the border. “The US spends a fortune and gets great stuff, but it’s pretty much commensurate with the size of the fortune they spend,” Hosek says. “We have a long-standing record of greater impact for our research, in many fields, than the Americans.”

Successful research communities built in Canada turn out to have many virtues money cannot buy. Just ask Jeff Cutler, who knows Canadians in Saskatoon do not underestimate the capacity of their growing body of local scientists. He is bracing himself for large crowds at the opening of the synchrotron. Back in 2000, when the facility’s site was little more than a muddy field, 4000 local people showed up on a Sunday afternoon to find out about the project. He wonders how many more will show up at the completed site. “We’re a tourist stop in Saskatoon,” he says, adding that even his son’s soccer team has been named Synchrotron. “Because they were full of energy and ran around in circles.”