By Howard Schneider
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, March 8 1998; Page A27

After taking over Canada's only private medical research institute five years ago, Mark Poznansky started hunting for eager Canadian scientists to expand his staff.

Fortunately, he found them.

Unfortunately, they were already working in the United States, and it took a hard sell and some aggressive fund-raising to lure them back from Harvard, Stanford, the National Cancer Institute and other American institutions.

Although Poznansky counts that "repatriation" of Canadian researchers among his chief successes – more than half of the 17 scientists he hired in the last five years were Canadian nationals brought back from the United States – his experience has been more the exception than the rule here in recent years. With Canadian research budgets dwindling, the lucrative grants, lower taxes and apparently stronger national commitment to scientific research that exist south of the border have become irresistible lures for many researchers who grew up and were trained in Canada.

For every scientist retained or attracted back to Canada, Poznansky said, many more leave, sometimes taking years of expertise with them. The result, he and others have warned with increasing urgency, is a brain drain that will make it harder for Canada to expand an economy still rooted in the country's natural resource wealth.

With research budgets increasing in the United States and parts of Europe, "long term . . . Canada will become a wasteland in terms of discovery and therefore of wealth and job creation," said Poznansky, president of the John P. Robarts Research Institute in London, Ontario. "The discovery platform – the young people – are going to leave."

Despite its relatively small size, Canada has built a successful scientific and research community. Canadian researchers discovered insulin at the University of Toronto in the 1920s, developed a unique technology for generating nuclear power and built the robotic arm being used on the American space shuttle.

But, as in many other fields, it is a community that has grown up in the shadow of the United States and sometimes sought validation from it.

Just as Canadian actress Mary Pickford migrated south and became one of Hollywood's first bona fide stars, many of this country's most talented performers, artists, scientists and entrepreneurs feel their careers are incomplete unless they succeed in the United States.

The concern now, however, is not over the loss of a singer or comedian, but of the type of technological prowess that makes countries competitive in the global marketplace.

Four decades ago, the government's decision to abandon development of the Avro Arrow military plane, a jet considered a generation ahead of its time, is thought to have crippled a budding Canadian aerospace industry and perhaps cost the country thousands of potential jobs.

In the early 1980s and 1990s, Poznansky said, Canadian scientists were becoming noted for genetic research on cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy, but looked to the United States for the money and support to exploit their discoveries.

Vancouver researcher Michael Smith, for example, won a Nobel Prize for his work on methods for altering genes but was lured to Seattle to establish a company to develop the technology.

More recently, government officials, in their assault on the federal deficit, cut the budget of every agency, including the country's three main research councils. The reductions amounted to as much as 25 percent. At a time when the National Institutes of Health and other U.S. institutions received funding increases and promises of more to come, grants in Canada were becoming scarcer and smaller, and research facilities were being closed.

At Chalk River, Ontario, where Canadian scientists contributed to the development of atomic bomb technology during World War II, recent cuts forced Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. to shut down its particle accelerator. Most of the approximately 20 scientists who worked at the facility left for jobs in the United States, said Larry Shewchuk, a company spokesman.

Although the accelerator was considered a valuable tool for the firm's physicists, Shewchuk said the agency considered it a luxury that did not relate to the main business of studying how to generate nuclear power more safely. There are no other institutions or universities in the country that could afford to run it, he said.

The scientists "were offered jobs immediately, on the spot," by such places as the University of Chicago, Shewchuk said. "The consensus of everyone is that it was really great science, but we simply could not afford it."

There are some bright spots, including the country's most recent federal budget. Beset by a lobbying campaign organized by Canadian research groups – one that included the resumes of scientists who have left the country for the United States and even a copy of a U.S. government check sent to support a Canadian researcher – Canadian federal officials agreed to restore funding for the three research councils to their 1994 level.

Industry Minister John Manley said the Liberal Party government realized Canada needed to better support basic research or risk losing its technological capacity to the United States.

"This had the potential to become a much bigger problem," Manley said. "If we had continued to allow the research funding to continue to decline . . . it would have been significant."

Whether the trend can be reversed is another issue. Even restoring funding to the 1994 level – about $600 million for the three main research councils – leaves Canada far behind the United States in per capita spending on some areas of research. In a presentation to Health Minister Allan Rock, Poznansky estimated that the U.S. government spends about $66 per capita on health and medical research, while Canada spends only about $8.

That reality is in part why biologist Alexandra Joyner is working in Manhattan. A Toronto native, Joyner said her career followed an arc common in Canada. She completed her doctoral work at the University of Toronto, did some post-doctoral study in California, spent eight years as a researcher in a Canadian hospital – and realized her opportunities were limited unless she was willing to leave the country again.

She is now director of a program at the Skirball Institute in New York, where she was allowed to recruit her own staff of 10 scientists to pursue biomedical research. She also has received a grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute that has guaranteed her salary and research costs for a decade or more, giving her a degree of latitude in her research that she said would be impossible to find in Canada.

"I hope at some point [Canada] would look attractive" again, Joyner said. She said the situation is particularly frustrating for young researchers who, just as they are starting their careers, must choose between a country where initial research grants are around $35,000 and one – the United States – where they are $130,000 or more.

"If they all leave, then the whole structure of Canadian research is going to fall apart," Joyner said.