Sir

Your upbeat News (Nature 409, 549; 2001) report of funds being poured into health research via the newly created Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR) requires comment. Although it is true that the CIHR budget from April 1999 to March 2002 will be effectively twice that of the former Medical Research Council of Canada, Canada's expenditure on biomedical research remains paltry.

This year's CIHR budget of some Can$477 million (US$310 million) pales in comparison with the current budget of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) at US$20.3 billion. The population of Canada is one-tenth that of the United States, so the CIHR budget would have to be increased to about Can $3.1 billion — US$2 billion — to be comparable in per capita terms to that of the NIH. Because the NIH budget itself is on target to double over a five-year period, the United States will continue to outspend Canada by at least a 6:1 margin in the near future.

Although the creation of the CIHR and the doubling of biomedical research spending are very welcome developments, the truth is that operating-grant funding levels in Canada have improved from abysmal to simply inadequate. For example, only 54% of renewal grant applications and 25% of new grant applications were approved in the last CIHR competition, even though several decades of inadequate support had left only the best and brightest scientists competing for funds.

Moreover, the budgets of the 400 applications funded were reduced by an average of 12.8% from the minimum budgets recommended by the grant committees. The average size of a research grant was about Can$92,000.

Until and unless the Canadian federal government makes several more doublings in the health-research budget, the statement by CIHR president Alan Bernstein — that Canada will be the place for health research in the twenty-first century — will continue to ring hollow.