This past week was fantastic for Toronto biotech. We hosted the 50th Anniversary of the Gairdner Awards [1], the OGI-IDT Synthetic Biology Symposium [2] and Canada’s first Science Policy Conference [3]. These events provided the opportunity to hear some big names do some big thinking… and the opportunity to reduce all those big thoughts to 140-character tweets @crossborderbio [4]. Here are a few items from the Cross-Border Biotech Blog [5] that got in on the fun as well:
- Bruce Alberts, the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Science, served for 12 years as the head of the U.S. National Academy for Science, an independent voice for science in policy decision-making. Dr. Alberts is actually in favour of a voice for science in everything, and he advocates for placing scientists into every career and country [6]. He strongly recommends a National Academies-type science fellowship program [7] for Canada.
- David Baltimore, Phillip Sharp and Corey Goodman have three Gairdner awards and two Nobel prizes among them in addition to truly impressive corporate expertise. They had a wide-ranging discussion about the biotech business model and pharma pipelines [8], and Corey Goodman suggested later that Canada needs to repatriate its expats gained VCs entrepreneurship experience in the U.S.
Also notable this week: the Cross-Border Biotech Blog’s science writer, Richard Chan, was thinking big in the Friday Science Review [9]. It has all the usual coverage of cool Canadian publications, plus Richard has branched out into science reporting, noting a Canada-California research collaboration and an international ranking of the best places to work in academia that includes Dalhousie and the University of Toronto.