Two years ago, a team of Canadian neuroscientists investigating the roots of Parkinson's disease, attention deficit disorder and other conditions came up with a plan to bullet-proof their research labs from a devastating drop in funding.

Experiment subject Ying Chen points to a screen as researcher Doug Crawford, right, shows graduate student Michael Vesia how to apply a magnetic pulse to safely simulate brain damage in a healthy person. Dr. Crawford is investigating Parkinson’s disease and is desperately seeking funding to keep his team together.

Experiment subject Ying Chen points to a screen as researcher Doug Crawford, right, shows graduate student Michael Vesia how to apply a magnetic pulse to safely simulate brain damage in a healthy person. Dr. Crawford is investigating Parkinson’s disease and is desperately seeking funding to keep his team together.

Thirty scientists at three Ontario universities joined forces with the aim of sharing some of the costs of running expensive brain scanners. As a group, they would also be able collect data faster and more efficiently and combine their diverse areas of expertise to create a team with the potential to rival the best in the world.

The crucial first step in their strategy was applying for a $1-million-a-year team grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. However, they heard last summer that the program would be eliminated, although the formal announcement didn't come until the January budget.

The cuts exacerbated a funding crunch that has left many senior researchers scrambling to find money to continue their experiments and wondering how Canada will keep its top talent - and attract the best young scientists - at a time when the United States is pouring billions into science.

The team grants were axed as part of the $147.9-million in cuts over three years to the CIHR and the two other granting councils that finance research at universities across the country.

It felt like the rug had been yanked out from beneath them, said Doug Crawford of York University in Toronto, who, along with Mel Goodale of the University of Western Ontario in London and Doug Munoz of Queen's University in Kingston, is frantically hunting for the money to keep the team together.

"Instead of reaching for the sky, we are scrambling to stay afloat," Dr. Crawford said.

"I started out as a professor in the mid-nineties and times were tight. Since then, we have always been building and improving and bringing Canada up to a place where it is not just keeping pace, but leading in the world, in our case, of neuroscience research.

"To suddenly see so much of that investment and so much of that work being set back like this really is both frightening and disturbing for us."

The researchers saw the team grants as a way to replace money they had received under an earlier CIHR program that encouraged researchers to work together by awarding them group grants.

Under the old program, which is being phased out, neuroscientists at York and Western shared a group grant of roughly $450,000 a year that runs out in October. Neuroscientists at Queen's had a group grant of $383,000 a year that will end next year.

That money gave individual researchers access to resources beyond what they could afford on their own, says Dr. Goodale, and was key to the kind of multidisciplinary effort that allows Canada to punch above its weight internationally.

There is no guarantee, of course, that the neuroscientists would have received a team grant had the program not been cut; recipients would have been chosen in a peer-reviewed competition. But their track records suggest they would have had a good shot. Without the money, they may have to lay off staff who have years of training and expertise.

"Why is this so important to us? It to a large degree funds our permanent core research staff, the technical support," Dr. Crawford said.

The Conservative government has defended its record on science funding, noting that the budget included $750-million for the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, which helps scientists buy expensive equipment. The budget also included $87.5-million for graduate research scholarships.

But the area they are neglecting, many researchers say, is funding for the basic, curiosity-driven research that history has shown leads to important discoveries. Many worry that in favouring targeted funding, for example research in the automotive sector, the government will starve researchers trying to answer big questions like how the brain works.

Money for basic research comes from the three granting councils - the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council . All three have had to cut their budgets by 5 per cent, which is why the CIHR axed the team grants, saving $34.6-million over three years.

Meanwhile, in the United States, the Obama administration has added $10-billion (U.S.) to finance medical research.

"We are going headfirst into a cement wall. The very best scientists will leave. We will lose the very best ones."