I took in two award shows last week, one at Koerner Hall and the other at the ROM next door.
The recipients weren’t powerlifters or Miss Universes or young pianists…or even drug-enhanced Olympians. They were medical scientists.
Offering big prizes for medical breakthroughs used to be rare. Now, there are many dozens of them worldwide, offering hundreds of millions in prizes. They’re driven by the mantra of discovery: “If you think research is expensive, try disease.”
The two shows I took in last week are proudly Canadian – and global.
The first was The Gairdner Awards which gives $250,000 to each of six international scientists and two $50,000 prizes to mid-career Canadian scientists for their discoveries in‘curiosity-driven’ research. The Gairdner selection committee is so expert that one in four Gairdner awardees goes on to win the Nobel Prize.
In the past two years, AI researchers started to win big because AI lets you reduce the time to collect and connect vast piles of information from months to minutes. This year, none of the winners was “AI”. But one of them was something The Gairdners had never chosen before: a nurse practitioner, Jennifer Stinson from Sick Kids, who won a Gairdner mid-career Award and $50,000 for her work in relieving chronic pain in children.
There’s one big reason Jean and I have gone to the Gairdners for the past 25 years: to hear the winners’ stories. The plotline is generally this: “I was a junior researcher and had an idea that my mentors couldn’t convince me was wrong. I was told I wouldn’t make tenure track. My NIH grant application was denied. My girlfriend left me and my dog died. So I went into the lab on New Year’s Eve and spotted something odd in the Petri dish. And now I’m on the plane to Stockholm.”
Little wonder Katalin Karikó, who won a Gairdner in 2022 and a Nobel the next year for developing mRNA vaccines, said “I’m thankful to the people who tried to make my life miserable…They made me work harder and without them I wouldn’t be here.”
The Gairdners have been happening for 68 years now, which makes them a Pioneer of One.
The second award show is now in its 10th year, and all of its contestants are doctors from a single hospital: St. Michael’s in downtown Toronto. Yet their Foundation packed 1,000 people into Koerner Hall for Angels Den, a bake-off modelled on the 20-season Dragons’ Den where St. Mike’s’ researchers compete for prizes from $50,000 to $200,000. Each team of 3 pitches their idea to 3 expert judges on stage and other judges in the audience. Not only are there truly transformational prizes that will jet fuel their startups (even the ‘losers’ win $50,000), St. Mike’s Foundation raised $2 million (compared to $1.5 million last year) for other medical research from Angels Den sponsors and attendees.
Again, like the Gairdner Awardees, while AI was peppered through nearly all the contestants’ pitches, the big winner was old-fashioned, very simple and hiding in plain sight: a plumbing fix for dialysis.
This was our first year at Angels Den, and I’ve never seen such a fast-paced, well-produced fundraising event. We’ve all been to some pretty dreary ones, and this is the opposite, where a depression scientist or a geriatrician can become a rock star overnight. They deserve it, to make medical research not just life-saving, but even harder, to make it popular.
So here’s to the Gairdners and Angels Den. Canada needs more first-stage rockets like them.
Meanwhile…
1. This just in! The Financial Times reported this week that women use exclamation marks more than men. Indeed, they use them nearly three times as much. Said the FT: “…women do this because they worry they will seem too cold and unfriendly if they don’t…[They] then spend even more time worrying about whether this makes them seem incompetent or inferior. The paper says this is because women are more sensitive to “…potential downstream impression formation implications of using exclamation points.” Maybe we should send the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology a subscription to Grammarly.
Speaking of academic publishing, Cambridge University Press, which opened for business in 1534, this week proposed radical change to academic publishing.
Speaking of bad writing, I joined all three mainstream political parties so I can get their fundraising pitches. The Liberals and NDP don’t talk down to their supporters, but the Conservatives assume their members’ comprehension level is barely above “See Dick Run.” See why here.
2. Take 2 on “The Letter to You.” Two weeks ago we launched our writing contest. The assignment was to write a letter to your 25-year-old self. No more than 100 words, which is 6 or 7 sentences. Points for originality and that old standby, authenticity. The deadline is tonight, Saturday, November 1, 2025, at 11:59:59 p.m. Eastern Time. Please use this link to submit your entry.
3. We all need to catch up…first to China, which is sprinting ahead. Then to AI whereThe Hinton Lectures can teach us a lot, quickly and at low cost. Then to what Canada’s airports need more of, quickly and at low cost. Then, what if we treated promising young mathematicians like athletes? It’s hard to catch up with China if we don’t. Speaking of China, PBS just launched a documentary series on Henry Kissinger. As his biographerNiall Ferguson notes: “We’ve had to recognize, it’s Henry Kissinger’s world.”
4. Where will you be on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month?Hopefully, not just remembering our fallen soldiers, but taking part in remembering them. There are lots of public events in Toronto on November 11th.
The day before, on November 10th, you can attend an Empire Club Luncheon (or watch it online) about how 40,000 teenage girls (The Farmerettes) supported the War effort in the 1940s and…yes, changed Canada forever.
5. The right to be forgotten. It’s the idea that we can demand certain online information about us be deleted or not made public. There are laws enforcing this right in Europe and elsewhere. In Canada…we’re inching there.
But what if you’re an ‘uncontacted’ Indigenous tribe living in the Amazon jungle? Do you have a different kind of right to be forgotten? British charity Survival International reportsthat it is seeing “surging numbers of…influencers entering territories and deliberately seeking interaction” with these tribes.
6. AI makes you nuts, but fat makes you worse. Scott Galloway connects ideas that miss most of us, including why obesity is a more lethal threat to our fiscal and mental health than AI.
7. Trump plays Japan; loses. The U.S. president came away with lots of swag, but only one deal, for rare earths. This could be because its new Prime Minister, Sanae Takaichi, is not his kind of woman. Or because Japan is a rules-obsessed nation.
8. Busted myths. First, the world doesn’t dismiss Canada. It rose from 4th to 2nd in the latest global reputation rankings comparing last year to this. Norway is first and the U.S. fell from 30th to 48th. Next, not all university students are snowflakes. Next, Elon Musk isn’t worth paying $1 trillion. Finally, global wealth inequality may be less extreme than we think.
9. Letters of recommendation. Here’s the absolute worst. Plus three letters that are the ABC of old-fashioned code.
10. Can’t dance, but love watching it. Especially Rachel JB Jones. And Hypo-dance. And Kulakova Polina. And of course The National Ballet. Can’t do any of this either. Don’t much love Meghan either, nor her new Holiday Collection.
11. What I’m reading. Andrew Ross Sorkin’s 1929. The story of the infamous stock market crash of 1929 that kick-started The Great Depression. The plot sounds dated these days, how the richest men on earth lied, cheated and stole their way to even more wealth, leaving millions destitute. What makes this history read like a thriller is that Sorkin, who wrote Too Big to Fail and the streaming series Billions, and who edits ‘DealBook’ at the New York Times…really knows how to tell a story.