If I know anything, it’s that education is the one policy we have to get right

by Jim Meek

It’s the week of May 24, 2010. In the Gulf of Mexico, BP tries to plug the Deepwater Horizon oil spill by pouring mud and concrete into the wound it opened on the ocean floor. In Toronto, a bank issues a report warning that health care may eat up 80% of provincial budgets by 2030. In Washington, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urges the world to stand in unison in its condemnation of North Korea, for its torpedoing of a South Korean warship. A dictator’s whim in Pyongyang puts fear into the world and depresses a financial services guru on Wall Street, who tells a reporter he doesn’t know what’s coming next.

If you’re looking for chaos theory, there’s enough to go around.

Here, though, in the place where imagination meets progress, the world looks saner. In this place—let’s call it Sackville, N.B., for the time being—chaos theory works in reverse, and a scientist who starts out investigating how the lowly shrew paralyzes its prey ends up finding a cure for cancer.

First told by CBC News, this is a beautiful story featuring two main characters: a biochemist named Jack Stewart and the northern short-tailed shrew. Probing the mystery of the shrew in the spirit of pure inquiry, Stewart isolated the paralyzing peptide in the creature’s spit. He figured that peptide, coined soricidin, might be effective as a painkiller, so he tested it in a culture of ovarian cancer cells, which died.

At first Stewart was disappointed—he was looking for a painkiller, not a cell killer. But hold it, these were cancer cells. Finding a way to kill them, without harming healthy cells, is the holy grail of medical research. It’s too early to say if Stewart has found a cure, but the Mount Allison University biochemist and founder of BioPospecting NB Inc. is investigating what looks like a promising diagnostic and treatment breakthrough in prostate, breast, and ovarian cancer. And big pharma is beating a path to his front door, while he’s probably out back in his garden, watching a tiny creature perform its small daily miracle. 

Stewart’s story doesn’t take us from the utterly chaotic to the merely random, by the way. For he still lives in a country that has traditionally found a way to support university researchers, even if it they’re scientists working at a small liberal arts institution in a small town in a small province. His success is a gentle rebuke to those “big five” university presidents—already referenced in Progress magazine’s Vol. 16, No. 7 issue—who launched an initiative last summer to capture more research money for their own institutions.

Since then, I have read a slew of research reports on the impact of higher education on economic progress. There is no bad news to report in this area—no torpedoed warships or massive oil spills to be seen. As the knowledge economy becomes increasingly important in North America and traditional manufacturing declines, universities and community colleges produce citizens who make higher wages than high school grads, give more to their communities, and are less likely to waste their spirits or their time on the dole.

A recent study by The Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government entitled A New Paradigm for Economic Development also shows that higher-educational institutions in the U.S. are becoming incubators of economic growth in the “era of the innovation economy.” Maybe I’m telling this story this way because I drink the Kool-Aid. As a consultant, I have done some work of behalf of the champions of post-secondary education. But I do know this, as one certainty in uncertain times: Education is the one policy we have to get right. 

If we accomplish this, students in Grade 4 today will build a better future. They will design a better blowout preventer for offshore rigs, populate Ottawa’s diplomatic corps with brilliant emissaries who can help future secretaries of state keep the world safe, and generate enough wealth to keep even Canada’s health care system solvent. In the magic kingdom where imagination meets progress, that’s what the future looks like. And we can get there from here.  

Jim Meek is a communications consultant and freelance writer based in Halifax. He can be reached at meek@ns.sympatico.ca.