Astronaut Bondar to advise health minister (01/11/98)

Astronaut Bondar to advise health minister

by Christopher Guly

OTTAWA - Canada's first female astronaut, Roberta Bondar, who claims Ukrainian heritage in part, was named to head a board of 20 prominent scientists on November 20, 1997, that will advise Health Minister Allan Rock on food, drug and animal-based research.

Dr. Bondar, 51, holds degrees in zoology, agriculture, experimental pathology, medicine and neurobiology. Five years ago, she made Canadian history when she became the country's first and only woman in space when she flew a six-day mission on the U.S. space shuttle Discovery. Dr. Bondar has taught at Toronto-based Ryerson Polytechnic University and the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, where she is now based and is involved in research on cranial blood flow.

Her new duties with the federal government, which will be conducted on a full-time basis, call for her and her yet-to-be-named colleagues to keep an eye on a federal department that has been recently plagued by budgetary cuts and criticism from some quarters as a result.

This fall, Mr. Rock, Canada's former attorney general, announced a six-month moratorium on cuts at Health Canada's health protection branch following a groundswell of protest over plans to decimate the department's food-research labs. For now, they remain active, along with projects in nutrition, food additives and food toxins, which have also been spared.

Around the same time, the Health minister promised to establish a panel of experts that would examine the future of the branch and the role of the labs. Now, it's up to Dr. Bondar and her fellow panel members (both Canadians and foreigners) to keep Mr. Rock a step ahead of similar potboilers over funding and government policy.

One of the first issues will be the future of a 788-member monkey breeding colony. In June, Health Canada commissioned the Royal Society of Canada to devise a plan on what to do with the department's simian residents used for research. Faced with an annual $900,000 bill to maintain the monkey colony, the federal government considered sending the primates to their heavenly reward.

No way, said a six-member, panel of experts from the Royal Society of Canada. While Health Canada should quit the monkey-breeding business, the panel advised Mr. Rock's department to reduce the number of those used for research by half and place the rest in a permanent sanctuary.