A doctor, researcher and distinguished leader, Henry Friesen has been at the helm of dozens of health organizations -- perhaps none as important as the Medical Research Council

Photo: Kevin Van Paassen
National Post

Henry Friesen has helped convince governments and corporations to invest billions in Canadian medical research throughout his career.

When Henry Friesen was asked to become president of the Medical Research Council of Canada, he turned it down.

"I was quite comfortable and enjoying immensely what I was doing," recalls Friesen, who was at the University of Manitoba at the time. But his friends and advisors urged him to reconsider, and in the end he accepted the appointment and moved to Ottawa in 1991.

Little did they -- or he -- know that the Medical Research Council would be history before he was done with it.

During his nine-year tenure, Friesen dismantled the agency and replaced it with the bigger and richer Canadian Institutes of Health Research. The tenacious doctor also helped extract billions of dollars from federal and industrial coffers for biomedical and genetic research.

All of which has earned Friesen another award to add to his large collection. He was in Toronto last Wednesday to pick up a Wightman Award and $30,000 from the Gairdner Foundation for his "extraordinary achievement as a creative scientist and a distinguished leader."

He puts it a bit differently.

"When I look back, I've been blessed," says Friesen, who points out he has lived and worked in a era of stunning medical advance and opportunity.

When he graduated from the University of Manitoba in 1958, polio and tuberculosis were such scourges there were special hospitals to treat all the infected people. "Thousands of patients were warehoused," he says.

He vividly remembers a young women he met the first week on the job. She arrived at the hospital with laboured breath, a sure sign of polio, and was quickly taken to a hospital for people stricken with the disease.

By 9 p.m. that evening, she was in an iron lung. The next morning she was dead.

"There were dozens of victims like that," says Friesen.

He practised medicine in Winnipeg for two years before heading to Boston to join the quest to find the hormones that orchestrate so many aspects of life.

His scientific skills blossomed -- "I had a wonderful mentor" -- and he spent the next 30 years heading research teams at McGill University and the University of Manitoba.

Friesen's biggest claim to scientific fame was the discovery of prolactin, which stimulates lactation in mammary glands. He and his colleagues also came up with a simple blood test to identify patients with tumours that secrete excessive amounts of prolactin and cause infertility. The test has enabled tens of thousands of people with prolactin-related reproductive disorders to seek treatment and cures.

Research was incredibly rewarding, says Friesen. He relished working with the dozens of graduate students and post-doctoral fellows who passed through his labs.

But he has proved even more talented -- judging by the billions of dollars he has helped to channel into Canadian research labs -- at reshaping the bureaucracy that runs Canadian biomedical research.

His 10-page résumé lists dozens of offices he has held, committees he has chaired, organizations he has headed and research funds he has helped broker. He put in stints as president of the Canadian Society for Clinical Investigation and the National Cancer Institute of Canada before taking the helm at the Medical Research Council, which was the country's premier agency for heath research.

When Friesen arrived, the council was narrowly focused on basic and clinical research.

He figured it could do much more. And within months, he struck a committee that travelled the country -- "with almost military-like precision" -- on a strategic planning exercise. They met with researchers, doctors and health professionals and concluded there were huge gaps that needed to be filled.

One of the most glaring holes was in research on management of the country's multi-billion-dollar health care system.

"Amazingly, there was almost none," says Friesen.

The hospital CEOs and deputy ministers who ran Canada's $70-billion health care system rarely thought of research.

Friesen brought this to the attention of his political masters.

"We began to make the point with increasing vigour, that the government should broaden investment in health services and health care research," he says. "Innovation should drive health care and it has to come from thoroughly done research."

Friesen says, "We're still not there." But he thinks the government has made major strides in the right direction.

With his help.

Friesen was a member of the advisory committee that helped convince Paul Martin, the Minister of Finance, to establish in 1997 the Canada Foundation for Innovation, which is investing $3-billion in refurbishment and modernization of university and hospital scientific infrastructure.

He also pushed for closer ties with industry and the MRC and helped set up partnerships that have seen hundreds of millions of dollars pour into university and hospital research labs from the private sector.

There was -- and is -- debate about the resulting loss of academic independence since medical schools and researchers are now more dependent than ever on corporate money.

But it is not about to slow down. Friesen, who arranged for the MRC to join forces in 1994 with a venture capital company, the Canadian Medical Discoveries Fund, to get money into university labs and ideas flowing out.

He also brokered a lucrative partnership with the pharmaceutical sector, with companies investing more than $500-million in university projects reviewed and approved by the council.

But the transformation of the Medical Research Council into the Canadian Institutes of Health Research stands out as the highlight of his time in Ottawa.

Friesen travelled the country building support for creation of the agency that would look at everything from hospital systems and services to the causes of cancer to the social aspects of what makes people healthy.

"A lot of people don't like change," says Friesen. He does. And he could see big benefits in having 13 new institutes under one big umbrella.

"We had a choice," he says. "We could imagine the incremental increases in funding [for the existing MRC] at best, or alternatively risk everything, put the whole institute on the line and say we can do a lot better."

He would often end his pep talks quoting the prayer of Sir Francis Drake: "Disturb us, Lord, if we dream too little, if we sail too close to the shore and arrive safely never having ventured forth."

"I didn't say poor old Sir Francis lost two of his three boats, and we could suffer the same fate," he chuckled in an interview last week.

The institutes, with its budget of $447-million a year, were created last June.

Friesen and his wife packed up and headed back to Winnipeg, where he is now senior fellow at the Centre of Advancement of Medicine at the University of Manitoba.

He talks about easing his way into retirement. But there is little sign of it yet.

Friesen is chairman of Genome Canada and has championed a national gene research program, convincing the government to cough up $300-million to finance genome centres and research across Canada.

A loyal public servant to the core, Friesen has nothing but praise for Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and Allan Rock, the Minister of Health, who backed his multi-million-dollar ideas, at times over the objections of top bureaucrats in Ottawa who thought Friesen was thinking too big.

"Maybe 25 years from now, people looking back will say it was a watershed period for Canadian sciences," says Friesen. "The government of Canada began to invest and understood this was the key to the future."