Podcast: Sensitive Research

Episode 1: An interview with Dr. Martha Crago

Introduction:

Host: Welcome to the Public Health Agency of Canada's Centre for Biosecurity podcast, where we will dive into all things biosafety and biosecurity. My name is Linda Rheaume and I'm a manager here at the Centre for Biosecurity.

I'm excited to introduce a new podcast series on sensitive research. The first episode in the series is based on an assessment from the Council of Canadian Academies, or the CCA, that was commissioned by PHAC and Defence Research and Development Canada to support Canada's open science commitments and research security obligations. The assessment resulted in a report titled Balancing Research Security and Open Science, which was published in October 2025.

As you may know, the Center for Biosecurity delivers a national compliance and enforcement program under the Human Pathogens and Toxins Act and the Human Pathogens and Toxins Regulations, and under certain provisions of the Health of Animals Act and its associated regulations. This compliance and enforcement framework helps to ensure that stakeholders working with human pathogens, terrestrial animal pathogens, and microbial toxins do so safely and securely.

Joining us for this first episode is Dr. Martha Crago. Over a 40-year period, Dr. Crago has served as a member of many university research boards and on international, national, and provincial committees. She has also had a very productive career as a researcher and professor, most recently serving as Vice President of Research and Innovation at McGill University. Appointed by the CCA as the Chair of the expert panel on Sensitive Research of Concern, Dr. Crago is here to talk to us about some of the report's findings.

We will focus today on pathogen and toxin research, the expert panel's process for producing their report, the balance between openness and risk management in research life cycle, and a new term coined by the expert panel called the modern research mindset. Join me in kickstarting our new series and welcome Dr. Crago and thank you for being here today.

This report was a significant undertaking, and I understand that the CCA convened a panel of 13 highly experienced individuals who met over the course of about a year. Can you tell us about the report, the process you underwent to produce it, and some of the topics that it covers?

Dr. Crago: Yes and thank you for having me.

Well, as you mentioned, this is a panel that met over approximately 11 months, so close to a year, to work with the CCA research team to produce a final report. And this gave me an enormous privilege of working with the fellow panel members who were experts in the following areas: both national and research security, post-secondary research ecosystem, research infrastructure, epidemiology and pathogen research, ocean research, biosafety and bioethics, as well as experience in implementing research security policies. So, it was a wonderful group.

The CCA's role in answering the charge from PHAC and DRDC was to convene the expert panel, to support the panel in their deliberations through research and writing, and to publish the report in both English and French, and then to support its dissemination and release.

Now, this report explores measures to identify sensitive research. Risk factors that also help to determine when it is sensitive and when it is sensitive of concern, being two different kinds of concepts, and how to safeguard this kind of research, particularly the sensitive research of concern. And it looks to safeguard it across three phases of the research process: the research design phase, before it's even begun to be put into operation; the active research phase; and the post research phase.

It also discusses enabling factors that support the implementing of research security measures in open science, including how to build capacity, how to share knowledge, and how to enforce compliance.

A key concept that was emphasized by the panel in the report, and I've always been very proud that we invented this phrase, was the modern research mindset. And this is a concept in which participants in research protect and preserve the research ecosystem by understanding everything from the global context of their work, the ethical privacy and security dimensions of their work, and prioritize research integrity throughout a project's life cycle, as I said, and reassess their own research sensitivity as it evolves because it may change over time.

Host: Thank you so much, Doctor Crago. All these topics I'm excited, really excited to dive into. And as soon as I read the report, I knew that the modern research mindset was a term that was going to be really relevant to our stakeholders, and it's really eye-catching. Can you elaborate more on what the modern research mindset could mean in practice for researchers and their institutions?

Dr. Crago: Ultimately it means an awareness of the context in which the research is happening and a willingness to educate oneself on how best to conduct research responsibly and with integrity and safely. In practice, the report talks about ways in which individuals and institutions can cultivate this awareness through collaboration and capacity building.

It also refers to the resources developed by both Public Safety Canada and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, or what we often refer to as CSIS. Academic institutions have resources and roles to play and international jurisdictions that guide researchers on balancing research security and open science. They don't function alone. They are integrated.

Host: And why do you think this mindset is essential now, if we compare it to a decade ago?

Dr. Crago: Well, I think most of us are aware that the current geopolitical context and its realities that include global participation, non-state actors, emerging security threats, and a drive toward more inclusive research, particularly with Indigenous communities in Canada, and a need for openness to foster scientific progress and innovation. These things all are related to each other and intermingled.

Host: And these are big issues, very relevant ones to our research landscape, particularly our stakeholders involved in research with human pathogens and toxins.

Risk & Global Context

Host: And we often hear in the Centre for Biosecurity that the average Canadian researcher is working to advance innovation for beneficial purposes and doesn't feel equipped to assess some of these bigger, broader, evolving global issues like foreign interference or the rapidly advancing technological space as examples. They often consider these issues to be outside of their realm of expertise.

How do these evolving global risks shape the modern research mindset for the average Canadian researcher? And does the research landscape change based on sector and geopolitics?

Dr. Crago: Well, both shifts in global geopolitics and the rapid technological advances are really drivers now that require researchers to be continually aware of how their work may be misused or exploited. And I think this goes across almost every scientific and scholarly sector I can think of. Though we emphasize in the report that it's not the responsibility of solely the researcher, the modern research mindset applies to everybody that's involved in the research, including the institutions and the governments. Researchers generally don't have the capacity or the training to engage with these issues alone, by themselves, and require support and external expertise to help them navigate this process, and that includes educational opportunities made available to them.

So, in the report, we stress the need for continuous reassessment of risks and adaptive safeguards throughout the research lifecycle. And it really means keeping aware during the whole process of something you may have planned at one point in time, but it now has some different ramifications as it proceeds to the conclusion of that research. But this can be accomplished in different ways, depending on the sector that's carrying out the work, academia versus private R&D. There isn't one size that fits all of the solutions.

But within the concept of modern research mindset, the panel underscores the need of all actors in the research ecosystem to build competencies beyond their subject matter expertise or silo. These areas include now really data stewardship, data management, geopolitically informed decision making, risk assessment for international partnerships, ethics.

All of these become important for a holistic view that shapes the stewardship of sensitive research. And these have to become the concerns of everybody, even people who are not familiar with thinking about geopolitics. So, this holistic view, it extends beyond the researchers such that these competencies are also key for decision makers and policy makers in institutions and governments. And that will include PHAC and its role that it plays as a government agency.

Practical & Forward-Looking

Host: Do you think there's a way for researchers and regulators to assess whether the modern research mindset is being adopted?

Dr. Crago: Well, this is a little complicated because one of the gaps that our panel identified as a challenge is in the monitoring and evaluating of existing programs. You can't exactly read research about research security programs right now. You can read about research security programs. You can read how they're done and what's involved in them, but there's not actually research on how well are they making the changes necessary to arrive at a modern mindset.

So, to secure, just to give you an example, to secure federal research funding, university researchers have to meet several requirements, both for open science and for research security. These includes things that are described in the policy and sensitive technology research and affiliations of concern, the tri-agency research data management policy. These things have all come into place in the fairly recent past.

And once people's funding is received, they have very little publicly available information on the completion of these various stipulations as was sent out in the applications. So not only do we not know exactly what works and what doesn't, beyond your first application, it's not clear always to researchers how they are supposed to be proceeding. And so, there's a lack of evaluation on the effectiveness of the measures, but also a lack of materials to help support people throughout a lifecycle of their research.

So, the first step in determining where the researchers and institutions are in the adoption of the modern mindset would be to better understand the uptake and follow through of existing programs and creating before people start to create new ones and make changes. So, the existing ones were put in place by looking at probably mostly what other countries were doing although I'm not sure how wide scale a look that it was by the policymakers. But also, taking what they thought were the better aspects of them and crafting them into the Canadian way of doing research and getting research funding. But we aren't clear if this is having the effect it's supposed to have.

Host: All great points and still some challenges ahead. Thank you for that.

Indigenous Rights & Data Sovereignty

Host: I want to shift a little bit to another important topic covered by the report on Indigenous rights. The report highlights the importance of considering Indigenous rights and data sovereignty and policies for safeguarding sensitive research. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was codified into our federal law in 2021. And as the government of Canada works towards reconciliation, so should research institutions that operate on Canadian traditional lands.

I'd love to hear more about the panel's findings related to Indigenous research. Namely, if you could talk about some of the risks that we run when Indigenous perspectives are not considered in research security policies and activities.

Dr. Crago: This part of the report became very important because we realized it applied both to PHAC and to DRDC, defense type research, and things that would be taking place in areas that were pertinent to Indigenous people in various parts of the country, basically.

Well, by centering Indigenous rights and governance and knowledge in the midst of research security practices, it means that systems become more culturally responsive, more ethically sound, and robust, ensuring also that the policies are applicable, inclusive, and trustworthy. Because without these perspectives, the legality and the effectiveness of research security frameworks would clearly be undermined. So first and foremost, in this context, you have to understand that Indigenous people have sovereign rights to their own data. They loan it to the researchers. They don't give it.

Many Indigenous organisations are really at the forefront of research security considerations from the perspective of this Indigenous data sovereignty issue. And they include such things as the First Nations Information Governance Centre, which develops very interesting training programs for researchers and has a lot of very interesting research workshops that are underway, and there's a lot of recent focus on genomic research, which is important to PHAC, clearly.

The other one is the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, which is ITK. So, Indigenous rights are protected by their own groups and their own organizations, but also, we have a very specific responsibility in Canada and a legal obligation under the United Nations documents that Canada signed on to. So, ignoring the rights of Indigenous people and their lands really risks violating our Canadian obligations to what we agreed to in the United Nations Declaration and the rights of Indigenous people.

Conclusion

Host: The report goes into so much more detail about Indigenous research and taking Indigenous perspectives into consideration for research security policies. And there's so much more in this report than we're able to cover today. What is your pitch to listeners on why they should read this report?

Dr. Crago: Well, I think if I think of it that way, I think people have to realize this is becoming more and more relevant for researchers, policymakers, and the general public. But for researchers in particular, policy has come into place already that many are not going to be aware of.

Our institutions, like universities, need to make the education about these policies very, very clear to the researchers and the students who are becoming researchers. And so, it's going to become very important that we have educational opportunities for people in universities, both the professors and the students, to learn about. And really the general public as well.

But if you don't have the time to read the full report - these are fairly lengthy, they have a lot of references in them - on the website are also some good products such as a one-pager of the findings, a quick reference guide for researchers that kind of distill down some of the key concepts that are looked at in the report, and the executive summary at the start of the report is also a great place to start reading about the topic.

Host: Dr. Crago, thank you so much for being here and for all your excellent work on this project. We really appreciate it.

Dr. Crago: Well, it was a pleasure and we appreciate your interest in it.