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Ask Slashdot: Crowdfunding For Science — Can It Succeed?
jearbear writes "Can crowdfunding work for science? Having raised nearly $40,000 for scientific research in 10 days for projects as diverse as biofuel catalyst design to the study of cellular cilia to deploying seismic sensor networks (that attach to your computer!) to robotic squirrels, the #SciFund Challenge is taking off like a rocket. Might this be a future model for science funding in the U.S. and abroad? What would that mean?"
I would send $100 to NASA right now if I knew it would reach their coffers.
The party's over
With a new roughing vacuum pump over 2k?
A temp controlled stirring hot plate at over 400 and often over a grand?
And we're not even talking about the more complicated experimental apparatus here. How is this more than a tiny tiny impact? This might fund a grad student. Maybe. Small grants rely on the existing infrastructure that groups have. You already have the equipment and the grad student and you allocate half their time to something.
Far too early to be crowing about how it's the next big thing with these funding levels.
(Aside: I work for a chemistry department doing lab equipment and instrument repair. At work, I spend my day finding ways to get equipment for such people for tiny fractions of the above prices. But, that's relying on the gear having been paid for years or decades back and me digging it out of storage, then finding ways to fix it for low cost. Starting up a lab without an existing infrastructure is expensive with a couple exclamation points. Yeah, I find the cost of current scientific gear to be outrageously high, but that's a different discussion.)
You've got to remember, though, that outside the simpler home-use inventions, science is expensive. A single Y chromosome decode costs between $1k-$5k, depending on the quality. Identifying genetic diseases means a full genome scan, at maybe 10x the price, but you can't just examine 1 individual. To be useful, you need hundreds if not thousands of samples, plus an equal number from your control group. So you're looking at $100,000,000 just for the analysis. Most bio labs cut corners, which is why most bio labs can't tell you much that's useful.
($40,000 is, frankly, chump change for anything of significance. It would buy you 4 hours of time in a low-end particle accelerator. It is a fifth of the cost of a decent-grade MALA ground penetrating radar unit. You might be able to buy a stormchaser vehicle with it, minus any scientific equipment to go in it.)
However, if you crowdsourced a million people per project, high-end science may be doable. The problem is convincing a million people to part with their money. Remember, getting donations is merely a voluntary version of taxation and people despise taxation. The fact that it's voluntary is immaterial, it doesn't change the cost of the project, it doesn't change the outcome of the project, it certainly doesn't change the management of the project. All of those matter far more than your goodwill.
Then there's the fact that a lot of these sites that handle such stuff are run by dweebs who are infinitely worse than any government agency when it comes to filing the proper paperwork, micromanaging what projects get listed, etc. Most of these sites are reputedly run by venture capitalists who would prefer it if they could waste your money rather than their own.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Another issue though is that all of humanity benefits from scientific advances. If government funding were to reduce and be replaced by fund raising drives, then (in the simplest case) those who don't contribute would be getting all the benefits (alternatives to fossil fuels, medical advances, etc) but with none of the upfront cost. Of course, we already have some fund raising for breast cancer/prostate cancer/MS/other specific disease but I would imagine this makes up a fairly small portion of their research budgets (and in some cases genuinely represents an investment in their personal future).
The obvious way around this is through a Kickstarter style reward system, where people who contribute get some specific rewards. But what would you offer? You get a share of the profits? (Well, now you're actually a corporation.) You get early access to the treatment? (That's not going to fly politically.) You get your name on the side of the particle accelerator? (That might work.)
Obviously, people are welcome to do whatever they want with their money, but I think government funding of science for the common good is the fairest scenario, and what we should be encouraging.
Physicist, consultant, science communicator
And how do you fund ongoing projects? Many (if not most) worthwhile scientific endeavors take decades. Having funding depending on a crowd's momentary whim doesn't seem like a good long term strategy. This problem already exits in the current funding scheme - long term projects often get dinged when money is scarce but at least there are (imperfect) mechanisms to deal with the problems.
Prioritizing science and technology funding is difficult. Letting the 'crowd' do it makes no sense at all.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
As one of the co-founders of #SciFund, I'm curious, after you slashdotters go and look at the projects at http://scifund.rockethub.com and their videos and rewards, would YOU crowdfund these projects? (and if you would, then by all means, do so!) This is the first time we're trying this on any scale, and so have chosen to start with small projects that, if they don't get funded, won't set back anyone's research program. What we're really curious is if the science literate and science interested people like YOU would go over, see what scientists have up, and say "Yeah, I'll fund that."?
And if you want more background, check the articles our scientists are writing about this process.
Not always. Entire projects in, say, Ecology can be done for the cost of one sequence. Theoretical modeling can require little more than a laptop, pen, and paper. Already, many prototype or preliminary research experiments get done on the shoestring budget at the end of a grant. Big Science does not always mean Big Money. And maybe that's the kind of research crowdfunding is suited for.
Crowsource funding for science will come off at best as well as crowsource funding for the arts, which is pretty much what we've had for the last several decades. The masses will fund what tickles their fancy, or their ego, and the smart researcher will tap into that by pandering. Science will end up with its equivalent of Justin Beeber, Hank Williams, Jr., Gwen Stephanie, and the list goes on.
My colleagues and I came up with a great idea along these lines some years ago (I've been in research since 1980) - one of us would grow a large head of hair and dye it white. He'd be the front man for a Church of Researching God's Creation (I think t that's the name we came up with) which we'd take to the airways to surf for donations. If done right, this could bring in serious money. Of course, we'd all have to look at ourselves in the mirror every now and then, but by the number of highly successful (and very rich) evangelicals floating around that must be a solvable problem.
Government funding is the ultimate crowdsourcing.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The problem with basic scientific research is that it often involves concepts too esoteric and complicated to be readily understood by the public.
If I tried to explain why you should fun a study of the color of highly unstable metal compounds, you might think I'm crazy. Of course it is studies like these in the early 1900's that lead to our understanding of molecular orbital theory and thus helped in the development of semiconductor transistors.
The large cognitive and temporal gap between basic research and applications will prevent such projects from getting funded. Sure people will fund robotic squirrel projects, but why bother with a gas-phase ion chemistry project, never mind the unseen world changing applications 50 years down the road.
The system works as it is now. Taxes fund scientific advancement agencies where qualified individuals evaluate grant applications based on the merits of the proposal and the reputation of the researcher. It's not perfect; tallent is occasionally overlooked, stagnation is occasionally rewarded, but it's the best system we have now.
I'll answer the question originally posed. And I think the answer is, for the most part, no. Most of the diverse projects funded by SciFund Challenge have goals in the hundreds of dollars or in the low thousands. While there are some science project you can do for a few thousand dollars, the are the minority rather than the majority. You also have be primarily talking about projects run by people who aren't getting paid to run these projects (i.e. professors paid with tax dollars an tuition). A more realistic scale for a small science project is two full time early career scientists, which, with benefits and overhead is going to run you $250k/yr, now add what it's going to cost to do the experiments. There's no way you are going to be able fund that on donations unless people perceive a immediate benefit to themselves.
You can probably guess from the signature, I'm a fan of SETI@home. From a couple hundred thousand SETI@home users, they manage to raise $50k/yr. That's not great for a project that costs $500k/yr to run. It could be worse. The Allen Telescope Array run by the SETI Institute (unrelated to SETI@home) costs about $1.5M/yr to operate. In their funding drive, the SETI Institute raise $200k to bring the ATA back on-line. If it's still back on-line, I don't know where the rest of the money is coming from.
In other words, no, I have no faith in the ability of "crowdfunding" to act as a stable funding source for any non-trivial science project, and even then I think much of the funding will go to people who are already funded (at least in terms of salary), and just see a means to squeeze a few extra bucks into their research programs. Except, of course, in the case of "one's a crowd". The rich in this country control most of the wealth and income. Why ask for money from the peasants? Since we're moving our economies back into the feudal model, if I were a scientist looking for funding, I would probably be searching for a wealthy patron. Chief Alchemist to the Court of Gates, perhaps?
Support SETI@home
Sorry, but I want public funding to go towards scientific research for two reasons.
First and foremost, you need public funding to support pure science. There are a few branches of pure science that will attract private donations, but most won't. Take astronomy vs. computers in the pre-WWII era. Astronomy was almost entirely impractical, but it attracted deep pockets. Real computers (i.e. anything beyond adding machines) received very little love at all, even though they turned out to be hugely important to society down the road. Computers were developed primarily because of government funding during and after WWII. Heck, even Charles Babbage received government funding. But all of the other computing projects (and there were a few) received inadequate funding and ended up going nowhere.
Like it or not, the government of the United States is designed to get its power from the consent of the people. The government IS the people.
If someone comes to your door and drags you out of your house for not paying taxes, it's because American citizens, as a group, have agreed be subject to such a law to make sure nobody tries to dodge their responsibility to ante up so that there can be roads, health care, a military, etc. While we don't require unanimous votes on these issues, if there was sufficient will the entire government could be changed top to bottom in a relatively short time.
The danger is not from government, it is from outside, non-citizen, non-human entities wresting control of government institutions from the people, as has been the case with the rise of the corporate oligarchy abetted by the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, in which an activist, rogue court inexplicably decided that corporations are "super-citizens" who have more influence over government than actual citizens.
In the US we are not bound to an aristocracy, a royalty or a military dictatorship. Without exception, every two years the entire House of Representatives stands for election. Every six years the entire Senate stands for election, and every four years the President stands for election.
I'm sorry that you believe that some outside agency is going to "drag you out of your house and throw you in jail", but you are not without influence. Americans have, decade after decade, voted that people who try to skip out on their civic responsibility can, in rare instances, be arrested and prosecuted and thrown in jail. It hardly ever happens, the jail part, except to people whose disregard of their responsibility to the community borders on sociopathy.
That's bullshit and you know it. I don't think "half the population" need a gun pointed at their head to realize that "getting science done" is a worthwhile endeavor for public resources. And for the most part, drama queens like yourself are ignored. Even so, you are free to try to convince your fellow citizens, though judging by the "anti-tax, anti-government" movement I've seen in the past few years, I doubt you'll find many who are physically fit enough to try to toss a few pallet-loads of tea into Boston Harbor, and the real progeny of the Boston Tea Party are busy trying to bring the biggest sociopaths to account via public demonstrations and protests in towns and cities all across the country.
You are welcome on my lawn.