What do you do when you're a scientist and you have no job and no money for your research? If you're Ethan Perlstein, you try crowd funding. He raised $25,000 to investigate where the drug methamphetamine is stored in the brain.
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LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:
You've heard of entrepreneurs raising money online to start a business. Well, say you're a scientist studying how drugs affect the brain. You need money for the research so you make a video asking for donations and post it to YouTube. That's not exactly how science is supposed to work.
But NPR's Joe Palca says it might just be working anyway. It's the latest installment of his project, Joe's Big Idea.
JOE PALCA, BYLINE: This is a story about a sharp young scientist named Ethan Perlstein. He's interested in doing something about mental illness and addiction, but he needs a lot more basic information about the brain before he can invent a new drug or treatment.
Now, most of the time the federal government funds the basic biomedical research in this country. But it's getting harder and harder to snag one of those government research grants. So Perlstein said, hmm, maybe there's a different way.
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PALCA: This three-minute video isn't going to the government. It's going straight to you.
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UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: It is time to experiment with the way we experiment. We will use the Internet to allow the public to fund and participate in a fully crowd-sourced basic research project.
PALCA: The idea of crowd-funding isn't new - you've heard of Kickstarter. It's being used to raise money for all sorts of projects. Let's say you're an electronic band from New York and you need money to make a new album.
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PALCA: Or you have a bakery in Liverpool, England and you need some dough to buy a new oven. You could crowd-fund.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: At the very heart of this project is an oven to bake the breads and cakes. And that's where you come in...
PALCA: When Perlstein first heard about crowd-funding a couple years ago...
ETHAN PERLSTEIN: I thought what a cool idea. It didn't occur to me instantly that one could do this for science.
PALCA: But he decided to give it a shot. And it was a good time to try something new. A five-year fellowship at Princeton was ending, and he was feeling frustrated.
PERLSTEIN: Look at the numbers. Forty-two is the age of the average getting the first big grant. Forty-two is the average age. I'm 33. I'm sorry, I don't want to wait around. Academia is not that - I don't want to go to that length.
PALCA: So he figured maybe crowd-funding was another way to keep doing the science he cared about.
PERLSTEIN: I want to know how brain drugs work, and I want to know this because I want to treat brain diseases. That's sort of the, you know, the simple message.
PALCA: And there's a particular reason why Ethan chose this topic.
PERLSTEIN: My mom passed away 10 years ago and she was mentally ill, and also an addict. I mean as I reflect on it, the more I remember, you know, kind of growing up, my mom always kind of joking to me: Oh, well, one day you're going to be a famous scientist and you're going to figure out what's wrong with me. You're going to figure out, you know - so I guess, yeah, I think talking about this now actually makes me think more deeply about why - why am I really working this is and not that.
And it's good to know why, 'cause I think that contributes actually to a sense of purpose.
PALCA: Purpose, sure. But with no money and no job, he turned to crowd-funding.
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PALCA: The video describes an experiment he wants to do. He wants to find out where the drug called methamphetamine goes in the brain. Knowing where methamphetamine goes should help in understanding drug addiction.
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UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: We'll peer deep inside brain cells to resolve once and for all where amphetamines accumulate. The best part is, we don't know where it will end up, so the public will experience the thrill of discovery as it occurs.
PALCA: Hold on a second. It's time for a little reality check. Ethan figured the most he could raise by crowd-funding was $25,000. And $25,000 doesn't take you very far down the path of discovery in biomedical research these days. Even a small lab will have a budget of more than $100,000 a year.
But Ethan decided it was better than nothing; although he knew even reaching $25,000 would be a struggle.
PERLSTEIN: In order the make this campaign work, Danny and I had to hustle.
DANIEL KOROSTYSHEVSKY: OK, my name is Daniel Korostyshevsky.
PALCA: Korostyshevsky is Perlstein's partner in this escapade. Usually when people support a musician or a baker, they get an album or loaf of bread as a reward. All Ethan and Danny could offer was a chance to watch and comment as the scientific project unfolded. They had no idea if that would be a big enough draw.
To get the word out, to build anticipation, Ethan blogged about the project, tweeted about the project, and the pair made personal appearances at conferences and meet-ups.
KOROSTYSHEVSKY: My pitch mainly was the novelty of funding science through this new model.
PALCA: And he was relentless.
KOROSTYSHEVSKY: Some people heard me talk about it over 20 times, probably.
PALCA: They were scientist-turned-science hucksters. Their campaign became an obsession. And in the middle of all this, Ethan got married and went on his honeymoon to Hawaii. He didn't exactly lavish his new bride with attention.
PERLSTEIN: You know, she would go sunbathe or something and I would send some emails.
PALCA: After the honeymoon - and I'm happy to say Ethan is still married - the campaign officially started October 4 on a Web site called Rocket Hub. The frequency of the tweets picked up.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: The time for a small science revolution is now.
PALCA: Is how one tweets went. Ethan says in the campaign got underway, contribution started rolling in. And he thought...
PERLSTEIN: Oh, my God. We're going to just - we're going to crush this in two weeks.
PALCA: But then things slowed down - a lot. Days went by with maybe one, maybe two contributions.
PERLSTEIN: We got demoralized a bit about halfway when we realize, oh-oh, we're not - halfway of the campaign is done, but we're not at 50 percent.
PALCA: Money kept trickling in but with three days left they still had more than $5,000 to go. People who'd done other crowd-funding campaigns told Ethan there'd be a surge at the end. But he was still...
PERLSTEIN: Absolutely nervous because I was looking at the numbers and said we've never raised $5,000 in a day. But that's what we're going to need to do.
PALCA: Another tweet.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: We have 24 hours to raise the rest, less than $5,000. Take us home.
PALCA: On the night of that final day, Ethan and Danny waited in their separate apartments - like two candidates waiting for election results.
KOROSTYSHEVSKY: We were just all plastered to our phones, refreshing. My wife was, every couple of minutes: We got another one.
PERLSTEIN: I knew how frequently we were getting donations, because I was getting an email every time it happened. Starting around 3:00 p.m., the last day, I was getting an email every five minutes.
PALCA: Twenty-five dollar donation, $50 donation, $10 donation.
PERLSTEIN: It was just going from drip, drip, drip for weeks to now just this stream was flowing in.
KOROSTYSHEVSKY: Everybody was sitting biting their nails. And I remember at 1:00, I guess, New York, a.m., it hit: Congratulations, your project has been funded. I just had a collective sigh of relief.
PALCA: The final total: $25,460.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: It's done. We did it.
PALCA: Ethan Perlstein worked his butt off to raise $25,000. To put that number in perspective, the National Institutes of Health spends about $30 billion a year on biomedical research. So $25,000, seriously? Is this going to make any difference in research funding in this country?
PERLSTEIN: I can't predict. I won't predict. But I do predict that there will be way more prototyping, way more innovation, and people will be pulling off more stupendous sums.
PALCA: Well, it turns out he's right about that. Since Perlstein's campaign ended, two crowd-funded projects aimed at studying the bacteria that live in our bodies have both raised around 10 times what Ethan raised.
Joe Palca, NPR News.
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WERTHEIMER: Tomorrow, Joe looks at what kind science gets crowd-funding support.
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Car commercial? Nope. Jessica Richman, Zachary Apte (center) and William Ludington are looking to the crowd for money to fund uBiome, which will sequence the genetic code of microbes that live on and inside humans.
Courtesy of uBiomeCar commercial? Nope. Jessica Richman, Zachary Apte (center) and William Ludington are looking to the crowd for money to fund uBiome, which will sequence the genetic code of microbes that live on and inside humans.
Courtesy of uBiomeWhen the X-ray was invented, people clamored to get one. Not for any medical reason, but just to see what was typically hidden inside their bodies.
Something like that seems to be happening with DNA sequencing technology. First it was companies offering to sequence people's genomes. Now it's learning all about your microbiome, the collection of microorganisms living on and in your body.
People's fascination with their inner workings may provide a new way for scientists to raise money for basic research. Just ask the folks at uBiome and American Gut.
Both are basic science projects aimed at understanding how microbiomes influence health. And in return for funding from individuals, both will provide donors with an analysis of the bacteria in their very own digestive track.
Using the Internet to crowd fund, the uBiome and American Gut projects have together raised more than $600,000.
Crowd funding, in case you're unfamiliar it, is accomplished by posting a project on a website like Kickstarter, setting a fundraising target, and asking people to donate.
Let's say you're an electronic band from New York, and you need money to make a new album ? you could crowd fund. Or you have a bakery and you need some dough to buy a new oven ? you could crowd fund.
Crowd funding for those kinds of projects has been going on for several years. Crowd funding for science, though, is fairly new.
Jessica Richman, one of the co-founders of uBiome, says she and her colleagues chose to crowd fund their project rather than use more traditional types of fundraising because they wanted to engage the public in the project.
"There's something magical that happens with crowd funding where you start getting 500 emails from people telling you, 'well, does it do this?' Or, 'what about that?' Or, 'why doesn't it do that?' And that really helps you refine what you're doing and understand better what people's questions and needs are," Richman says.
Before uBiome and American Gut, most of the scientists who've tried crowd funding haven't raised anything close to $250,000. Previous takes were closer to just $5,000.
"People say, you know, what can they do with $5,000? I'm an ecologist. You can do a lot of things for $5,000," says Jai Ranganathan. He's with the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, California, and he also co-founded the SciFund Challenge, an effort to encourage scientists to crowd fund.
He says for an ecologist, $5,000 would pay for several months of field work. "Not all science is, you know, sending a rocket to Mars," Ranganathan says.
Critics of crowd funding worry that it will turn science into a popularity contest. They say, " 'Only the panda bear research is going to get funded. My very serious research will never get funded this way.' That's the worry," says Ranganathan. "And, in fact, it's dead wrong."
Even esoteric projects can raise money, Ranganathan says. "We had a microbiologist in New Zealand who was studying the evolution of E. coli in mouse guts. Wow, nothing very particularly sexy about that, but she was such a gifted communicator and [could explain] 'Hey, this is why it's exciting.' "
Ranganathan says scientists ought to get better at selling their science. "My goal is to change the culture of science to one where scientists are reaching out to the public," he says.
But some scientists need to be persuaded that reaching out to the public is a good thing. "Some do, and many do a fantastic job. But generally, do scientists reach out? No, they don't. We need a new argument. How about money? Money seems to be a good argument sometimes," he says.
The idea of being financially rewarded for being a good science communicator seems to me to be a worthy goal.
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