Crowdfunded Research Shakes Medicine's Ivory Towers 1/19/16 By Kristen Schepker, Assistant Editor

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For most of its history, medical and scientific research has been funded by grants from government institutions, nonprofit foundations, and private companies. But an emerging trend suggests a new potential source of future funding: the internet.

By now, almost any of us who use the internet have received pitches from creative friends, family members or colleagues seeking the resources to produce the projects of their dreams: indie films, albums, better-tasting healthy snacks, Great American novels, dream trips around the world....you name it.

Tech-savvy entrepreneurs and artists have been using online crowd-funded campaigns to raise to launch dizzying variety of projects and products. It's an easy, efficient, inexpensive way for campaigners to draw resources from a very wide potential donor pool--as wide as the web itself.

Some have raised 6-figure or even 7-figure sums.

Sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo were among the first crowdfunding sites to appear on the market, and online appeals have since been become a regular part of our online lives.

Shaking the Ivory Tower

cont'd

http://holisticprimarycare.net/topi...edical-research-funding.html?showall=&start=1

 

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Haven't read this yet, but I think this kind of thing is our greatest hope for more immediate results!

GG

 

[caledonia]

Good article - thanks for posting.

This means that ME is right on trend. Crowd funding or private funding of research is a good way to work around institutional barriers to funding proper research for our disease at the NIH and CDC.