Scott’s recent post inspired me to dust off the old hat and hold it out, as will perhaps become the norm in Italy.
Should you want to directly support the purchase of lab supplies to enable research in medical genetics, I have the charity for you. (No joke.) My research group, among the many at the Necker Children’s Hospital, can directly receive money from private donors.
Research on rare diseases is particularly dependent on private funding for its breakthroughs. The researchers and doctors of the world-renowned Necker Children’s hospital have therefore established an official management instrument for such funds, called the Institut Necker, which supports both basic and clinical research projects at the hospital by providing a legal mechanism to distribute external funding in a transparent framework with light administration overhead. The Institut Necker is subject to the same rigourous financial disclosure and audit requirements as any private French non-profit association. It provides for both donors and its beneficiary research members a guaranteed conduit to apply dedicated funds where they are needed most – in the laboratory.
This is sort of our black box for buying all those things – and sometimes for employing technical assistance – that are difficult or impossible to do with public calls for proposals. For example, it pays for tickets on non-national airline carriers, leaving more money for buying reagents. It enables us to establish a contract within weeks, rather than (sometimes) months, for summer interns (when they do get paid, which is not rote). We can get posters printed in town if need be and buy printer cartridges that arrive the same year. (Then again, we have to pay value-added tax. But the value is often added in flexibility.). Make your checks out to: Institut Necker, account HIRSCH-HE, 149 rue de Sevres, 75015 Paris, France . Mrs. Harb will send you a receipt. If you’re in France, you get money back on your taxes with it, by donating to a non-profit association.
I also wanted to thank all you wonderful editors at Nature for publishing two beautiful papers directly in line with my interests (for once, rather than interesting papers outside of my expertise that take time away from what I thought I was supposed to be doing because I’m [shhhh] intellectually promiscuous).
Okay, maybe it wasn’t crystal clear – I am not actually begging for money. I do write grant applications from time to time.
Asking for charitable donations isn’t begging. At its core, is there that much of a difference between appealing to the state or a foundation for funding through a grant, and appealing to individual donors for a donation?
Heather, I am with Scott in that providing the option for a direct donation is not begging for money. This merely adds an extra opportunity for donations, which may be likely to come from people whom you – all scientists in your lab- know closely.
I suppose asking for donations is a natural reaction when cash is short. Why is there a dearth, so little research of any kind performed that translates to commercial ventures that pay for further research? To create a research organization initially set up to perform research that can translate to near future profit, and then when the profits exist to branch off into unrelated “pure science” type of research? Perhaps capitalism is deemed an, impolite dirty word and attitude in life is why. Organizing and planning and taking responsibility for my organization’s future existence would seem a priority number one, to moi, if I were the creator of the research organization.
And I’d follow up your questions in steffi’s blog, but I worry that any and every post of mine in Nature.com and thus these posts of mine are then property of the owners of Macmillian Publishers, where repressive English laws of hate speech could be applied. All I need in the future is to step off an airplane in Great Britain and be placed under arrest. Past comments have caught up with me. I, another one of those arrogant Americans, insulted Islam by referring to it as a dinosaur. A dying dinosaur…
“And he was smiling as he was led away in handcuffs…” :)
Apparently, God is still blessing America, for sure. A private exchange of intelligent, constructive thought on those comments is possible, if you wish.
Kurt – thank you for the invitation. I haven’t had intelligent, constructive conversation for weeks, though. Sometimes intelligent, sometimes constructive. I’ll give it a pass this time around, but will keep it in mind. Sorry about the long delay in responding and please check in again next year.
The INSERM has set up a branch organization called Inserm Transfert whose purpose in life is supposedly to promote translational ventures. However, it is currently staffed with people who go around begging us staff scientists, hired for our ability to conduct “pure” pie-in-the-sky work, to try to bridge the gap and become such translators. I think that it takes a different and under-encouraged skill set. Perhaps we should be seducing more engineers amongst us. There is an interesting discussion of “science” compared to “engineering” in The Intelligibility of Nature by Peter Dear.
Don’t underestimate the value of philanthropic donations. The paediatric hospital I work in has built up an endowment that must be nearly a billion dollars in aggregate over the years, which funds all kinds of things.
And – in the years prior to the cloning of the Cystic Fibrosis gene, it is said that members of Lap-Chee Tsui’s lab actually set up a booth in the Toronto Eaton Centre (think big, big downtown shopping mall) asking for donations. This story, as far as I know, is true (I did my PhD in the lab next door).
So there is precedent. Beg away!