Scientists have launched a crowdfunded initiative for blue-sky research amid federal funding cuts.Credit: Michael Siluk/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty
Amid a backdrop of massive cuts in US federal support for scientific research, a new effort — the Science Foundation — launched last week to raise public funds for transdisciplinary, discovery-based research.
The Science Foundation’s initial US$100,000 fundraising goal will support ten $10,000 research grants to advance recipients’ careers, akin to the supplemental grants awarded by the US National Science Foundation to collect proof-of-concept data in pioneering research projects. “We’re calling them ‘What IFS’, or interdisciplinary foundation science,” says Maren Friesen, project director and an evolutionary ecologist at Washington State University in Pullman. Scientists at all career levels will be eligible, and projects will ideally span at least two disciplines. “We want to support cross-fertilization of science based on intellectual curiosity, rather than chasing the latest use for artificial intelligence,” she explains.
Friesen and her colleagues are betting that the public will step up to support scientists’ blue-sky endeavours. “In our first request for proposals, we plan to ask: why are you excited about this work?” says Venkatesh Srinivas, deputy project director and a Google software engineer in Seattle, Washington. The non-profit organization has so far raised $20,000, says Srinivas, and secured a pledge to match the next $20,000 in donations, which can be made at science-foundation.org.
Solicitations will focus on five disciplines: maths, physics, chemistry, biology and Earth sciences. “We’re not considering biomedical, engineering or computer science, because we feel those already have plenty of investment,” says Friesen. Once Friesen and her team have proposals in hand, they will assemble a review panel of specialists and at least one member of the public. The foundation aims to release its first request for proposals this year. “We need to give young scientists hope that people continue to believe in the value of science,” she adds.
A lost generation?
Since US President Donald Trump took office in January, his administration has blocked or cancelled billions of dollars of funding through the US National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy and other sources.
Yet even before that, public funding for basic science in the United States had stagnated over the past decade. The federal government’s share of basic-research funding decreased from 52% to 41% between 2012 and 2023, according to a July report by the National Science Board.
“We’re not just doing this in response to the Trump-administration cuts or to replace the National Science Foundation,” says Friesen. “We are trying to build something that that we think will have value in addition to government-funded science.”
Such support could help to ameliorate one growing concern — a lost generation of scientists. “We are facing a workforce time bomb,” warns David Stern, Science Foundation board member and former president of the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. “If we don’t have science practitioners, we don’t have science,” he says.
Exploratory research is particularly imperilled now, Stern and others argue. “We need alternative models to support basic science,” says Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Davis. “I favour this [the Science Foundation] serving as a model for people to experiment with.”
But, Stern acknowledges, “Let’s not kid ourselves that this is a solution; it won’t replace federal funding. But it is a need that was already there, and more important now.”
