Help Scientists Build a Meth Lab

Yes, that's right. Ethan Perlstein, an evolutionary pharmacologist, is interested in exploring the psy­chophar­ma­col­ogy behind amphetamines, which includes crystal meth. (And don't worry: Perlstein made the meth lab joke before me.) But rather than writing a grant proposal, Perlstein and his colleagues are interested in crowdfunding their research:

Fact: the average basic-research life scientist deals with an 80% grant rejection rate, and gets his or her first big government grant at age 42. Basic biomedical research uses advanced 21^stcentury technology, but is still fueled by a clumsy, archaic government-grant funding model that even predates the Internet.

It’s time scientists experimented with the way we all experiment.

Today, there’s a glut of highly trained but underemployed scientists. Let’s harness their idealistic passion before they turn grey, using social networks and data sharing to create an open, interactive, dynamic model of basic life sciences research. That new foundation can serve as a platform on which others will build and improve. This is particularly vital for mental health research, so often stymied by misunderstandings and blind spots, both public and scholarly.

Funding this project won't be easy, and Perlstein has already crunched the numbers:

To date, no one has achieved our stated goal in the sci­ence crowd­fund­ing space. In fact, break­ing through the $10,000 bar­rier is no small feat, as I was recently gen­tly reminded by Jai Ran­ganathan, co-founder of the awe­some­ness that is The #Sci­Fund Chal­lenge. And even then sci­ence crowd­fund­ing suc­cesses have come in the least cost-intensive cor­ners of the nat­ural sci­ences, like ecol­ogy, archae­ol­ogy and anthropology.

But this is going to be an experiment itself, not just a way to fund other experiments. Perlstein aims to statistically analyze the amounts being donated, what sort of publicity translates into the most donations, and much more along the way. And if you contribute money, you get to participate in the science being done, not just watch it happen.

This is a really exciting project, and not just for pharmacology. It's a bold new experiment in how science gets funded and a way to see if interested individuals will actually band together to support research rather than relying on more traditional funding mechanisms. Go join this bold test!

Top image:SubDural12/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain