Online fundraising for creative projects is called crowdfunding (Wheat et al. 2012; Kaplan 2013). The mechanics of offline fundraising also apply to crowdfunding, namely fine-tuning a message and then appealing to the general public, except prospective “crowdfunders” are anyone with an Internet connection and a credit card. Since 2009, the public has patronized an array of projects by artists, technologists, entrepreneurs and others on websites like Kickstarter, which has collected $500 M in donations to date, with a 44% success rate. However, scientists, in particular biomedical and pharmaceutical researchers, have been slow to embrace crowdfunding, because the average sums raised by crowdfunding are several orders of magnitude smaller than research grants awarded by government agencies like National Institutes of Health (NIH). Also, crowdfunding requires dynamic online presence and social media savvy, which many academic and industry scientists don’t have time or incentives to cultivate.
Prior to last year, I too dismissed crowdfunding as a viable funding source for my research. But in the Spring of 2012, with less than six months of funding left in my fellowship at Princeton University and my future career path uncertain, I decided to perform my first crowdfunding experiment. This experiment began with the selection of a topic whose importance could be understood by the public, and that fit my research trajectory. After the publication of my former Princeton lab’s paper on the accumulation of the antidepressant Zoloft in yeast cells (Chen et al. 2012), I emailed dozens of prospective collaborators in order to extend this research. Because the amount I could realistically raise by crowdfunding would be a fraction of a traditional grant, I needed a collaborator with an existing lab infrastructure.
Eventually, Professor David Sulzer of Columbia University Medical Center and I struck up a correspondence. The Sulzer lab studies the mechanism of action of amphetamines. Over the years, they observed multilamellar bodies in mouse brain cells treated with amphetamines (Larsen et al. 2002; Cubells et al. 1994), These multilamellar bodies resemble membranous structures in yeast cells treated with Zoloft. Sulzer and I wondered if amphetamines and antidepressants, which are both hydrophobic weak bases, might accumulate in multilamellar bodies. I proposed autoradiography as an experimental technique to test this hypothesis. Daniel Korostyshevsky, a technician in my former Princeton lab who mastered electron microscopy techniques required to investigate drug-membrane interactions, signed on as lead experimentalist. With a team in place, the amphetamines distribution project would proceed in the Sulzer lab.