Why crowd-funding?

At the writing of this post, we are 72% of the way towards our goal. Wow. Thank you so very much! One thing that isn't immediately obvious from these sites is that experiment.com is an all-or-nothing site. That means, if we make our goal, we get to keep all the funds we've raised (and anything over the goal), but if we miss our goal, none of your cards will be charged, and we will have raised nothing for Gila monster research.

This all-or-nothing world is sometimes a scary position to be in.

But, let's take a minute and talk about why we're raising money to sequence the Gila monster genome here, instead of a more traditional funding mechanism.

You! Perhaps one of the most exciting reasons to do crowd-funding is that you, as a backer, are directly involved in the success of this project. You will receive updates as we progress through our goals, and you have access to us to ask anything you'd like about the research we are doing. This is how science should be. Scientists should not be closed away behind closed doors, emerging only to announce a new discovery. That isn't how science works, first of all. It's a process. We work, we revise, we reevaluate. By conducting this project with as much transparency as we can, we hope to illuminate a bit more about what we're doing, build upon your interest in the science, and learn from you about what it is you think is most pressing to study. Traditional scientific funding is risky. The types of grants I usually apply for come from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). Typically these are multi-year grants that are for comparatively much larger amounts of money than we are trying to raise here. They take weeks to write (sometimes with two stages of peer-review), and then typically several months (4-8) before we know if we've been awarded... wait for it... all-or-none of the money we applied for. Sure, there's a handful of cases where you'll be awarded most of the money you requested, but are asked to cut the budget in some significant way. And, to be fair, there are rare instances where you'll be offered slightly more than you requested for a given project. Also, the "all" side of the funding tends to be between 7% and 12% of applications. So... it turns out that while traditional grants can fund much (much) more money, they are also a lot of time to write, and typically require months (if you only have one submission) before you know if you will receive any of the grant money.

Funding genome projects is so 2003. Although there are many useful things we will learn from the Gila monster genome, I've been told by funding agency representatives that they "no longer fund genome projects." Partially this is because one goal of many funding agencies is to support hypothesis-driven research. The genome and sequences we produce from this project will be publicly available, and will serve as a new tool for ourselves and others in the field (you'll even be able to download analyze it if you like!). But a genome sequence and analysis is not hypothesis-driven research.

If we take it all together: the all-or-nothing model is really not something new, so shouldn't be so intimidating with crowd-funding; the success rates of crowd-funding tend to be higher than traditional NIH and NSF funding mechanisms; we actually have a chance of raising the money for the Gila monster genome sequence here because its utility as a tool is valued; and, we get to work with you, our wonderful, enthusiastic, brilliant backers!

While we've convinced ourselves that crowd-funding is the way to go to get the Gila monster genome started, it is still a bit nerve-wracking to realize that if we don't make our goal by the deadline, all of your enthusiasm, all of our effort will be relegated to starting back at square one. Please share this project to help us reach our goal, and start sequencing the genome of one of the most fascinating organisms we can think of, the Gila monster. Thank you for your support.