Massachusetts Institute of Technology chemical engineer Kristala Prather is relishing the chance to present her work in person at scientific meetings now that the pandemic has eased. But starting this month, she will head to the airport with an added goal in mind: to serve as a “scout” for an unusual new funding program.
Prather’s mission is to spot colleagues with an intriguing research idea so embryonic it has no chance of surviving traditional peer review—and, on her own, decide to provide some funding. “I’m looking forward to giving it a try,” she says. “I’m a people person, and I like learning new things.”
Prather’s new task comes thanks to the Hypothesis Fund, a nonprofit launched today that has an intriguing approach to funding climate change and health studies. Instead of inviting scientists to submit proposals, the fund will find recipients through 17 scouts—scientists, including Prather, chosen for their curiosity, creativity, diversity, and interest in the work of others. Each will get 12 months to award a total of $300,000 to fellow researchers with promising early-stage ideas.
“We’re setting up a network of incredible scientists and empowering them to look for really bold ideas,” says Hypothesis Fund’s founder and CEO, Seattle entrepreneur David Sanford.
The objective, fund officials say, is to quickly seed projects that conventional peer-review panels would spurn because they are too risky and lack preliminary data. Each scout is given a “hunting license to go out and, given their budget, find one, maybe two, maybe three great ideas that are going to languish” without funding, says former Princeton University president and molecular biologist Shirley Tilghman, a Hypothesis Fund board member.
Sanford knows the philanthropy world from 7 years as chief of staff to LinkedIn co-founder and billionaire Reid Hoffman, whose gift giving has included science programs. And the spark for the Hypothesis Fund, he says, goes back 20 years to when Sanford was a college student studying bone loss using mice with an atrophying limb. To trigger the atrophy, bone researchers usually cut a nerve or put the mouse’s limb in a sling. But an episode of Nip/Tuck, the plastic surgery TV show, gave Sanford an idea: Inject Botox to numb the limb.
It sounded crazy, but Sanford’s lab showed it worked. “It taught me that really new, diverse ideas happen unexpectedly. And when they do happen, they need the right kinds of support,” Sanford says.
After raising funds from donors such as Hoffman and Bill Gates, Sanford’s board and scientific advisers recruited the first class of scouts. The unpaid volunteers are mostly midcareer scientists in fields such as infectious disease, geobiology, and neurobiology. Eleven of the 17 are women; five are white, four are Black, and the rest are of South or East Asian ancestry. They can select potential grant recipients at their own university or elsewhere, and together fill out a form of up to four pages. The fund will approve the grant as long as the work is novel, early stage, helps humans adapt to risks, fosters diversity, and can be completed within 18 months. Sanford hopes to plant 100 seed grants over 2 years with the money he’s raised so far.
The Hypothesis Fund isn’t the first to suggest empowering a network of scientists to hand out money to their peers. Scientists in the Netherlands have made a similar proposal, for example, but it has yet to get off the ground. It’s also just one of many programs that aim to fund high-risk science without preliminary data. But Tilghman, who has reviewed those efforts—at agencies such as the National Institutes of Health—says they are still “permeated with the fear of taking a risk.” She says the Hypothesis Fund’s approach seemed like “an experiment worth doing.”
There could be pitfalls. For instance, the scouts could direct the money to buddies. But Sanford says that’s a “good thing” if the friends have “bold, divergent ideas that could really make a difference.” Prather, meanwhile, worries about spending her budget too fast, or waiting too long to find ideas. “I feel a responsibility to get it right,” she says.
Another scout, Stanford University physical biologist Manu Prakash, isn’t concerned about finding recipients: He says during his field research in oceans around the world, he’s come across “hundreds of people doing remarkable work that could not proceed because it didn’t fit classic criteria.” Having the ability to now support some of those ideas, Prakash says, is “really exciting.”
Massachusetts Institute of Technology chemical engineer Kristala Prather is relishing the chance to present her work in person at scientific meetings now that the pandemic has eased. But starting this month, she will head to the airport with an added goal in mind: to serve as a “scout” for an unusual new funding program.
Prather’s mission is to spot colleagues with an intriguing research idea so embryonic it has no chance of surviving traditional peer review—and, on her own, decide to provide some funding. “I’m looking forward to giving it a try,” she says. “I’m a people person, and I like learning new things.”
Prather’s new task comes thanks to the Hypothesis Fund, a nonprofit launched today that has an intriguing approach to funding climate change and health studies. Instead of inviting scientists to submit proposals, the fund will find recipients through 17 scouts—scientists, including Prather, chosen for their curiosity, creativity, diversity, and interest in the work of others. Each will get 12 months to award a total of $300,000 to fellow researchers with promising early-stage ideas.
“We’re setting up a network of incredible scientists and empowering them to look for really bold ideas,” says Hypothesis Fund’s founder and CEO, Seattle entrepreneur David Sanford.
The objective, fund officials say, is to quickly seed projects that conventional peer-review panels would spurn because they are too risky and lack preliminary data. Each scout is given a “hunting license to go out and, given their budget, find one, maybe two, maybe three great ideas that are going to languish” without funding, says former Princeton University president and molecular biologist Shirley Tilghman, a Hypothesis Fund board member.
Sanford knows the philanthropy world from 7 years as chief of staff to LinkedIn co-founder and billionaire Reid Hoffman, whose gift giving has included science programs. And the spark for the Hypothesis Fund, he says, goes back 20 years to when Sanford was a college student studying bone loss using mice with an atrophying limb. To trigger the atrophy, bone researchers usually cut a nerve or put the mouse’s limb in a sling. But an episode of Nip/Tuck, the plastic surgery TV show, gave Sanford an idea: Inject Botox to numb the limb.
It sounded crazy, but Sanford’s lab showed it worked. “It taught me that really new, diverse ideas happen unexpectedly. And when they do happen, they need the right kinds of support,” Sanford says.
After raising funds from donors such as Hoffman and Bill Gates, Sanford’s board and scientific advisers recruited the first class of scouts. The unpaid volunteers are mostly midcareer scientists in fields such as infectious disease, geobiology, and neurobiology. Eleven of the 17 are women; five are white, four are Black, and the rest are of South or East Asian ancestry. They can select potential grant recipients at their own university or elsewhere, and together fill out a form of up to four pages. The fund will approve the grant as long as the work is novel, early stage, helps humans adapt to risks, fosters diversity, and can be completed within 18 months. Sanford hopes to plant 100 seed grants over 2 years with the money he’s raised so far.
The Hypothesis Fund isn’t the first to suggest empowering a network of scientists to hand out money to their peers. Scientists in the Netherlands have made a similar proposal, for example, but it has yet to get off the ground. It’s also just one of many programs that aim to fund high-risk science without preliminary data. But Tilghman, who has reviewed those efforts—at agencies such as the National Institutes of Health—says they are still “permeated with the fear of taking a risk.” She says the Hypothesis Fund’s approach seemed like “an experiment worth doing.”
There could be pitfalls. For instance, the scouts could direct the money to buddies. But Sanford says that’s a “good thing” if the friends have “bold, divergent ideas that could really make a difference.” Prather, meanwhile, worries about spending her budget too fast, or waiting too long to find ideas. “I feel a responsibility to get it right,” she says.
Another scout, Stanford University physical biologist Manu Prakash, isn’t concerned about finding recipients: He says during his field research in oceans around the world, he’s come across “hundreds of people doing remarkable work that could not proceed because it didn’t fit classic criteria.” Having the ability to now support some of those ideas, Prakash says, is “really exciting.”