Experiment.com Gains Big Venture Backers To Bring Crowdfunding To Science

Microryza&#x2F;Experiment founder here, we&#x27;re excited to launch a new landing page introducing the new name. <a href="http://experiment.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;experiment.com</a>

This is excellent news. I really look forward to seeing Experiment grow. These are two challenges I foresee...<p>1. At the moment, the people posting projects are <i>mostly</i> PhD students. This is excellent for PhD students, but the real challenge is getting more entrenched scientists to explore this new medium. I&#x27;ve seen a few professors, but not many. I&#x27;d love to know how Experiment are planning to engage the science community.<p>2. Currently it&#x27;s only open to US scientists. This really sucks for the rest of us. A major potential benefit of this platform is to open up science to those in places where science funding is <i>really</i> bad, unlike the US where it&#x27;s just not as good as it used to be, but is still tens of billions per year. Please fix this.

Is it possible to Kickstarter to fund science or engineering projects?<p>Kickstarter seems geared towards the music, arts or engineering with clear visual impact. Most science does not have elevator pitches -- they are hard to explain or visualize, and they deal with unsexy issues.<p>Einstein said if you can&#x27;t explain a theory to a 5 year old you don&#x27;t understand it. Is that even really true?<p>I doubt you can explain the technical details of web apps to the typical 5-year old. Perhaps that is just a defect of our current explanations?

I once spoke to a doctor that was trying to raise funding for a lab to develop a drug that he&#x27;d been working on and take it to the next stage.<p>I asked &quot;How much are you trying to raise?&quot;<p>&quot;Oh, about $300 million.&quot;<p>I had to rehinge my jaw.<p>Apparently physical labs are expensive.<p>This is just one second hand data point. Does anyone else have experience in this space? Are setting up labs and development&#x2F;manufacturing environments for relatively early stage bio companies really this expensive?

Would developing an educational computer game about science (i.e. based on SimCity but with special features to support using it in the classroom and teaching topics like global warming, pollution, economics, etc) be within the scope of this site?

Coincidentally, Lawrenceville Plasma Physics recently announced that they would look to crowdfunding for financing their fusion reactor. I find it both sad and hopeful that one of the most promising projects for solving humanity&#x27;s energy problem looks for funding this way.<p><a href="http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/index.php?option=com_lyftenbloggie&amp;view=entry&amp;year=2014&amp;month=01&amp;day=24&amp;id=114%3A2014-kickoff-report-looking-back-the-year-ahead&amp;Itemid=90" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com&#x2F;index.php?option=com_l...</a>

Awesome to see crowd funding getting leveraged for such great potential. The team&#x27;s been at this for a while and making good progress. Great to see the new name!

I am all in favour of funding more science (I seem to remember Brian Cox quoting that the UK banking bailout was more than the cost of all science funding globally, since the Renaissance.)<p>I would like to clarify a couple of instant worries<p>- ethics committees ? Who runs the ethics committee? Is it public which ones they reject ? UHauling dinos is one thing but bio-ethics will get messy fast.<p>- peer reviewing - if I invest I want to know the output is a success - is there a systemised approach for this? must they publish to get final drawdown? it&#x27;s not really an in estment as the usual measure that you did not stuff up your last experiment is that a grant committee finds you again

Would the site be geared more towards projects with translational or immediate impact value? Is there any room for basic research? I guess it depends on how you sell it to people.

One of the bigger obstacles to me, besides the current level of crowd funding being at the &quot;student project&quot; or &quot;preliminary data&quot; level, and thus still needing to heavily compete for grants is institutional level resistance.<p>Every grants office I&#x27;ve talked to has essentially responded with &quot;Wait, what?&quot;, and the amounts are small enough that it&#x27;s often not worth the administrative hassle.

Interesting. I was just thinking about how expensive it would be to quit my job but still do science on the side. And I&#x27;m not in a field with expensive experiments or anything just travelling to conferences etc. adds up to a lot.<p>Good luck, seems like a good idea :)<p>Edit: Found a typo: &quot;research funded ourside of the traditional science funding system&quot; ... should (probably) be outside

Unfortunately seems like a great opportunity for wastes like free energy, perpetual motion, homeopathy and a so on.

Congrats to Denny &amp; Cindy! They&#x27;ve come a long way in just one year.