Reposted with permission from https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02931-x
NATURE CAREER NEWS
17 September 2025
The Science Foundation seeks donations to fund ten $10,000 ‘what if’ seed grants.
Amid a backdrop of massive cuts in US federal support for scientific research, a new effort — the Science Foundation — launched last week to raise public funds for transdisciplinary, discovery-based research.
The Science Foundation’s initial US$100,000 fundraising goal will support ten $10,000 research grants to advance recipients’ careers, akin to the supplemental grants awarded by the US National Science Foundation to collect proof-of-concept data in pioneering research projects. “We’re calling them ‘What IFS’, or interdisciplinary foundation science,” says Maren Friesen, project director and an evolutionary ecologist at Washington State University in Pullman. Scientists at all career levels will be eligible, and projects will ideally span at least two disciplines. “We want to support cross-fertilization of science based on intellectual curiosity, rather than chasing the latest use for artificial intelligence,” she explains.
Friesen and her colleagues are betting that the public will step up to support scientists’ blue-sky endeavours. “In our first request for proposals, we plan to ask: why are you excited about this work?” says Venkatesh Srinivas, deputy project director and a Google software engineer in Seattle, Washington. The non-profit organization has so far raised $20,000, says Srinivas, and secured a pledge to match the next $20,000 in donations, which can be made at science-foundation.org.
Solicitations will focus on five disciplines: maths, physics, chemistry, biology and Earth sciences. “We’re not considering biomedical, engineering or computer science, because we feel those already have plenty of investment,” says Friesen. Once Friesen and her team have proposals in hand, they will assemble a review panel of specialists and at least one member of the public. The foundation aims to release its first request for proposals this year. “We need to give young scientists hope that people continue to believe in the value of science,” she adds.
A lost generation?
Since US President Donald Trump took office in January, his administration has blocked or cancelled billions of dollars of funding through the US National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy and other sources.
Yet even before that, public funding for basic science in the United States had stagnated over the past decade. The federal government’s share of basic-research funding decreased from 52% to 41% between 2012 and 2023, according to a July report by the National Science Board.
“We’re not just doing this in response to the Trump-administration cuts or to replace the National Science Foundation,” says Friesen. “We are trying to build something that that we think will have value in addition to government-funded science.”
Such support could help to ameliorate one growing concern — a lost generation of scientists. “We are facing a workforce time bomb,” warns David Stern, Science Foundation board member and former president of the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. “If we don’t have science practitioners, we don’t have science,” he says.
Exploratory research is particularly imperilled now, Stern and others argue. “We need alternative models to support basic science,” says Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Davis. “I favour this [the Science Foundation] serving as a model for people to experiment with.”
But, Stern acknowledges, “Let’s not kid ourselves that this is a solution; it won’t replace federal funding. But it is a need that was already there, and more important now.”
Public support is strong
Public understanding of the impacts of the recent research funding cuts is mixed. In April, the Association of Science and Technology Centers, a non-profit organization in Washington DC, surveyed 1,017 US adults about their perceptions of science and changes to federal science policies. Some 94% of respondents said they use one or more sources of scientific information at least weekly — including weather forecasts, nutritional information, air-quality reports and public-health updates. Yet, although 77% of respondents were aware of funding cuts, only 15% could provide specific details about them. And nearly half of the respondents thought that funding gaps in federal science budgets could be filled by private entities, “reflecting a fundamental misunderstanding of the unique nature of federal government investments in scientific research and the challenges associated with replacing public support”, the non-profit wrote in a press release.
At the same time, the scientific community’s outlook is increasingly bleak. A survey conducted between 8 May and 15 July of faculty members supported by National Institute of Health T32 grants, which fund graduate and postdoctoral research, documented the impacts of the recent cuts to federal funding. Only one-third of respondents said that, if they were given the opportunity to start over, they would be somewhat or more likely to choose to pursue science again. The top concerns were laboratory instability, trainees’ career progression and well-being, and the future of the scientific enterprise, says study co-author Arghavan Salles, a surgeon and equity researcher at Stanford University in California. The grant that funded the survey was terminated in June, during the third year of a five-year award.
The survey also received more than 230 written responses, including: “We are all living in a climate of stress and uncertainty. The ship is going down and we are powerless.” Salles’s survey did not specifically sample people whose grants had been terminated, but “it shows just how devastating the impacts have been”, she says.
Yet anecdotal evidence suggests that the public is willing to support basic science — and this is partly what convinced Friesen and Srinivas to create the Science Foundation. In April, the Washington State University Breadlab in Burlington, which breeds new grain varieties, was informed that the remaining $2.5 million of a five-year US Department of Agriculture grant had been paused. Individual donors sent money, and bakeries around Washington — as well as the sustainable clothing and food company Patagonia — held fundraisers to keep the research going. (The grant was ultimately reinstated in July.) Similarly, the Cascadia Research Collective, a non-profit research corporation in Olympia, Washington, has, in addition to federal grants, solicited donations for decades. In a typical year, they receive a few thousand dollars. This year, they have received around $150,000 from individuals who support their mission to study marine mammal biology, animal behaviour and ecology.
“There is an appetite to support researchers,” says Srinivas, who has donated roughly $500,000 of his own money to a range of climate-science and global-health initiatives, as well as individual research labs, over the past decade. “This is the organization I wish existed, so we had to build it.”
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-02931-x