Erik Ranheim: Impact of Individual Donations

In the past, well essentially 8 years, the funding level for basic science and translational research from National Institutes of Health has declined dramatically. This is really resulted in a break in the pipeline of young scientists who are coming out of graduate school and post-doctoral fellowships, out of clinical fellowships, who chose to go into research or succeed in being in research because essentially they can’t pay for their science. One of the problems that we see in translational research is although everybody talks about translational research although NHI in theory promotes translational research it’s often difficult to convince the actual people who are deciding, who are reading your grants, that we’ve gone far enough in the mouse or the basic realm to begin to try to treat people with cancer. The ability to have small amounts of funding to start up projects that are perhaps high risks, maybe are just a good idea at first, allows the production of real data, the kind of data that impresses the people who decide who give larger grants. The fact is that its very difficult unless you are Bill Gates to fund an entire program to go after the cure for a specific disease whether it be tuberculosis or lymphoma, and that without strong government funding and other organizations that this effort is really deemed to fail, but even small groups, even focused on a single center like the University of Wisconsin can provide seeding money that allows these projects to start up, it allows young investigators to get a foot in the door and allows them to get preliminary work done that then they can use as evidence to support their applications for broader funding. In addition, bringing funds in a specific disease area to the University of Wisconsin frankly works to force the dean and on down to provide research space, to recruit specifically people who are interested and successful in this area into our faculty, which we very much need to make this successful, and so money talks. We’ve developed a really excellent website in collaboration with our partners and that’s at www.forwardlymphoma.org.