Oceanographer Dr Ben McNeil developed http://thinkable.org/ to help address major shortfalls in funding for emerging scientists.
“Thinkable doesn't want to replace government funding but government grants tend to fund incremental research by established, more senior scientists, which is really important, Dr McNeil told SBS from his laboratory at the University of New South Wales.
“But what we do absolutely need is to work on is those breakthrough ideas that tend to come from younger researchers because that's where the next Nobel Prize will come from.”
Dr Martin Rees is pioneering new research into heart disease, an illness that kills an Australian every 12 minutes.
He's developed drugs he hopes will stop the immune system attacking blood vessels but he wouldn’t be testing them in the lab without the $36,000 dollars he’s raised on Thinkable.
“People have thought they knew how blood vessels get damaged during inflammation, during heart disease, but I have a totally new idea about how that damage occurs,” Dr Rees told SBS.
Initially Dr McNeil wanted to help researchers in Australia develop bold ideas that might not attract mainstream funding or competitive government grants.
But after just a few months the website is proving so popular he’s heading to Europe and the United States to develop global partnerships.
“Thinkable bight be Aussie but the potential is global. We have found that about seventy percent of interest has been from overseas so we are heading over in a couple of weeks to meet with potential partners and build on that.”
The site is designed to attract funding but it also encourages donors to learn, engage and track innovations as they happen.
Nobel Prize winning immunologist Peter Doherty says the site could attract big money.
“Having worked in the unites states for a long time I am very familiar with the benevolent investor who will burn money away just to be involved in innovative projects,” Professor Doherty said.
In Australia, on average, four out of five applications for competitive government funding is unsuccessful and, Dr McNeil says, a lot of brilliant minds end up leaving their field.
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