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Hi Victor,
We hope you and Wendy are well. Mark and I wanted to thank
you for your continued support of The Windbridge Institute
and for always listing Windbridge in your weekly Afterlife
Report. We also wanted to respond to your previous commentaries
about university research.
While it is true that only a very small percentage of universities
(or other research institutions) actually perform paranormal
research, what is preventing more investigators from engaging
in such research has much more to do with money than with
“negligence” on the part of the institutions.
It is important to note that universities do not, for the
most part, fund research. They provide space and the basics
like electricity for laboratories, but the researchers themselves
are responsible for acquiring the funding needed to support
their studies. This funding is used to pay the salaries of
the research staff as well as to pay for equipment, computers,
copiers, paper, printer ink, books, journal subscriptions,
society memberships, travel for academic conferences, etc.,
etc., etc. Researchers most often acquire funding through
grants offered by--in the US--the federal government
or certain private organizations. Rarely, funding is provided
by generous individuals interested in certain types of research.
Usually, however, individual donations go more to support
the university infrastructure (for example, new buildings)
than actual research studies. In addition, at a university,
close to half of the acquired funding regardless of its source
goes to the institution for overhead costs and does not directly
support research.
This paradigm--again, at least in the US--forces
researchers in any and all scientific fields to choose between
the studies they would like to do and the studies for which
they can acquire funding. Thus, it is the “negligence”
of the funding organizations and not the universities per
se that most often prevents parapsychological research from
being done. Granted, the stigma of performing fringe parapsychological
or psi research (“the boo taboo” as Dr. Dean Radin
calls it) does its share of preventing researchers from embracing
these fields, but if there was money in them, it is only logical
that a lot more individuals would go for it anyway. No one
should be blamed for wanting a job that allows for the expenses
of shelter and food.
The reality is that there is very, very, VERY little funding
available to perform parapsychological research. This in turn
also makes it difficult to “waste” funding on
systematic replication studies that would solidify the reality
of the phenomena being studied. Researchers and funding organizations
alike prefer to use the limited resources to investigate new
questions or use new methods. This, however, prevents studies
from being replicated in order to increase the amount of evidence
for any particular phenomenon.
The current global economic crisis is making matters even
worse. A number of groups in the parapsychology community
as well as in other fields are not able to offer the grants
this year that they usually do. In the November 7th 2008 issue
of the journal Science, the “News of the Week”
section included an article by Jennifer Couzin about the impact
of current economic woes on the funding of scientific research.
“Among the first to feel the slowdown,” writes
Couzin, “are charitable foundations and other philanthropies,
which provide billions of dollars in funding to scientists
each year, including support for innovative, risky research
that the government may be reluctant to back.” Scientists
all over the US are losing their jobs because even philanthropic
organizations which rely on endowment income are working with
limited support. At Windbridge, we strongly rely on the support
of our members and donors in order to perform “innovative,
risky research that the government may be reluctant to back.”
At Windbridge, we were very honored to receive funding this
year from what may be considered the largest parapsychological
research grant available in the world: The Bial Foundation,
associated with a major pharmaceutical company of the same
name in Portugal, offers a biannual grant for research in
parapsychology and psychophysiology. We are so grateful for
this support, but to put it in perspective, the yearly funding
from a Bial research grant is a mere fraction of the yearly
funding provided by US federal grants from, for example, the
National Institutes of Health (NIH) or National Science Foundation
(NSF) for mainstream scientific research studies. Our project--an
objective analysis of mediums’ abilities that is a replication
of a previous study I performed while at a university--requires
four researchers as well as equipment, office supplies, etc.
and even with little to no overhead costs at Windbridge, the
Bial funding does not go as far as we would like and there
are few other options available for us to support that and
the other studies we hope to do this year.
So while ignorance and materialist denial on the part of university
researchers and administration definitely play a part in the
absence of psi research at those institutions, the real issue
is most likely an economic one.
Best wishes,
Julie and Mark
Julie Beischel, PhD
Director of Research
Mark Boccuzzi
Director of Operations
The Windbridge Institute for Applied Research in Human Potential
www.windbridge.org
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