|
 |
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
|
| |
|