FUNDRAISING FOR RESEARCH

As I was preparing for retirement in 2016, I became increasingly concerned that my junior colleagues around the world who were passionately committed to study Nutrition and Mental Health were having to leave the topic and develop their careers in other areas. The primary reason was that their grant applications to study a broad spectrum of nutrients (in balance, all together, in the manner required by the human brain) were being rejected by funding bodies who told them to study one nutrient at a time — the ‘magic bullet’ approach. I published a paper in 2007 on single-nutrient research published in the previous 100 years, showing how weak the magic bullet approach was, but that did not help my junior colleagues. So in 2015 I approached two community foundations and established (and seeded) two charitable funds to help support their work, as well as some educational programs.