Tuesday, 2 April 2013
The Brain from Top to Bottom Turns to Its Readers for Funding
As you can read in the column to the right, after having sponsored us for more than 10 years, the CIHR Institute of Neurosciences, Mental Health and Addiction has been forced by budget cuts to cease our funding as of March 31, 2013. We were given the news in August 2012, and ever since our little team has been looking for another source of stable funding to let us continue our mission of providing the general public with the best possible information about the brain and neuroscience.
We have approached a number of organizations, all of which have recognized the value of our work, but we still have not succeeded in finding a sponsor. So for the moment, we are forced to turn to our readers for funding to let us continue updating and adding new content to this blog and this web site.
Within the next few days, the column to the right will be replaced with the fundraising thermometer that you see here. This thermometer shows, in order of priority, from the bottom up, what work we plan to do with the the money that we raise and how much money we still need to raise to meet our annual budget. Any contributors who wish can have their names or the names of their organizations appear opposite the amount of their contribution as the “mercury” in this thermometer rises.
Our system to let you make donations on-line will be up and running shortly, and we hope that it will let us raise enough funds to stay productive until we find more stable funding. We are currently negotiating with a number of organizations, but many of them are just as short of funds as we are. That is no surprise, given Canada’s current Conservative government, which openly votes against science, but it does not make our task any easier.
Please rest assured, though, that we will do our utmost to keep this site accessible in the original spirit of the Internet: the desire to share information free of charge and with no advertising.
In closing, we want to thank you most sincerely for your past and future support, whether moral or financial.
The Brain from Top to Bottom team
Bruno Dubuc, Patrick Robert, Denis Paquet and Al Daigen
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P.S.: We wouldn’t want our financial worries to distract us from our main reason for publishing this blog: the pleasure of sharing new findings and discoveries about the human brain. So let me take this opportunity to tell you about the excellent web site that Eric H. Chudler, editor of the web site Neuroscience for Kids, has selected as the Site of the Month for April 2013. The web site is called HeadNeckBrainSpine. It is edited by Dr. Brett Young, and it presents images of neural structures in the brain and the neck, all captured by a method called magnetic resonance imaging. The site provides a very original method for navigating through the images, which have been captured in three dimensions and are presented in the three major anatomical planes (axial, coronal and sagittal) in three panes on the screen. When you click on a colour-coded structure in any one of the panes, the images in the two others sync up with it, so that you can explore the structure in all three planes at once. This makes it much easier to understand the structure’s shape and location. (For complete instructions, see the video on the site’s home page). In other words, this site looks at the brain at various levels, an approach that has already proven successful right here. After all, The Brain from Top to Bottom was itself selected as the Neuroscience for Kids Site of the Month in May 2004!? 😉
HeadNeckBrainSpine
Neuroscience for Kids
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