The Foundation was endowed at filing in 2000 and its fundraising line has read zero every year since. We are not short of money. We are short of scrutiny, of good proposals, and of people willing to tell us where we are wrong.
The Foundation does not fundraise. It was endowed once, in 2000, and has taken nothing from anybody since. There is no membership, no appeal and no annual campaign, and there is not going to be one. What follows is the list of things that are actually useful to us, in the order we would rank them.
Everything the Foundation has funded since 1951 is published, including the coupon libraries, the failure reports and the two hundred and six negative results. Criticism that arrives with a number attached is the most valuable thing we receive, and it arrives by post.
We retain no intellectual property. Three groups we have never funded have built variants of our spectrometer head; that is the intended outcome and requires no permission, no licence and no acknowledgement.
Two rounds a year. Six pages. Nineteen per cent funded. The Foundation’s most common regret is the proposal it never received because somebody assumed a foundation would not fund seals. How to apply →
The Foundation accepts bequests and restricted gifts of instruments, archives and land, arranged in writing with the Secretary. It runs no campaign, employs no fundraiser, and will decline anything conditional on naming, exclusivity or an embargo.
An endowed foundation that starts fundraising acquires an audience, and an audience has to be told things on a schedule. The moment the Foundation needs an announcement every quarter it stops being able to publish four empty years in the middle of its own history, which is the part of the record we are least willing to give up.
So the arrangement is deliberately one-directional: we spend, we publish, and we ask nothing of the public except that the archive stays open behind us.
Write to us. It is read, and answered in the order received by the office of the Secretary. We do not operate a switchboard and we do not answer questions about the founder beyond what is already on the leadership page.