Support
The Foundation was endowed at filing in 2000 and its fundraising line has read zero every year since. It runs no appeal, employs no fundraiser, and has never asked the public for a credit. There are, however, five things that would genuinely help.
What actually helps
Everything the Foundation has funded since 1951 is published, including the coupon libraries, the failure reports and the 206 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 dates are published before they are met and the misses are published afterwards, in the same place and the same type: 1984 to 1987 is four years in which the Foundation committed nothing at all. Check the 2031 window against what we said about it in 2021, and write to us where the two disagree.
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.