Hey, buddy, can you spare a dollar for a passionate researcher?

Posted on June 28, 2012 at 12:34 PM EDT

Biologist Brenda Larison retrieves a dart that contains a bit of skin from a zebra in Africa. Larison is trying to raise funds for her zebra research project through the crowdfunding website, Petridish.

UCLA biologist Brenda Larison is on the hunt for an answer to a question that has never been resolved by scientists but has tantalized many a kindergartner, among others: Why do zebras have stripes? And not just any pattern of stripes, Larison asks. Why do the patterns differ among plains zebras living in different locations in Africa?

Does it make any sense that, through natural selection, zebras have acquired stripes that make them easier to spot by their predators? Or can striping actually offer the animal an advantage? Does it confuse lions, for example, who, watching zebras rush by, can’t tell where one ends and another begins?

Larison is hoping to answer such questions by collecting samples of DNA from zebras living in six different locations in Africa, identifying the genes responsible for striping, mapping their genetic and stripe variations, and looking at variables in their environment.

Is that a research goal worth pursuing? Some 23 members of the public think so and have pledged a total of $2,694 to cover Larison’s travel and fieldwork expenses through a website called petridish.org.

Larison is one of a handful of Web-savvy, entrepreneurial graduate students and staffers at UCLA who have turned to a process called crowdfunding to raise money for their book, film and research projects. Creating eye-catching videos and blogs designed to give people an inside look at how research is done, they appeal directly to the public on websites such as Petridish, RocketHub, Fundmyresearch and Kickstarter, the giant crowdfunding site that has raised more than $100 million for creative projects since its launch in 2009.

While UCLA consistently ranks high among top research universities that receive the most research dollars — the campus was awarded $955.4 million in 2011-12 — young investigators everywhere are having a hard time cobbling together start-up funding. "Because it’s so hard these days to get any funding, people are attracted to this idea of a different approach and different sources," Larison said. "It’s a way of getting funding in the very beginning when you don’t actually have data. That’s really helpful because there aren’t many places you can go to otherwise. You always have to start small."

Visitors to these websites can pledge $25 to $2,500 or more to projects. In exchange for posting their projects, researchers pay the site a small percentage of what they raise — 5 percent for Larison — plus third-party credit card processing fees in some cases, if they are successful in raising all or most of their goal amount within a given timeframe. If they are unsuccessful at making that threshold, they pay nothing and receive nothing.

Larison is an assistant researcher whose day job at UCLA is working for scientists in two well-established biology labs on campus investigating problems that don't involve zebras. But she has already gone to Africa to do field work on a $20,000 grant from the National Geographic Society. Through Petridish— a crowdfunding website that accepts projects from tenured and junior faculty, postdocs and graduate students from universities, nonprofits and research institutions —Larison hopes to raise $10,000 to return to Africa to collect the remaining samples she needs to develop preliminary data before she applies to a funding organization.

But she may end up not raising any money — she is now 11 days away from her deadline to meet her goal, and she has raised 26 percent of it so far, most of it from family and friends.

If she can’t find enough donors, then all her efforts and time will have been for naught. To promote her work, she has had to put up a website and a blog about her research, make a splashy video, design zebra T-shirts for her top donors and come up with other clever giveaways.

"Grant-writing also takes time away from your research, but at least once you’re done, you turn it in and that’s the end of it," Larison said. "But this? You have to keep working at it. Now I have a blog in National Geographic. … It’s generating a whole lot of work of its own."

Christina Marisa Tellez, a biologist who studies alligator parasites.

Christina Marisa Tellez, a Ph.D. candidate in biology at UCLA, decided to pitch her project to study alligators’ immune responses to parasites on RocketHub to raise $3,000.

Although she ended up raising 50 percent of her goal and ultimately getting nothing, she was thrilled with the media attention and public support it brought her as an alligator researcher. Tellez has been the subject of newspaper articles and a segment on KPCC and LatiNation, a nationally syndicated TV show. "I’ve been contacted by a couple of production companies from Discovery and Animal Planet to do a mini-documentary on my research," she said.

"Being able to reach out to the public and non-academics and getting their support for my project has been tremendous," said Tellez, who now keeps a lively blog about her alligator adventures, travel to exotic locales and the social life of a busy grad student.

While Tellez enjoys the public exposure, it’s something that Larison said she’s not used to. "I feel a little bit exposed," she said, preferring the privacy of a lab. "But it really made me think about how to present my work in an engaging way." To get people to care enough to contribute, Larison had to think about how to make her work meaningful to non-scientists.

That’s what biology graduate student and nature photographer Neil Losin and his collaborators accomplished with their project, a photo-rich book on the colorful Wall Lizards of the Pityusic Archipelago, a winner on Kickstarter. Having succeeded at surpassing their $15,000 goal and reaching $20,045, Losin is currently on the Spanish island of Formentera, one of the few places where the threatened species can be found.

Eyal Alony, director of the Professional Programs in Screenwriting and Producing at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, said the public process of being on Kickstarter was vital in being able to raise $27,850 in one month to make "Silk," a short film he and three other UCLA alumni are making about a Glendale woman who was a Yemeni child bride, given away by her family when she was 10. Alony and the film’s director, Catherine Dent, who was a regular on the now-defunct FX drama, "The Shield," co-wrote the screenplay for the American Film Institute’s Directing Workshop for Women, and it’s now being shot in the Los Angeles area. Kickstarter donations have provided everything from portable toilets to a make-up trailer.

"With crowdfunding, we reached people who want to see us make the film that we told them we’d make. We reached those people quickly and on a mass scale," wrote Alony in an email. He is also co-producer on the film.

"Our goal is to make the movie we want to make, to tell the story we want to tell and to do it our way. It’s nice not to have venture capitalists to answer to," said Alony.

Director Catherine Dent (from the left scouts a location for the film, "Silk,"with production designer Shamim Seifzadeh and producer Nikit Doshi.

"I think the primary reason people donate is that there is an understanding of how difficult it is to make a film," Alony said. There’s also a sense of empathy among artists who want to help other artists. "There are generous people who want to be part of the process of making a film, and there are family members who had no choice but to help us if they wanted to have a peaceful Thanksgiving this year."

Alony conceded that there are drawbacks to using crowdfunding, especially since no money will exchange hands if you don’t meet your goal. Also, transactions aren’t processed until you reach the funding deadline so donors have time to retract their pledges. "But that wasn’t our experience," he noted. "We have nearly 300 backers, and every one of them came through."

At the very least, crowdfunding is giving independent filmmakers a chance, Alony said. "If your film doesn’t target 14-year-old boys or isn’t based on an ’80s board game, it probably won’t get made in a risk-averse Hollywood system. … Crowdfunding gives filmmakers an opportunity to turn their passion into reality, to [have a] voice themselves, and to reach audiences with a story that might otherwise never be told."

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