Finding philanthropy: Like it? Pay for it : Nature News & Comment ('crowd funding')

The hard sell

Another objection to crowd-funding may be harder to shake. To sell a project, researchers need an attention-grabbing story (see ‘How to woo the crowd’). That is easy to construct if your subject of study is, say, saving pandas or curing cancer. It is less so for researchers working on polymers. So will crowd-funding prove profitable only for 'sexy' science?