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In these lean times, research institutions need to be creative in the quest for extra funding. The latest brainstorm is online bidding to encourage donor support for graduate research fellowships.

'Sponsor-a-Scientist' is an item on eBay, the online auction site, as of 4 September. The Sbarro Health Research Organization (SHRO), a non-profit collective based at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and the University of Siena in Italy, hopes it will yield at least one fellowship, to last a year, for graduate training. A best-case scenario would be five fellowships.

Bids start at US$25,000. The winner will be entitled to name the fellowship (in their name or to honour someone else), meet the sponsored researcher and tour the lab. Raffaela Cimina, director of development at the SHRO, which specializes in research into cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular disease, conceived the idea. At the time Nature went to press, there were no bids, but Cimina says they plan to renew the bid every ten days in the hope that word will spread and bids will materialize before the auction's target end date, tentatively planned for early 2010.

Some 120 graduate students and first-year postdocs are being trained at the SHRO to investigate the genetics of lung, breast and prostate cancer, hepatitis and cardiovascular disease, as well as stem-cell research and developmental biology. But despite success in securing grants from the US National Institutes of Health and state and private donors, raising the money needed to train graduates and postdocs is difficult. “Given the tightness of money for training new scientists and the pervasiveness of online portals and social networking, using the Internet to jumpstart a scientific career seemed a natural next step,” says SHRO president and chief executive Antonio Giordano. He says that SHRO wants to take advantage of sites such as eBay to reach new donors and engage the public in biomedical research. He also hopes to build connections between donors and researchers.

Steven Perrin, president of the non-profit ALS Technology Development Institute (ALS TDI) in Boston, Massachusetts, suggests that the SHRO's eBay approach could, if carefully implemented, ensure the long-term support needed for several years of student training. Giordano guarantees that the recipient of any fellowship will be covered for their entire training period by matching funds from existing donations.

“We all need to be creative to keep non-profits productive and moving forward,” says Perrin, whose organization focuses on amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a progressive neurodegenerative disease. The ALS TDI has already used social-networking sites, such as Facebook, to help connect those interested in research fund-raising for a particular disease.

If the eBay approach works, Giordano says the SHRO will expand the idea — and he expects that other institutions will follow its lead.

Sponsor-A-Scientist is at http://tinyurl.com/n5l2q2