The Limits Of a Crowd’s Wisdom

Crowdfunding, the practice of bringing together bright ideas and open wallets, appears to have limits. The producers who are working to complete Orson Welles’s unfinished final film, “The Other Side of the Wind,” could not raise $2 million that they had asked for online — or even $1 million after extending the deadline. And a campaign to crowdfund Greece out of its financial crisis fell a billion and a half euros short of its goal. But they tried. Still, there are plenty of success stories out there. The Foo Fighters say they will go play a concert in the small city of Cesena, Italy, after a group there raised $50,000 — most of it through crowdfunding — to produce a YouTube video in which 1,000 musicians performed the band’s “Learn to Fly.” The effort won’t save the eurozone, but at least it is entertaining.

And the crowdfunded entertainment gets bigger. The New York Wheel, a 192-meter Ferris wheel, is going up on Staten Island, and $ 450 million has already been raised through other financing. Now, The Times reports, the project’s leaders will try to raise $30 million more by selling shares through crowdfunding platforms.

Jim Dowd of North Capital Private Securities, which is working on the deal, said he believed the project “is going to be the largest transaction we’re aware of that has crowdfunding.”

Perhaps it is in terms of dollars, but maybe not in the size of the stakes. Some medical researchers are considering life-and- death propositions.

Ezekiel J. Emanuel and Steven Joffe, professors in the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, described in The Times how a former oncology professor of theirs was considering the ethics of one of his ideas. He had created a test that might determine the best chemotherapy for a patient’s cancer, and he wanted to conduct a research trial. He needed money for the trial, and he was thinking of charging the patients themselves. About $30,000 each.

The oncologist is not alone in this sort of thinking. Other scientists have been discussing whether this approach may be a way to advance worthwhile research.

“Ideas about potential tests and treatments for diseases like cancer, multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer’s disease are not being tried out because of a lack of research funds,” Drs. Emanuel and Joffe wrote. “Supporters have what appears to be a good case. Charging would result in more research, and the more research that is done, the more society learns about which drugs, devices and diagnostic tests work and which don’t.”

There would be value even in failed trials, they wrote, as “society learns what leads not to pursue. This kind of ‘pay-to-play’ research would be a form of crowdfunding, a kind of Kickstarter for clinical research.”

Nevertheless, the two ethicists think the crowd’s money is better left to rock concerts and Ferris wheels.

“Many people are willing to try almost anything for themselves or a loved one, especially a young child with a terminal illness,” they wrote. “And just because a person could write a check to enroll in a research study does not mean he or she cannot be taken unfair advantage of.”