Pouring accolades on ‘Ice Bucket Challenge’
ALS Association says it was able to fund new research that led to a breakthrough
Maybe you did it, pouring a bucket of ice water on your head in order to raise money for charity. Maybe you hated the viral phenomenon with a burning passion.
But no matter how you felt about the “Ice Bucket Challenge” when it took over the Internet in the fall of 2014, the meme is actually getting results, according to the main charity that benefited from the campaign.
With the millions raised for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) research from the viral stunt, the ALS Association said it was able to fund research that identified a new gene, NEK1, that contributes to the disease, the non-profit announced on Monday.
The breakthrough is the subject of a paper published in Nature Genetics.
The Ice Bucket Challenge was inescapable in 2014, as it spread like a chain letter across Facebook.
It was fundraising-as-meme. Justin Bieber, LeBron James, Oprah Winfrey and Bill Gates were among the endless parade of celebrities who did it. It became a bad Halloween costume.
At the time, some worried that the campaign wouldn’t actually “raise awareness” for ALS, because the disease seemed to be secondary to watching the spectacle of a bunch of people volunteering for temporary misery.
Or, that all those ice bucket champions wouldn’t actually follow through with the donations they promised as part of the challenge. And sure, the celebrities and bros who participated in the viral phenomenon may not have talked at length about ALS, and it seems fair to assume that not ev- eryone who did a video made a donation. But the campaign still raised a ton of money to fund research.
The viral campaign raised more than $115 million (U.S.) for the ALS Association alone, in order to fund research into new treatments for the disease. ALS is also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, a progressive neurological condition that causes muscle weakness and atrophy from the deterioration of nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord. The disease has no cure, and it is always fatal, often within less than a decade of diagnosis.
The gene discovery isn’t even the only breakthrough for which the Ice Bucket Challenge is getting partial credit so far: last August — a year after the challenge went viral — scientists at Johns Hopkins said that the money raised from the campaign had a big effect on their work.
“Without it, we wouldn’t have been able to come out with the studies as quickly as we did,” lead researcher Philip Wong, a professor at Johns Hopkins, told the Washington Post last year.
According to CNN, the ALS Association planned to spend $77 million of the $115 million raised through the challenge on research like the one that led to this particular discovery. The project in question, Project MinE, received just $1 million of that windfall.