Exhausted by the hunt for research funds? Disgusted with departmental politics? Take heart, there may be an alternative. Witness the tale of Canadian astronomer Bruce Campbell. For four years, Campbell toiled at the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory in Victoria, British Columbia. But chronic underfunding made it impossible for the observatory to offer him a permanent position, so he left in June 1987. And while Campbell had just received a three-year grant from the National Science and Engineering Research Council for two research assistants and travel expenses to the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope, he lacked a salary for himself. By this past summer, he was fed up. "I worked on the project for nearly 1-1/2 years without pay, and I finally concluded that I couldn't do that any longer," he says.
So Campbell decided to follow in the footsteps of yesterday's artists and today's athletes and seek a patron. After all, he argues, a ...
