Virginia Tech Professor Spent $147k to Help Uncover the Flint Water Scandal
Weird that nobody has mentioned this yet:  The article claims that Prof. Edwards spent $147k from his discretionary research funds and personal funds.  He's still a good guy and has probably used a non-trivial amount of his own money, but it's not like he had to pull all of it out of his bank account.  Discretionary research funds are given to researchers as money for them to spend on whatever research they find interesting.  It's kind of like 3M's 20% time.  The article doesn't mention how much of the $147k came from his research money and how much came from his pocket book.  Why?  Because it's not as sensational to find out that this guy (who is a tenured professor at a big school) put up $125k of research money and $22k of his own.  I don't know what the actual numbers are but I wouldn't be surprised if he put up less than $50k of his own money and had the vast majority come from research funds, considering his history (wikipedia claims he received a $450k grant in 2011 from the EPA to study lead and copper in the water).Again, I'm not saying he's a fraud.  He probably still put up a decent chunk himself.  He did take out a mortgage on his house, but it doesn't mean that he put 100% of the value of his house towards this crisis.  All I'm saying is don't get caught up in all the sensationalism.