Falling Prey

The Picower Foundation of Palm Beach will be closing its doors, having lost over a half a billion dollars in the alleged Ponzi scheme run by Bernard Madoff, reports the Boston Globe. Picower funded cultural programs, human rights and child advocacy programs, and medical research. Its medical research grantees included Harvard Medical School, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania. "It's just so horrific," Virginia Lee, the director of the Center for Neurodegenerative Disease Research at UPenn tells ScienceInsider. She expects the Parkinson's disease consortium she was a part of to "fall apart" as a result.