wich research/cause most urgently requires funding/voluntary work?

mod: please append 'sand' to the beginning of thread title.

I don't know, sebastien, sorry. good luck.

zut. another typo.
french should be the lingua franca of ile.

Causes that are harder to sell are underfunded and therefore attract less scientists since they need the money for their research.
It's a self-reinforcing circular pattern ( just like writing in english on the internet because it's the most popular language, when I think about it). I remember not too long ago Bill Gates gave a lot of cash to some of these causes that are unappealing from a marketting point of view.

(p.s. can moderators really modify the title of a thread? if so, could someone please correct this one so it can just get the attention it deserves)

Thinking about popular charitable organizations, I'm not surprised to hear from time to time (more or less) half of the money raised actually goes to the administrative costs.

I finally found a satisfying answer to that question on a site I discovered a couple of days ago called worldchanging.org :

"Ten Cents
Big Systems - Global Institutions, Governance and History

The Millennium Development Goals are the closest thing we have to an international consensus on how to meet the basic needs of everyone on the planet.

It's an imposing to-do list: eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, provide universal education, ensure sustainability, etc. But it all hinges on one thing - keeping people healthy. At least, that's what Jeffrey
Sachs says (PDF): "One cannot think about poverty reduction without thinking about improvements
in health. ... People who are sick and dying do not get out of poverty. Children orphaned by AIDS or other killers do not have much prospect of getting out of poverty in the world that we are living in. ...You need a strategy; the strategy must be for universal access to essential health services. People need to stay alive for societies to have a chance to achieve development."

But - and here's the kicker - providing universal essential health care is entirely within our means:

"[W]e found that $25 billion was needed to deliver basic life-saving health services for the low income countries. If you do the arithmetic, it is $25 billion out of $25 trillion. That’s one-thousandth of the rich world’s GNP! Just 10 cents out of every $100 of rich countries’ GNP."

That's right, for ten cents off every Benjamin Franklin we spend in the wealthy world, we could be starting to turn this thing around. And Sachs is talking about what's possible right now, given current technologies and political restraints, not what is becoming possible with changing priorities, non-profit pharmaceutical companies and collaborative efforts. Sometimes what's most galling isn't what we can't do, but what we could."