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My nephew asked me why nobody talks about the guy who invented the ice bucket challenge anymore
My 11 year old nephew was on his tablet at a family dinner in Sacramento and out of nowhere asked me who started the ice bucket challenge, because he saw a video about it at school. I said Pete Frates, and then I realized I could not remember the last time the name came up anywhere, even though in 2014 it was literally every feed I had. We ended up reading about the ALS money and where it went, and he said 'so it still worked even after people got bored?' which honestly stuck with me. I guess I always thought of those viral moments as things that just die, but the money kept funding research long after everyone stopped dumping ice on themselves. Does anyone here actually keep up with a cause after the hashtag stops trending, or do we all just move to the next thing?
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calebross14d ago
That part about it still working is what gets me. My aunt did the challenge in 2014 and honestly we all forgot about it by October. But the ALS Association kept putting that money into things like the Ice Bucket Challenge project that mapped out genes linked to the disease. They found a new gene called NEK1 in 2016 with some of that cash. That was two years after everyone moved on to the next thing. So yeah, the trend died but the money didn't. Kind of wild that a bunch of people dumping ice on their heads in their backyards is still paying off a decade later.
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