Up until a few months ago, I had thought academic research—being traditionally government funded—was generally fairly well insulated from the economic boom-bust cycles or even large-scale financial frauds. Well, I was pretty naïve, to put it mildly.

As universities dip into their endowments and researchers turn to private foundations for funding, they are becoming more susceptible to the craziness of Wall Street and yes, to conmen too.

Mass High Tech and Science have articles describing how the grants of several researchers in the Boston area and beyond are simply vanishing because of the collapse of Bernard Madoff’s alleged Ponzi scheme. Turns out that some foundations that fund a lot of research were investors of Madoff’s. For example, the Picower Foundation, which funded a lot of neuroscience research and whose endowment was in the hands of Madoff, says it will close its doors in the coming months, according to the two articles, leaving researchers including Jeff Flier, dean of Harvard Medical School, with promised funding that will never materialize.

For MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, its $50 million in startup funds from the foundation have already been paid but it was promised another $4 million to launch an innovation fund. Both articles say that this additional funding might not come through.