Read your way through the serious research on mediumship, near-death experiences and after-death communication and sooner or later you hit a name that is never the subject of any of the studies and yet turns up almost everywhere – in the small print, in the acknowledgements, in the funding line: Fundação BIAL. The Portuguese foundation is one of the few funders worldwide that support psychophysiology and parapsychology systematically and across decades. This article explains who is behind it, how much money actually flows, which of the studies presented here depend on it – and what its critics object to.
A foundation between a pharmaceutical company and the universities
The BIAL Foundation was created in 1994, and not by one wealthy individual but by two parties jointly: the Portuguese pharmaceutical company Bial and the Council of Rectors of Portuguese Universities (Conselho de Reitores das Universidades Portuguesas). Both institutions still appoint representatives to its management. That construction matters more than it sounds: the foundation is therefore not a pure corporate vehicle but institutionally tied into the Portuguese university system.
Its stated mission is deliberately broad: to foster the scientific study of the human being "from both the physical and spiritual perspectives". The man behind that wording is Luís Portela, a physician, president of the Bial company from 1979 to 2021 and today president of the foundation. Portela makes no secret of his personal motivation: an interest in spirituality and parapsychology, he says in interviews, is what brought him to medicine in the first place, and he has published several books on the subject. This is precisely the point on which the criticism later turns. More on that below.
The grants programme in numbers
The core of the foundation's work is a biennial grants programme for research projects in psychophysiology and parapsychology. The figures the foundation itself publishes, as of September 2025, give an unusually clear picture:
- Up to 60,000 euros per project.
- 3,722 applications in total, of which 946 projects were approved.
- Around 1,900 researchers from 31 countries were involved.
- In the most recent round the approval rate was 19 per cent – four out of five applications are turned down.
- Funding between 1994 and 2024 produced 2,141 articles in indexed journals, about half of them in Q1 journals, that is, in the top quartile of their field.
How much of that goes to parapsychology in the narrow sense is quantified by the Psi Encyclopedia of the Society for Psychical Research: "About 30% of its grants go to parapsychology, with a further 19% spanning parapsychology and psychophysiology." In other words: close to half the research budget of a foundation operating in the millions goes into a field that has no regular budget line at most universities.
The rest is strikingly conventional. Alongside the grants the foundation awards several mainstream medical prizes: the Prémio Bial de Medicina Clínica (120,000 euros, awarded in 21 editions since the mid-1980s), the Bial Award in Biomedicine created in 2018 (350,000 euros, biennial since 2019), the Maria de Sousa Award for young Portuguese researchers together with the Portuguese Medical Association, and the Nuno Grande Doctoral Scholarships. Anyone reducing the foundation to parapsychology is describing the smaller part of what it does.
"Behind and Beyond the Brain"
Since 1996 the foundation has held a symposium every two years under the programmatic title Behind and Beyond the Brain. The series began from a practical need: grant holders needed a venue at which to present and discuss their projects. It grew into one of the very few conferences where brain research and frontier research sit in the same room.
The speaker list shows this more clearly than any mission statement. Alongside parapsychologists such as Dean Radin, Edwin May, Robert Morris, Ian Stevenson and Peter Fenwick, the platform has hosted neuroscientists of the standing of António Damásio, dream researcher Allan Hobson, Harvard psychologist Stephen Kosslyn and sleep researcher Robert Stickgold. The themes of the individual editions mirror the same dual nature: Exceptional Experiences, Consciousness and Brain, Memory, Sleep and Dreams, Intuition and Decision-making, Mind-matter Interactions, Placebo effects, Healing and Meditation, The Mystery of Time, and most recently Creativity.
In 2014 a documentation centre was added: a publicly searchable database of every funded project since 1994, with the resulting papers and symposium contributions available for download. Anyone who wants to know what actually became of the money can look it up – a degree of transparency that is not a given in this field.
Why this matters for mediumship research
The reason the foundation keeps appearing on HeavenConnect is simple: without it, a substantial part of the research we write about here would not exist.
- Windbridge. When Julie Beischel founded the Windbridge Institute with Mark Boccuzzi in 2008, a BIAL grant was part of the initial funding. Later Windbridge projects were supported by the programme as well.
- The 2013 EEG study. Arnaud Delorme, Julie Beischel, Leena Michel, Mark Boccuzzi, Dean Radin and Paul J. Mills examined the brain activity of mediums during subjectively experienced contact – published in Frontiers in Psychology (volume 4, article 834). The funding note reads, verbatim: "This study was supported by a research bursary from the Bial Foundation." It is thus one of the precursors to the work Jeffrey Tarrant later deepened with imaging techniques.
- The ADC study. The international research project on spontaneous after-death communications around Evelyn Elsaesser, Chris Roe, Callum Cooper and David Lorimer – with more than 1,300 participants across six languages the largest survey of its kind – is funded among others by the BIAL Foundation and the Society for Psychical Research.
- Near-death research.Bruce Greyson is among the inner circle of invited speakers at the symposia; the detailed portrait film about his work at the University of Virginia was produced by the foundation itself and is linked in our knowledge collection.
The same pattern could be extended to other names: Etzel Cardeña, Chris Roe and Christine Simmonds-Moore appear in the award lists of recent rounds. Anyone who wants to run a study in this field with a control group, blinding and pre-registration needs money for it – and the number of addresses to apply to is small.
What money changes structurally
It is easy to underestimate a funding body, because it argues no thesis in any footnote. In practice, though, funding decides which questions can be asked at all in a form that holds up methodologically. A quintuple-blind protocol with paid participants, trained raters and statistical pre-registration costs a multiple of what an interested lone researcher can fund out of pocket.
And this is where the real effect lies: the foundation ties its money to scientific standards. Applications pass through a selection process with a high rejection rate, funded projects are expected to publish, and the record is measured in indexed publications. That roughly half of those papers appear in Q1 journals is a quality marker that cannot be produced by goodwill – acceptance is decided by peer reviewers who have nothing to do with the foundation.
For a field with almost no institutional base at universities this means something specific: the research has not disappeared, it has moved. Private money in science is nothing unusual in itself – industry funding, contract research and endowed chairs are everyday features of any university. The difference is that private money there adds to the core provision, whereas here it replaces it: where there are no chairs, no departmental budgets and hardly any public research funding, a handful of private foundations is the only address left. In Germany this is comparable to the role played by the IGPP in Freiburg.
The other side
The foundation has prominent critics, and their objections deserve to be stated precisely. The best known is the physicist Carlos Fiolhais (University of Coimbra), one of Portugal's most influential science writers, who has publicly attacked the funding on the blog De Rerum Natura. His arguments come down to three points:
- The terms Portela uses are imprecise – the "energy" his books speak of has "nothing to do with the energy of physics".
- Phenomena such as telepathy or communication with the dead are not scientifically established, and many of the works cited lack sufficient credibility.
- Parapsychology has historically seen a great deal of fraud – an objection Portela does not dispute but assigns to the nineteenth century, answering that psychology sees plenty of fraud too.
The first objection hits a real weakness, though one of the founder's popular books rather than of the funded studies: use physical terms metaphorically and you invite the question. The second is the actual matter in dispute, and it cannot be settled by suspicion, only against the data – for instance against Patrizio Tressoldi's meta-analysis, which puts exactly this question in quantitative terms. The third holds, and holds equally for every field under publication pressure.
That leaves the structural suspicion usually humming beneath such debates: a funder with a worldview of his own might pull results in one direction. The point is legitimate – but it is answered by how the money is awarded, not by who gives it. An application process with a 19 per cent approval rate, independent peer review at publication and a public project database are precisely the instruments by which that suspicion can be tested. Anyone accusing the foundation of steering results would have to demonstrate it at those points. Conversely, it would be less than honest to pretend that industry funding elsewhere in medicine is a solved problem.
Conclusion
The BIAL Foundation is not a research institute and argues no thesis. It is infrastructure – and it is the reason a part of the questions this site deals with are investigated under laboratory conditions at all rather than merely discussed. Anyone seriously examining the evidence on mediumship, near-death experiences and after-death communication should know who pays for it; that belongs to the assessment. And anyone who does examine it will find that the conditions attached to this money are stricter than the field's reputation suggests.
Sources:
• Fundação BIAL, An overview of the Bial Foundation (fact sheet, as of September 2025) and Grants for Scientific Research, fundacaobial.com.
• Society for Psychical Research, Psi Encyclopedia, entry Bial Foundation, psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk.
• Arnaud Delorme, Julie Beischel, Leena Michel, Mark Boccuzzi, Dean Radin & Paul J. Mills, Electrocortical activity associated with subjective communication with the deceased, Frontiers in Psychology 4 (2013), article 834, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00834.
• Carlos Fiolhais, Sobre a parapsicologia apoiada pela Fundação Bial, blog De Rerum Natura (2018).
• Interviews with Luís Portela, among others in Diário de Notícias and Revista Líder (Portugal).
For more, see our curated knowledge collection – it links to interviews and studies on mediumship research, near-death experiences and the scientific debate.