Remember when everyone poured buckets of icy cold water over themselves, filmed it and then posted it to Facebook? What you may not remember is that it wasn’t just so people could get stupid on social, it was actually a challenge where people had to donate in order to do it to help fund research into the progressive neurodegenerative disease ALS.
Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), or motor neuronsdisease as it’s also known, is a rapidly progressive disease that affects the brain and spinal cord. It derives from the Greek language, literally meaning ‘no muscle nourishment.’ When the muscle is not nourished, it wastes away, and leaves people in a body that is unable to move, talk and eventually breathe.
But, some good news, it actually turns out that throwing buckets of freezing cold water over ourselves did some good. The challenge raised $115m (that’s £85.7m if converting dollars to pounds isn’t your strong point). A crazy 17 million people uploaded their ALS Ice Bucket Challenge videos to Facebook, and they were watched in total by 440 million people worldwide. The proceeds went on to fund six different research projects.
One of the six projects was Project MinE, a data-driven initiative funded by the ALS Association with the donations. On Monday the project’s researchers were able to announce that they have identified a new gene associated with the disease, that could go on to new treatment possibilities, and understand ALS better.
Celebrities like Anna Wintorr, Benedict Cumberbatch and Chris Pratt were among those that took the challenge, and while it was criticized at the time for wasting drinking water and not educating people about what ALS actually was, it’s evident that this social media challenge did a whole lot of good.
If you need to jog your memory on some of the best ice bucket challenges, here you go.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.