Editor’s note: Since this story's publication WIRED has made several clarifications and corrections, which are described at the bottom of this piece.

On Monday night Gary Taubes will begin his second transatlantic trip in a week—from Zurich to Aspen—then eventually head back to Oakland, which he calls home. The crusading science journalist best known for his beef with Big Sugar is heading back from four days at a nutrition conference, where he spent time advocating for a new study into the role of diet in obesity and diabetes. It’s the same kind of work he has taken up with the Nutrition Science Initiative, his nonprofit dedicated to improving the quality of nutrition research. But while the research is pressing forward, the future of his unconventional organization is less certain.

NuSI (pronounced new-see) launched in September 2012 to much fanfare, including in the pages of WIRED. It quickly raised more than $40 million from big-name donors to facilitate expensive, high-risk studies intended to illuminate the root causes of obesity. Taubes and his cofounder, physician-researcher Peter Attia, contended that nutritional science was so inconsistent partly because it was so expensive to do right. With a goal of raising an additional $190 million, they wanted to fund science that would help cut the prevalence of obesity in the US by more than half—and diabetes by 75 percent—by 2025.

Rehabilitating the entire field of nutrition research was always a long shot. But six years in, NuSI is nowhere near achieving its lofty ambitions. In fact, the once-flush organization is nearly broke and all but gone. It’s been three years since it last tweeted, two years since it’s had a real office; today NuSI consists of two part-time employees and an unpaid volunteer hanging around.

But while the organization is almost out of money, Taubes is not yet out of ideas.

When Taubes and Attia first hatched their “Manhattan Project for nutrition,” they planned to work on it nights and weekends, crowdsourcing funds from the low-carb corners of the internet. Between a 2002 New York Times Magazine cover story titled “What If It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?” and his best-selling book Good Calories, Bad Calories, Taubes had become the country’s anti-sugar agitator-in-chief. Then, in 2011, Taubes received an email from a former natural gas trader named John Arnold, who wanted to help.

In May 2012, just weeks after announcing his and his wife’s new charity aimed at reforming iffy areas of science, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation gave NuSI a $4.7 million seed grant to do nutrition research right. In 2013 they followed that up with an additional $35.5 million commitment over five years, making them NuSI’s lead funder.

At the heart of their mission was the decades-old question of whether all calories are, in fact, created equal. The mainstream view is that it’s simply an excess of calories that makes people fat—no matter whether those calories come from a bagel or a steak or a bowl of broccoli. Taubes and Attia subscribe to a growing minority stance, dubbed the carbohydrate/insulin or C/I hypothesis, that contends obesity is caused by an excess of insulin driving energy into fat stores. In other words, carbs make people fat.

Taubes and Attia thought those questions needed a more streamlined research approach to get real answers. So they formed NuSI to funnel money into a rigorous new set of studies while leaving scientists with the experimental independence that would shield their results from bias.