Hanso Foundation

The Dharma Initiative, also written DHARMA (Department of Heuristics and Research on Material Applications), is a fictional research project featured in the television series Lost. It was introduced in the second season episode "Orientation". In 2008, the Dharma Initiative website was launched. Dharma's interests were directly connected with fringe science. Dharma is a Sanskrit term used in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. The logo is a circle with the word "dharma" inside, all inscribed inside a bagua.

The Dharma Initiative and its origins are first explored in the episode "Orientation" by an orientation film in the Swan Station. Dr. Pierre Chang (Francois Chau), under the alias of Dr. Marvin Candle, explains that the project began in 1970, created by two doctoral candidates from the University of Michigan, Gerald and Karen DeGroot (Michael Gilday and Courtney Lavigne), and was funded by Alvar Hanso (Ian Patrick Williams) of the Hanso Foundation. They imagined a "large-scale communal research compound", where scientists and free thinkers from around the globe could research meteorology, psychology, parapsychology, zoology, electromagnetism, and a sixth discipline that the film begins to identify as "utopian social-" before being cut off.

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