Excerpt from the innagural bulletin/newsletter of the Bhaktivedanta Institute, from an essay with the title, "About Bhaktivedanta Institute" (p.2):

Founded in 1976 by His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, the Bhaktivedanta Institute is a center for the advanced study of the origin and nature of life. While modern science revolves around the concept that everything (including life and consciousness) can be explained and understood in terms of matter alone, the scientists and scholars of the Bhakivedanta institute feel that this concept is too restrictive to account for the observed phenomena of life. Instead, the Institute members utilize the insights into life, consciousness, and the self discovered by the ancient Vedic scholars, who made the study of consciousness their primary concern and who held that conscious life is primordial and cannot be reduced to physio-chemical phenomena. On the basis of this information, the members of the Bhaktivedanta Institute are developing new scientific paradigms that incorporate consciousness and other higher-order bio-phenomena as irreducible features of nature.