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| Best Practices: Philanthropy |
The Scientific Method
Mark Dowie
09/01/2004
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Frontier Mentality
After World War II ended, Vannevar Bush, a
central figure in the development of nuclear fission and the Manhattan Project
as director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, declared
science “the endless frontier.” He guided the nation’s leaders and academies
toward preeminence in technology that would last half a century. With that
imperative, Bush persuaded the government to pump so much money into research
that, to many observers, private science philanthropy seemed almost irrelevant.
But some prominent philanthropists were more motivated than ever, turning their
attention toward influencing public policy and pulling the government’s purse
strings.
Mary Lasker, wife of the late advertising pioneer Albert Lasker and
a noted donor to medical research in her own right, spearheaded a lobbying
effort in 1952 that helped increase the National Cancer Institute’s annual
budget from $18 million a year to $110 million. Even so, in a television
interview with Edward R. Murrow in 1959, she called the amount of government
money going into medical research “just a piddling.” She added: “The Department
of Defense spends 185 times more on defending us against dying in a military
attack than the federal government spends on research against the sure killers
and cripplers of our people, like cancer and heart disease and arthritis and
mental illness and a variety of other things. And you won’t believe this: Less
is spent on cancer research than we spend on chewing gum!”
Questions for a Science Philanthropist
• Is this initiative bound
to run into a public policy stumbling block? Would a successful discovery be a catalyst for policy change?
• How will a discovery in this field change
the way we live? Will it have a positive impact on society?
• Will the
research pay off in my lifetime? Can it be commercially applied? Does this
really matter to me? |
While a faction
among philanthropists worries that the United States is in danger of losing its
scientific edge, science funding in the 21st century seems headed primarily
toward building the next big thing in the global economy, or perhaps the
galactic sphere. Rockefeller and Carnegie believed that philanthropy should look
for investment returns, and it is no accident that Allen and his kind today are
devotees of the venture philanthropy school of giving. (See The Business of Philanthropy.) Many of us are intent on paving the road to invention with seed
grants for wholly new concepts that could someday be ripe for privatization. If
there is even the remotest possibility of financial gain from an experimental
drug, microprocessor or other novel product, a savvy philanthropist will write a
2 percent or 3 percent equity provision for the donor into a grant
agreement.
Visionary scientists who 10 years ago might have reflexively
applied for a government grant are looking with renewed interest toward this
type of private philanthropy. Not coincidentally, foundations that previously
paid no attention to scientific matters are reconsidering their guidelines and
supporting speculative research. If foundation funding is a fair indicator,
private science philanthropy is undoubtedly on the rise. In 2000, 2.8 percent of
all foundation funding went to science, mostly the general and life sciences. By
2002, the share of the foundation pie going to science had risen to 3.6 percent,
with $568 million in grants to some 2,200 projects. The majority of money is
slated for biological science.
Something Ventured
Paul Brainerd, founder of Aldus, sold his company in
1994 and granted one-third of the proceeds (about $130 million) to protect the
environment of the Northwest. He then helped form a unique philanthropic entity
called the Social Venture Partnership (SVP). With 110 partners, most of whom
accumulated their wealth from applied science and technology, the SVP today
works under a venture capital model to create partnerships with grantees in such
areas as social service, education, health, the environment and community
activism, but all with a scientific approach to their cause. Like classic
venture capitalists, SVP executives communicate directly with applicants and
grantees to discuss objectives, goals and specific targets of
performance.
While capitalizing scientific philanthropy is embryonic,
intellectual property is already a controversial scientific issue debated by
many contemporary private funders. The buzzwords are “open source” and “free
access.” Backers such as Gordon Moore and George Soros are hoping to reverse
what they see as a lamentable trend toward secrecy and private sector ownership
in science. Moore provided a $9 million seed grant that launched a scientific
journal called Harold Varmus’ Public Library of Science. Soros is behind the
Budapest Open Access Initiative, an international effort to make research
articles in all academic fields freely available on the Internet. To date there
is minimal government support for moving scientific research and discovery back
into the public domain, but older, more established foundations such as Ford,
Rockefeller and MacArthur have begun making sizable grants to open source and
open access activists.
For those of us with the resources, the resolution and
the vision, science can extend our legacies through the generations. In the
1940s, the Rockefeller Foundation began to fund programs to breed new wheat
stocks in Mexico to improve agricultural output and avert famine. That effort
became the Green Revolution, an international surge in the production of food
crops in underdeveloped nations. While not free of controversy—critics say the
Rockefeller crops require more costly fertilizers and divert power from small
farmers to multinational agribusiness giants—its repercussions are still felt
around the world.
Illustration by Jim Frazier.
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