Best Practices: Philanthropy
The Scientific Method
Mark Dowie
09/01/2004

Paul Allen funds causes that many people consider in the realm of science fiction. Microsoft cofounder, cosmophile and fifth-wealthiest person in the world (according to the 2004 Forbes rich list), Allen provided most of the financial fuel to propel Mike Melvill 62 miles above Earth’s surface in the first successful privately funded manned spaceflight. That was in June, the same month that Allen’s support led to the opening—appropriately enough—of the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle.

TOP VIEW
From the forest floor to outer space, science philanthropists are seeking serious advances in the same way that Rockefeller and Carnegie championed the modernization of American business. Today, however, we might have to wait many years to see our funding produce results.
Meanwhile, in the Cascade Mountains of Northern California, the SETI Institute (the acronym stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is installing 350 radio telescope dishes, each of which will search vigilantly for some telltale electromagnetic sign that we are not alone in the universe. The project is called the Allen Telescope Array, or ATA, after its benefactor. When NASA abruptly terminated SETI’s unsuccessful search for signs of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe in 1993, Allen offered a $13.5 million challenge grant to sustain the project. With Nathan Myhrvold, a former chief technology officer at Microsoft, Allen privatized SETI, which the partners now co-manage with the University of California, Berkeley.

Those of us attracted to scientific causes in our philanthropy may take comfort and glean insights from the country’s long history of similar projects. Allen’s initiative reflects a tradition of philanthropists funding science projects that harkens back to America’s fabled wealth creators. Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Alfred Sloan and Olivia Sage (the widow of Russell Sage and, in her day, the wealthiest woman in America) all played Prometheus to scientific researchers. Rockefeller was primarily interested in the medical and health sciences. Carnegie favored physics and metallurgy, while Sage supported social sciences. They and other private philanthropists brought scientific research into the American university, where they could best steer it away from speculation and theory and toward empiricism, utilitarianism and issues of public urgency.

Science was to be the handmaiden of industry, and philanthropy was structured to guide public policy. Allen, however, has reversed the conventional route to discovery. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, private donors would provide seed capital for scientific research, which the government would adopt and expand if it bore results. Conversely, Allen is backing projects that the U.S. government has abandoned. Today there are many scientific projects that are either way out there (literally, in the case of SETI), or are opposed by the present administration (such as cloning or germline genetic engineering). Private philanthropists drawn to these controversial areas lie in wait for a discovery that might spur public support.

Early philanthropists also envisioned a symbiotic relationship between science and business, but their reasons for funding science had more to do with boosting commerce in order to propel America (and themselves) on a path to greatness. At the turn of the 20th century, the United States was not the world leader in scientific research; that honor belonged to France, where Louis Pasteur’s discovery of germs would revolutionize medicine, while Marie and Pierre Curie were studying the uses of radium. Frederick Gates, a Baptist minister who helped John D. establish the Rockefeller Foundation and became its first president, was thinking less of altruism than of American competitiveness when he funded research that eliminated the debilitating hookworm, a plague on worker productivity in the South because it sapped its victims’ strength. Indeed, these early philanthropists, with their eyes on productivity and progress, shaped research priorities for roughly three decades until the U.S. government began to get serious about science in the early 20th century.

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.
The factor that prompted the feds was World War I, which stimulated government funding in such areas as radio communication, chemistry, aviation and meteorology. The Great War also heightened the interest of foundations. When Secretary of War and Carnegie trustee Elihu Root predicted that, as he put it, “the prizes of industrial and commercial leadership will fall to the nation which organizes its scientific forces most effectively,” private money poured into science. Root and his philanthropic followers were convinced that world dominance, whether industrial or military, was impossible without science. By the 1930s, there was no question that the United States had become the leader in most scientific fields.

Under the leadership of Warren Weaver, director of natural science for the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1930s, science funding from private sources shifted away from the narrow economic interests of war and industry toward what Weaver called “the welfare of mankind.” He focused on research in experimental biology and agricultural science that sparked improved nutrition, as well as molecular biology—a term he coined—that led to a deeper understanding of genetics.

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.