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