From Palladium Magazine, August 22:
An unprecedented amount of private philanthropy is flowing into science and medicine these days. Multiple private foundations such as the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Wellcome Trust, Novo Nordisk Foundation, and Gates Foundation, each with over $20 billion endowments, focus mostly or solely on science, and there are more philanthropists than can be listed who are willing to donate hundreds of millions of dollars in one fell swoop.
But over the past several decades, philanthropy has become much more bureaucratic: if you want a grant from one of these well-endowed foundations, you have to be willing to navigate a large bureaucracy while specifying all of the legible ways in which your activity will have provable impact.
As a result, most of the current R&D philanthropy funds the usual suspects at traditional institutions. Look at some of the most prominent examples from recent years: Roy Vagelos, the former CEO of Merck, has given a total of $900 million to Columbia University, the most recent tranche of which was to launch the Roy and Diana Vagelos Institute for Basic Biomedical Research. In 2023, hedge fund CEO Ken Griffin gave $300 million to Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which was renamed after Griffin. In 2015, Nike founder Phil Knight gave $500 million to Oregon Health and Science University to support cancer research and, in 2021, he gave the second of two $500 million donations to the University of Oregon, to support the Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact.
There are many more examples of philanthropists who want to promote science and who simply write enormous checks to existing universities. In the past, however, large bureaucratic foundations didn’t even exist, and philanthropy was based on the whims of eccentric individuals with wealth to burn—sometimes at a great loss, but often to extraordinary benefit, including funding the creation of new fields. Such opportunities have not been exhausted. Katalin Karikó, the scientist who won the Nobel Prize for her work that led to COVID-19 vaccines, was penalized in academia because funders didn’t see the potential in her ideas.
Given the challenges of our times, we need to revitalize crazy philanthropy—that is, donations to unusual issues, to individuals outside the traditional university system, and to genuinely outside-the-box ideas that could lead to the creation of entirely new fields. Philanthropy can have much higher impact if it doesn’t just piggyback on existing institutions and ideas. Instead of giving more money to universities that are already sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars in endowments, why not give money to the Analogue Group, which tries to find the next Katalin Karikó, or to Convergent Research, which funds an entirely new type of research organization?
Even New Philanthropy Isn’t That Innovative
There are a few cases where major philanthropists create new scientific organizations rather than merely giving money to existing universities or medical centers. But their efforts still end up resembling the status quo in many respects, often despite rhetoric to the contrary.For example, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (or HHMI) dates back to 1953 and has an endowment of over $24 billion. Its most famous initiative is the HHMI Investigator program, which gives outstanding scientists around $11 million each over a potentially renewable seven-year term. In other words, the program gives extra money over a long time-frame to existing university scientists.
Such funding can be wonderfully freeing for those individual scientists, but it is still parasitic on the existing system—HHMI essentially depends on the current system to identify “top” scientists, and then gives them a bit of extra money at their current job. There’s nothing in the HHMI program that would identify a potential Einstein working outside of academia at age 25.
Other new efforts in science philanthropy, however admirable, also look like they are largely piggybacking on the existing system. For a few examples: Sean Parker gave $250 million to launch the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, which is a collaboration “among 300 of the country’s leading immunologists at six academic cancer centers.” In 2016, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan gave $600 million to establish the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, which is basically a collaboration between the major Bay Area research hubs like Stanford and Berkeley. And, in 2021, the Arc Institute was launched with major funding from Patrick Collison, Ron Conway, Dustin Moskovitz, and other Silicon Valley and Wall Street funders. It is also collaborating with Stanford, the University of California, San Francisco, and Berkeley, but offers longer-term appointments with more financial stability than is typical for biomedical research....
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