Can Philanthropy Save Science?
There are so many sources of science and tech funding: the Defense Department (such as DARPA), the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and dozens of venture capital firms that pour out money like tap water.
But all that is not enough, says Tom Kalil, who has been science and tech advisor to some of the most powerful people in the world—Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Despite all the sources of funding, there’s a big donut hole of the most audacious projects that none of them fit well, he says. These include mapping the brain, monitoring ocean-based carbon dioxide removal, and creating open-source databases on all manner of topics.
“If you went to a VC and said, ‘Give me $50 million. I'm going to use that to create a high-quality data set, and then I'm going to put it in the public domain,’ that would be a very short meeting,” Kalil told me.
“These projects are also difficult to do in an academic setting because they require a larger group of people than you have in a single academic lab,” he said. “Or it requires a mix of not only scientists but professional engineers.”
Instead, he proposes a nonprofit and philanthropic route, leveraging ultra-high net worth donors by sparking excitement through the prospects of improving the health of individuals or the planet. “If I told you what the goal is, and you were a philanthropist, your view would be, ‘Boy, I would view that as an important part of my legacy,’” he says.
On May 6, Kalil launched Renaissance Philanthropy, an organization working to excite and recruit patrons to fund nonprofit research organizations working on the most audacious science and technology. It’s early days: The organization has not yet launched its first projects. Time will tell if this model can succeed.
—Seán Captain, executive editor
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