As government financing of basic science
research has plunged, private donors have filled the void, raising
questions about the future of research for the public good.
Last
April, President Obama assembled some of the nation’s most august
scientific dignitaries in the East Room of the White House. Joking that
his grades in physics made him a dubious candidate for “scientist in
chief,” he spoke of using technological innovation “to grow our economy”
and unveiled “the next great American project”: a $100 million
initiative to probe the mysteries of the human brain.
Along
the way, he invoked the government’s leading role in a history of
scientific glories, from putting a man on the moon to creating the
Internet. The Brain initiative,
as he described it, would be a continuation of that grand tradition, an
ambitious rebuttal to deep cuts in federal financing for scientific
research.
“We can’t afford to miss these opportunities while the rest of the world races ahead,” Mr. Obama said.
“We have to seize them. I don’t want the next job-creating discoveries
to happen in China or India or Germany. I want them to happen right
here.”
Absent
from his narrative, though, was the back story, one that underscores a
profound change taking place in the way science is paid for and
practiced in America. In fact, the government initiative grew out of
richly financed private research: A decade before, Paul G. Allen, a
co-founder of Microsoft, had set up a brain science institute in Seattle, to which he donated $500 million, and Fred Kavli,
a technology and real estate billionaire, had then established brain
institutes at Yale, Columbia and the University of California.
Scientists from those philanthropies, in turn, had helped devise the
Obama administration’s plan.
Wendy Schmidt and her husband are advancing ocean studies.Credit
Béatrice de Géa for The New York Times
American science, long a source of national power and pride, is increasingly becoming a private enterprise.
In
Washington, budget cuts have left the nation’s research complex
reeling. Labs are closing. Scientists are being laid off. Projects are
being put on the shelf, especially in the risky, freewheeling realm of
basic research. Yet from Silicon Valley to Wall Street, science
philanthropy is hot, as many of the richest Americans seek to reinvent
themselves as patrons of social progress through science research.
The
result is a new calculus of influence and priorities that the
scientific community views with a mix of gratitude and trepidation.
“For better or worse,” said Steven A. Edwards,
a policy analyst at the American Association for the Advancement of
Science, “the practice of science in the 21st century is becoming shaped
less by national priorities or by peer-review groups and more by the
particular preferences of individuals with huge amounts of money.”
They
have mounted a private war on disease, with new protocols that break
down walls between academia and industry to turn basic discoveries into
effective treatments. They have rekindled traditions of scientific
exploration by financing hunts for dinosaur bones and giant sea
creatures. They are even beginning to challenge Washington in the costly
game of big science, with innovative ships, undersea craft and giant
telescopes — as well as the first private mission to deep space.
The
new philanthropists represent the breadth of American business, people
like Michael R. Bloomberg, the former New York mayor (and founder of the
media company that bears his name), James Simons (hedge funds) and
David H. Koch (oil and chemicals), among hundreds of wealthy donors.
Especially prominent, though, are some of the boldest-face names of the
tech world, among them Bill Gates (Microsoft), Eric E. Schmidt (Google)
and Lawrence J. Ellison (Oracle).
This
is philanthropy in the age of the new economy — financed with its
outsize riches, practiced according to its individualistic,
entrepreneurial creed. The donors are impatient with the deliberate, and
often politicized, pace of public science, they say, and willing to
take risks that government cannot or simply will not consider.
Yet
that personal setting of priorities is precisely what troubles some in
the science establishment. Many of the patrons, they say, are ignoring
basic research — the kind that investigates the riddles of nature and
has produced centuries of breakthroughs, even whole industries — for a
jumble of popular, feel-good fields like environmental studies and space
exploration.
As
the power of philanthropic science has grown, so has the pitch, and the
edge, of the debate. Nature, a family of leading science journals, has
published a number of wary editorials, one warning
that while “we applaud and fully support the injection of more private
money into science,” the financing could also “skew research” toward
fields more trendy than central.
“Physics isn’t sexy,” William H. Press, a White House science adviser, said in an interview. “But everybody looks at the sky.”
Fundamentally
at stake, the critics say, is the social contract that cultivates
science for the common good. They worry that the philanthropic billions
tend to enrich elite universities at the expense of poor ones, while
undermining political support for federally sponsored research and its
efforts to foster a greater diversity of opportunity — geographic,
economic, racial — among the nation’s scientific investigators.
Historically,
disease research has been particularly prone to unequal attention along
racial and economic lines. A look at major initiatives suggests that
the philanthropists’ war on disease risks widening that gap, as a number
of the campaigns, driven by personal adversity, target illnesses that
predominantly afflict white people — like cystic fibrosis, melanoma and
ovarian cancer.
Public
money still accounts for most of America’s best research, as well as
its remarkable depth and diversity. What is unclear is how far or fast
that balance is shifting, since no one, either in or out of government,
has been comprehensively tracking the magnitude and impact of private
science. In recognition of its rising profile, though, the National
Science Foundation recently announced plans to begin surveying the
philanthropic landscape.
There
are the skeptics. Then there are the former skeptics, people like
Martin A. Apple, a biochemist and former head of the Council of
Scientific Society Presidents.
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