Some of the richest people in history are using charitable donations to explore fresh approaches to funding scientific research. Their ranks could soon grow: in the next year or so, initial public offerings by some of the biggest artificial-intelligence companies, OpenAI and Anthropic, both in San Francisco, California, could see the companies valued at more than US$1 trillion apiece, making hundreds of their employees millionaires in the process.
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Many of the new philanthropists are adopting an engineering mindset, focusing their donations on technological approaches to solving societal problems. As Nature reports in a News feature, they are also bringing many of their own ideas about how this research should be prioritized, funded and executed.
These donors speak of high-risk, long-term and interdisciplinary research. Their goals include finding ways to make research faster and more efficient by encouraging data sharing and speeding up grant approvals, with solutions that include incorporating AI into the processes.
But there’s a disparity when you compare how these funders and those in the public sector operate. Like much of the research that takes place in companies, the results of projects funded by philanthropy won’t necessarily be published. Private organizations are not always obliged to collect and report data on how well their projects have worked — by publishing in peer-reviewed journals, for example — or to make other details about their grants public. At Nature, we think they should be more transparent. Transparency in science funding is a component of transparency in science itself: a non-negotiable principle. Research that is not transparent cannot be verified or built on by others, who might then improve it or find new applications.
An increasing number of examples of science philanthropy can be found around the world. In China, tech entrepreneurs have launched awards such as the Xplorer Prize for young researchers, which is funded mainly by the company Tencent in Shenzhen. New philanthropic foundations are emerging, including the Beijing-based Xiaomi Foundation, which supports universities and provides grants to teachers and researchers. And in Brazil, the Serrapilheira Institute in Rio de Janeiro was established in 2017 by private donors to fund fundamental research, which is usually supported by governments.
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But it is in the United States that philanthropists have one of the longest histories of shaping the direction and structure of the scientific enterprise, from the industrialists of the early twentieth century to today’s tech entrepreneurs.
In 2015, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, paediatrician Priscilla Chan, pledged to donate 99% of Facebook shares, then valued at US$45 billion, to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. One of the initiative’s ambitions is to build interdisciplinary research infrastructure to allow the study of complex biology, to take research beyond the study of individual diseases. By 2025, Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates had donated nearly $64 billion of their wealth to the Gates Foundation (formerly the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) in Seattle, Washington, which is focused on projects to improve public health and alleviate poverty in some 140 countries.
These and newer donors are keen to fill some of the perceived gaps in publicly funded research. Some, such as those financing the Arc Institute in Palo Alto, California, have created funding schemes to allow investigators to rapidly change direction in response to research results — something that is difficult, if not impossible, to do with conventional grants. Others, including former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, are investing in technologies to speed up research. The Astera Institute, co-founded by cryptocurrency entrepreneur Jed McCaleb and based in the San Francisco Bay Area, is focused on using AI and developing infrastructure to tackle what it describes as “neglected ideas that aren’t supported well through existing institutions”.
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Philanthropic foundations do not have the same reporting requirements as government funding agencies, which must publicly document their investments and the outcomes of their spending choices. It can be argued that freedom from such requirements is liberating. Without the fear of being called before lawmakers to explain the value of specific research projects, philanthropists are free to be more adventurous with their money. They can invest in long-term and high-risk projects. And with fewer bureaucratic obligations, charities can be better positioned to pivot rapidly when new technologies emerge, and to bridge disciplinary divisions to assemble teams with diverse expertise.
That said, science supported by philanthropy still relies on a foundation of public funding. Privately funded science and technology builds on published findings, many of which have been achieved through research funded by the public purse (M. Mazzucato and G. Semieniuk Oxford Rev. Econ. Policy 33, 24–48; 2017). If privately funded science is to achieve its ambition to benefit the world, philanthropists need to coordinate with and support the public sector. There are pragmatic reasons for doing so. Any new technologies that tech philanthropists want to roll out to the public will need to be compatible with existing ethical and safety frameworks.
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Philanthropists should also bear in mind that in science, the line between an idea and a result is rarely straight or predictable. Those still relatively new to philanthropy would be wise to study the experiences of the Gates Foundation. In 2003, the organization, working with academic researchers, announced that it would fund up to 14 Grand Challenges in Global Health (H. Varmus et al. Science 302, 398–399; 2003). This was a set of ambitious goals to harness science to improve public health, ranging from developing vaccines that require no refrigeration to creating new treatments for infectious diseases. Some of the work, such as the use of gene editing in mosquitoes to control malaria, is paying off. But it has taken time. A decade after the launch of the challenges, Gates acknowledged that he had been “pretty naive” about how quickly the objectives could be achieved — a salutary lesson for his successors.
In countries around the world, public funding for scientific research is being cut or is at risk of being cut. That makes philanthropy an even more important source of finance. Without greater transparency about the results of philanthropic grant-making, however, there is no way of knowing what approaches have been successful or which might be instructive for guiding future science funding.
The engineer’s drive for efficiency and constant improvement, combined with the philanthropist’s freedom from constraint promise to bring fresh perspectives to science and innovation. Open science offers the best bet for ensuring that the resulting research delivers on its lofty goals.