Eden Stiffman
In March 2020, an experiment in science philanthropy was hatched in the span of a five-minute call. Patrick Collison, the now-34-year-old billionaire CEO of the online payments company Stripe, and economist Tyler Cowen were chewing over a shared concern: Scientific progress seemed to be slowing down.
As the first pandemic lockdowns went into effect, sometop scientists were in a holding pattern, waiting to hear if they could redirect their grants to Covid-related research. Collison and Cowen saw an opportunity for action. Worried that the National Institutes of Health wasn’t moving quickly enough to respond to the virus, they launched Fast Grants, a pop-up grant-making effort to get emergency research dollars to virologists, coronavirus experts, and other scientists rapidly.
“We thought, let’s just do this,” Cowen recalls. “It was a bit like put up or shut up.”
Collison and his brother and Stripe co-founder, John, contributed and along with Cowen helped raise more than $50 million over the next year and a half. Other donors included some of the biggest names in tech: Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel. Others like Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy, gave through their philanthropic funds.
The first round of grants went out in 48 hours, and later rounds were distributed within two weeks, a drastic difference from the hundreds of days a scientist typically waits to hear from the NIH. By January 2022, all the money had gone out the door to more than 260 Covid-related projects.
Grants of $10,000 to $500,000 backed early efforts to sequence new coronavirus variantsto help track and prevent the spread of the disease, clinical trials for drugs that could potentially be repurposed, and a simple and reliable saliva-based Covid-19 test that received emergency FDA approval in August 2020.
Fast Grants is one of many science-improvement projects launched or backed by Silicon Valley billionaires in recent years. There’s been a flurry of new activity since the pandemic began. Donors have channeled hundreds of millions of dollars into research labs and nonprofits to address what they view as problems with how government agencies and institutional philanthropies fund science. They argue that scientists spend too much time seeking funding for grants that are too restrictive and see a clear role for philanthropy to support high-potential young scientists and risky or speculative projects often overlooked or underfunded by government agencies.
Collison, along with Vitalik Buterin, creator of the Ethereum blockchain platform, and other donors, pledged more than half a billion dollars to the Arc Institute, a new biomedical research nonprofit that wants scientists to focus on science, not chasing grants.
Collison and Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn backed the Good Science Project, a new advocacy group that’s pushing government agencies to make their science grant making more innovative and efficient.
Eric and Wendy Schmidt spun off Convergent Research, a nonprofit helping to incubate even more independent organizations to develop research tools and niche areas of science they believe might otherwise not be funded.
Both Collison and Schmidt Futures declined to disclose specific donation amounts.
While these contributions are just a drop in the bucket compared with the nearly $50 billion the NIH spends on research each year, they’ve been met with both applause and ambivalence from scientists and philanthropy observers. Some are excited to see what comes from these experiments but are reserving judgment until there’s more evidence of successes and failures. Others question the societal implications when science projects for the public good are driven by a handful of tech elites motivated by the “move fast and break things” ethos.
But one thing’s for sure: In Silicon Valley, science philanthropy is at an inflection point.
‘Back to the Future’
Private donors have long played a role in shaping science in the United States — from the creation of the modern research universities to the independent research institutions of the early 20th century and beyond.
Eric John Abrahamson, a historian of corporate and nonprofit organizations who is at work on a book about science philanthropy, says he sees parallels between today’s donors and Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, who wanted to reimagine the institutions of science in the 1910s, ’20s, and ’30s.
“There is a sort of ‘back to the future’ element to what these guys are doing,” Abrahamson says.
Collison’s giving is inspired by a similar interest in rethinking institutional structures. There might be a better way to do or fund science, he has said, but it is impossible to know until more experiments get underway.
The federal government became the majority funder of basicscience research at universities and nonprofit research institutes in the post-World War II era. Today, federal funding for basic science, which provides a foundation for knowledge and discovery rather than solving a specific problem, still exceeds that from corporations, universities, and philanthropy combined — but not by much. However, as a proportion of total funding, government contributions have been on a steady decline since the 1960s, as higher-education endowments and contributions from philanthropy have increased. In the past decade alone, the federal government’s share of total funding for basic research at universities and nonprofit research institutes dropped from 56 percent in 2010 to 50 percent in 2020, according to National Science Foundation surveys. The NIH’s annual budget alone could soon surpass $50 billion a year.
The impact of private donors has grown since the 1990s, says France Córdova, president of the Science Philanthropy Alliance, which works to increase giving to basic science research. Nonprofit and philanthropic contributions for basic research increased from $1.5 billion in 1990 to $9.8 billion in 2020, according to NSF surveys.Contributions from higher education funds, which include money donors gave to university endowments in the past, increased from $1.9 billion to more than $14 billion in that same period.That growth is largely thanks to new philanthropies built on wealth from technology, data, and finance, she says.
These donors “want to apply some of the same entrepreneurial spirit that they used to get their money to philanthropy,” Córdova says.
Some are Science Philanthropy Alliance members. Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan sought guidance from the Alliance as they set up their Chan Zuckerberg Initiative with its eye-popping goal to prevent, cure, or manage all human disease by the end of the century. Schmidt Futures is also a member. And program officers at Alliance member foundations, like the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, have advised Collison as he’s deepened his philanthropic commitments.
Córdova and her colleagues are closely watching how these donors approach their giving and what results emerge from their experiments, she says. “We’re seeing a lot of creativity in that space, and that’s one thing we want to keep on top of because they may provide models to some of the older foundations.”
Conversations Turn to Action
Collison, who grew up in Ireland and studied math at MIT before launching his company, has been an influential figure in bringing together science-curious entrepreneurs with scientists and staff from big foundations.
In 2018, he co-wrote an essay in the Atlantic titled “Science Is Getting Less Bang for Its Buck,” arguing that the rate of scientific progress is stagnating despite an exponential increase in funding. And for several years he has hosted invitation-only gatherings at his home and around Northern California to discuss topics like science policy and opportunities to speed up innovation.
In the past few years, as many of these science-interested tech entrepreneurs became wealthier, they influenced each other to put their money where their mouths are.
Brian Nosek, executive director of the Center for Open Science, which works to increase transparency in the research process so that more studies can be reproduced, applauds the new donors for helping to test ways to shake up how science is funded.
“We’re limiting ourselves to things we’ve tried,” Nosek says. “There are many possible ways to decide what to fund, who to fund, how to fund them, how to track progress, and we haven’t had a culture of experimentation.”
He’s a board member of another new nonprofit, the Good Science Project, that wants to reduce the amount of federal bureaucracy scientists must wade through to secure funding. That group’s director, Stuart Buck, previously led science grant making at Arnold Ventures. He founded the Good Science Project after a conversation with Collison. Collison and his brother, John, are its biggest benefactors, though they have not disclosed the size of their contributions.
Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn gave the group $70,000 through his Survival and Flourishing Fund, and Scott Alexander, a doctor and blogger, gave $50,000.
David Peterson, an assistant professor of sociology at Purdue University who studies how scientific organizations are evolving, says approaches that shield scientists from bureaucracy or allow a wider range of ideas to get support may be useful in a circumscribed way. But he has doubts that these experiments will tilt the scale more broadly — nor does he think they should.
Making massive grants to individuals can be “deeply problematic,” he says.
In his conversations with scientists, some have said they view these donors’ approaches as an extension of technology leaders’ fixation with disruption. Others expressed frustration that the money was often tied to ignorance with how diverse fields of science operate, Peterson says. “There is a feeling that science is another institution like the music industry or taxicabs that are ripe for fundamental transformation to make it much more efficient.”
But for scientists doing the kind of work these extremely wealthy donors care about, such as applying machine learning to neuroscience and genomic sequencing, there’s now more money and opportunity.
Mini Moonshots
In an office park in Alameda, an interdisciplinary group of nine scientists are at work on a moonshot project with a five-year timeline.
Some have left academic research positions and jobs at biotech companies to develop a technology platform for scientists to map every circuit between the 100 billion or so neurons in the brain. Understanding the full architecture of the brain could eventually lead to new treatments for brain disorders.
The organization, called E11 Bio, is one of a handful of new nonprofits launched with support from Eric and Wendy Schmidt.
In 2021, their Schmidt Futures philanthropy spun off Convergence Research, a nonprofit that vets proposals from scientists and helps incubate and launch independent organizations focused on areas like synthetic biology or how drugs target human proteins. These nonprofits, called focused research organizations, operate like time-limited start-ups for niche projects the founders believe might otherwise be overlooked. That might be because they’re too risky or complex for academic labs or are developing tools that are not directly profitable enough for venture capital or industry funding.
Think of them as mini-Manhattan projects or “SEAL teams” for science and technology, says Adam Marblestone, CEO of Convergence Research. Each focused research organization has a $20 million to $100 million budget and a five- to seven-year duration.
Having long time horizons for research “is a really wonderful thing,” Marblestone says, but he also sees value in having the pressure of time to focus on a single deliverable in a finite time.
Schmidt Futures declined to disclose total funding amounts for this work but in March announced a joint $50 million commitment with hedge-fund billionaire Ken Griffin to launch two more organizations.
These groups may choose to seek out government grants in addition to philanthropy, and Marblestone hopes they’ll inspire other donors and governments to adopt similar organizational models for science.
The idea is already taking off. Through his nonprofit Astera Institute, early blockchain entrepreneur Jed McCaleb has supported a focused research organization to study ways to extend longevity in collaboration with the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. The nonprofits announced a joint $70 million commitment to that project in 2021.
In Britain, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has expressed interest in launching similarly focused organizations on British soil and is in talks with Schmidt Futures to invest up to $20 million to help support that work.
New Ideas or Just New Money?
Many of the experiments being backed by private donors are similar to approaches funded by government. As the federal government takes steps to shake up its conservative, risk-averse approach, some have questioned whether small-scale experiments in science funding are money well spent or even original.
The National Science Foundation has distributed fast grants through its Grants for Rapid Response Research program since 1990 and through its Eager (Early-concept Grants for Exploratory Research) program since 2009, for example. Grants from these programs are capped at $200,000 and $300,000, respectively. The agency is able to get money out the door quickly by bypassing the lengthy system of review by outside experts.
Last year, the Biden administration established the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, a $1.5 billionagency that aims to speed up breakthroughs in treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and other health challenges. While some of the philanthropy-funded efforts share a mission to move quickly, Renee Wegrzyn, who directs that agency, welcomes their contributions.
There are a lot of good ideas that need funding, she said in an email: “There are health challenges that won’t be moved by just one approach or organization; instead, it may require a variety of research approaches.”
New approaches can have a big impact if they’re transparent about exactly what’s working — and what isn’t.
Nosek, with the Center for Open Science, hopes donors’ entrepreneurial ambitions to try new ways of doing science are accompanied by evaluations. “The main limitation that we’ve had in a lot of these efforts to improve science is that it’s done with good ideas and good intentions,” he says, “but without good evidence” to determine whether or not they’ve worked.
Fighting Cancer and Other Complex Diseases
Building on lessons from Fast Grants, Collison, whose net worth Forbes estimates at $5.5 billion, in 2021 helped launch the Arc Institute, a Palo Alto-based biomedical research organization that gives scientists no-strings-attached funding over renewable eight-year terms to study the causes of complex diseases like cancer.
When the Fast Grants team surveyed scientists who received their support, 78 percent said they would change their research program “a lot” if their existing funding could be spent without constraints. At Arc, funding isn’t connected to a particular research project so if scientists want to change course, their hands aren’t tied.
In 2021, Collison again partnered with his brother, John, and Buterin, along with Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife, Cari Tuna, and more than a dozen other donors, to collectively pledge more than $650 million to cover scientist salaries and labs at the institute.Arc reported $8.6 million in net assets at the end of 2021, according to its most recent tax filing.
The institute is led by neuroscientist Silvana Konermann, a Stanford assistant professor of biochemistry (who is also married to Collison), and Patrick Hsu, an assistant professor of bioengineering at the University of California at Berkeley. Both were involved in Fast Grants.
Arc partners with Stanford, UC Berkeley, and the University of California at San Francisco so scientists can still hold faculty positions at those institutions and graduate students can work in the nonprofit’s labs. Any revenues from intellectual property is shared among Arc, the university, and the inventors, an Arc spokesperson said.
n addition to what researchers discover, Arc may provide encouragement for other donors to try similar experiments and help them expand. It may take years to know whether Arc is a success.
Philanthropists who have come from the business world often want to see results quickly, but science doesn’t always work that way, says Stuart Buck of the Good Science Project. “You can’t necessarily predict what you’re going to discover, nor the timeline,” he says. “The true impact oftentimes occurs decades down the road.”
