Philanthropy and the Future of Science and Technology

Evan S. Michelson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429814105
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Finance
• Index: Business

An increasingly important and often overlooked issue in science and technology policy is recognizing the role that philanthropies play in setting the direction of research. In an era where public and private resources for science are strained, the practices that foundations adopt to advance basic and applied research needs to be better understood. This first-of-its-kind study provides a detailed assessment of the current state of science philanthropy. This examination is particularly timely, given that science philanthropies will have an increasingly important and outsized role to play in advancing responsible innovation and in shaping how research is conducted.

Philanthropy and the Future of Science and Technology surveys the landscape of contemporary philanthropic involvement in science and technology by combining theoretical insights drawn from the responsible research and innovation (RRI) framework with empirical analysis investigating an array of detailed examples and case studies. Insights from interviews conducted with foundation representatives, scholars, and practitioners from a variety of sectors add real-world perspective. A wide range of philanthropic interventions are explored, focusing on support for individuals, institutions, and networks, with attention paid to the role that science philanthropies play in helping to establish and coordinate multi-sectoral funding partnerships. Novel approaches to science philanthropy are also considered, including the emergence of crowdfunding and the development of new institutional mechanisms to advance scientific research. The discussion concludes with an imaginative look into the future, outlining a series of lessons learned that can guide how new and established science philanthropies operate and envisioning alternative scenarios for the future that can inform how science philanthropy progresses over the coming decades.

This book offers a major contribution to the advancement of philanthropic investment in science and technology. Thus, it will be of considerable interest to researchers and students in public policy, public administration, political science, science and technology studies, sociology of science, and related disciplines.

1 Renewed giving for science

The re-emergence of philanthropic support for the scientific enterprise

Two editorials, twenty years apart

Consider two editorials in the journal Science published just under 20 years apart from one another, in time periods rather different with respect to federal funding of science and technology research in the United States. The first editorial, published on August 1, 1997, arrived during a time when substantial government resources were going toward basic science, helping to advance endeavors like the Human Genome Project, the Hubble Space Telescope, nanotechnology research, and other advances across multiple fields of science. The editorial was prescient, however, noting that more than just federal dollars were needed to keep the scientific enterprise moving forward and able to flourish over the coming years. Both retrospective and prospective, the editorial foresaw a need for increased financial resources for scientific research to be provided by foundations and other donors. It highlighted the impact that previous well-known philanthropists had in shaping the direction of science—the likes of Rockefeller, Carnegie, and others—and argued that philanthropy needed to refocus on supporting science efforts going forward. “The transition from the 20th to the 21st century provides American philanthropy with an opportunity to review its history and to renew its commitment to science,” wrote the editorial authors Susan Fitzpatrick and John Bruer (Fitzpatrick & Bruer, 1997, p. 621). Instead of going alone, though, they imagined a more collaborative, interactive mode of funding and giving. “Private foundations can best accomplish this by joining in partnerships with other foundations, federal agencies, corporations, and individuals,” they wrote (p. 621). “In the new century, support for science must become a national, rather than federal, responsibility” (p. 621).

Fast forward nearly two decades. Scientific research experienced both gains and losses in the intervening years. In the early years of the 20th Century, funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) roughly doubled (Johnson & Sekar, 2018). As part of the United States government response to the Great Recession, spending on non-defense research and development (R&D) spiked by nearly $20 billion over fiscal years 2009 and 2010 (Yamaner, 2012). This growth was then followed by nearly eight years of stagnant or even falling resources in aggregate, especially at agencies like the National Science Foundation (NSF). Even more telling is that federally funded R&D spending as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and as a percentage of the total federal budget has also been declining or stagnant. For example, since 2010 all federal R&D spending has fallen well below 1% of total GDP, a key benchmark figure that countries use to measure the intensity of support for science and technology.

On September 30, 2016, a Science editorial, written by David Baltimore, renewed a call for more philanthropic resources to go toward basic research to augment and complement funds provided from the public sector. “To solve some of our greatest societal problems, we not only need to focus on basic science research—we also need sufficient resources and new approaches,” he wrote (Baltimore, 2016, p. 1473). He continued by emphasizing that philanthropic grantmaking provides the potential to spur new lines of inquiry and take risks that government funders might be hard-pressed to pursue. Foundations, he said, “can initiate research thrusts into unproven directions, which generally do not draw government funding” (p. 1473).

Renewing attention on the philanthropy-science interface

Similar pieces have also appeared in popular and trade press outlets, identifying the need for increased philanthropic involvement in and support for science and technology. For instance, general interest articles describing the rise of philanthropy in science and technology have been published in Physics Today (Kramer, 2018) and The Scientist (Grant, 2017), in addition to publications focused on the philanthropic sector, including articles in Philanthropy magazine (Zinsmeister, 2016), The Chronicle of Philanthropy (Anft, 2015), and the website Inside Philanthropy (Williams, 2016). Newspapers like The Washington Post (Aldrich, 2014) and The New York Times (Broad, 2014), and magazines like The New Yorker (Max, 2017), have all published blog posts and articles covering similar ground, both describing the trend of increased philanthropic giving for science and in profiling high-net-worth individuals who have focused their giving in this area.

But why, and why now? Why has there been seemingly more attention paid to the role of foundations in the scientific enterprise? What can be learned about how contemporary foundations are responding to these challenges? What do these responses signal about the future of philanthropic engagement with science and technology going forward? How do foundations shape the way fields of science and technology progress over time? How do foundations think about the societal implications of science and technology? How could science philanthropies support research while simultaneously realizing more societally oriented goals?

The purpose of this book is to investigate these questions and develop a better understanding of the role that philanthropies play in setting the direction of science and technology research and illuminating how these organizations can better account for considerations of societal responsibility with the funding they provide. In an era where other sources of support for science and technology are more tentative or even on the decline, there is a need to examine the role science philanthropies play in this ecosystem. By examining the societal responsibility of science philanthropy, the expectation is that those in leadership positions at foundations can become more intentional about the work that they do and that this investigation might open new avenues for further research and scholarship by those in the academy.

An important point on terminology. The terms “philanthropies” and “foundations” tend to be used interchangeably to denote non-profit, independent grantmaking institutions, which will be the case throughout this book. Similarly, while there are many philosophical debates about the boundaries between and the relationship among terms like “science and technology” and “research and innovation,” these too will tend to be used in a comparable mode throughout this book to denote the full scale of the scientific enterprise, from basic research through technological development to innovation.

Even as coverage of these issues in the popular and trade literature has begun to grow in recent years, the gap in the academic literature on this subject is particularly telling and is evident across many fields. Much of the analysis has focused on how government agencies use their funds to inform the direction of different areas of science or how industry fostered technological innovation in a diverse range of fields. To be sure, government funding has a critical role to play not only in advancing basic research but also in fostering technological innovation (Fleming, Greene, Li, Marx, & Yao, 2019; Mazzucato, 2015; Weinberg, et al., 2014). The overwhelming attention paid to the government’s role in advancing science and technology can be seen, for instance, in the extent of analysis that has looked at the impact of the National Science Foundation on different fields of study (Kleinman, 1995; Appel, 2000; Solovey, 2013). More recently, there have been a raft of popular histories tracing the influence of entities like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Jacobsen, 2016; Weinberger, 2017) or profiles of the innovations emerging from industrial sites like Bell Labs (Gertner, 2013) or Xerox’s renowned PARC laboratory site (Hiltzik, 2000).

There are few, if any, recent book-length treatments in science and technology policy, science and technology studies, political science, or public policy that examine philanthropy’s role in science and technology, let alone speak to the role foundations might play in considering the societal implications of the research that is funded. What research there does exist on the topic is mostly limited to historical considerations from the history of science, either covering more distant donor-scientist relationships from centuries earlier or documenting the early decades of the 20th Century, when many of the major foundations that exist today in the United States got their start (Kohler, R. E., 1976). Even studies that chart the wider history of foundations often have minimal attention on science and technology. For instance, out of 100 examples profiled in a series of philanthropy case studies, only a small number (less than 10%, not including medicine) featured instances of philanthropic funding for science and technology research (Fleishman, Kohler, & Schindler, 2007). An updated, searchable, online version of this philanthropy case study database, maintained by the Center for Strategic Philanthropy & Civil Society at Duke University, contains close to 600 entries of philanthropy examples. However, a search of this database indicates how little attention and study philanthropic giving for science and technology has received. A keyword search of the site only returns three case study examples using the search term “science,” zero using the search term “technology,” and only 23 examples using the search term “health” (Center for Strategic Philanthropy & Civil Society, n.d.). Furthermore, recent scholarship on the subject mostly tends to be limited or narrowly focused, examining the role foundations played in spurring the evolution of specific scientific disciplines or projects, such as molecular biology (Abir-Am, 2002), the social sciences (Richardson & Fisher, 1999; Fisher, 1993), or specific research projects in fields such as astronomy (Finkbeiner, 2010; Science Philanthropy Alliance, 2017).

Moreover, little attention has been paid to how foundations and philanthropic activity fits within leading, contemporary conceptual frameworks in science and technology policy or science and technology studies. It is only more recently that scholars have turned their attention more deliberately to the role that non-governmental and civil society organizations play with respect to these theories (Michelson, 2016; Ahrweiler, Gilbert, Schrempf, Grimpe, & Jirotka, 2018). As scholars have developed new theoretical constructs about the broader role of science in society, understanding how foundations fit within conceptual frameworks such as anticipatory governance (Barben, Fisher, Selin, & Guston, 2008) and responsible research and innovation (RRI) (Stilgoe, Owen, & Macnaghten, 2013) is critical on multiple fronts. First, there is a need to gain a more well-rounded view as to the range of applicability of these frameworks. Second, this kind of analysis helps philanthropic institutions think about their own role with respect to the societal implications of science and technology. In fact, discussions related to anticipatory governance and RRI, especially in the United States, have not focused much on the role played by funders (in general) and philanthropies (in particular). One modest indicator of this point is that a keyword search of the word “philanthropy,” and related variations on the term, conducted in January 2019 in articles published in the Journal of Responsible Innovation, a leading journal in the field, returned only four results. None of these articles explicitly addressed the role of philanthropies with respect to these theories and mainly just referred to philanthropies in passing. In short, science philanthropy’s relationship with responsible innovation has received insufficient attention (Kundu & Matthews, 2019).

This is not to say that philanthropies have been wholly ignored in the scholarly literature related to research and innovation (European Commission, 2014). Large-scale research projects focused on understanding philanthropic giving in these areas across Europe took place, first, as part of the Foundations Research Mapping (FOREMAP) study (European Foundation Centre, 2009) and, subsequently, in the European Foundations for Research and Innovation (EUFORI) study (European Commission, 2015). These studies charted giving trends, compared grantmaking size, and analyzed strategic priorities of different donors. While much of the country-by-country analyses focused on philanthropic funding for scientific research and technological innovation, there was some analysis about how certain European foundations engage with the RRI concept. It should be noted, however, that the specific definition and use of the terms “philanthropy” and “foundation” can differ widely across these country contexts, and these institutions vary considerably in terms of their resource base, mode of operation, and other related factors. Moreover, these studies, while highly informative about philanthropic grantmaking for science and technology across Europe, by definition did not cover science and technology philanthropies based in the United States.

Beyond the decline or stagnation of federal funding for scientific research and the retrenchment by the private sector in support of basic research, another key reason for examining the role that American philanthropies play in science and technology is the sheer scale of funding these institutions provide. While the numbers fall well short of the resources provided by government, they remain substantial. One survey found that nearly 50 research institutions in the United States received over $2.3 billion in private funding from philanthropies, individual donors, and other sources in 2017 (Science Philanthropy Alliance, 2018). In one of the first rigorous empirical research studies on philanthropic giving for science and technology, economist Fiona Murray found that philanthropy contributes on the order of $4 billion annually toward academic research, rising to $7 billion annually when income from philanthropy-provided endowments is included (Murray, 2013). Another analysis puts that collected total of philanthropic support for science even higher, finding that a combination of direct philanthropic giving for research projects, coupled with more indirect forms of giving by philanthropy and other sources to university endowments, accounted for a total of $22.7 billion, or 44%, of funding for basic scientific research, when both this direct support and endowment funding are added together (Kastner, 2018). A search conducted in early 2019 of a publicly available database on foundation giving managed by the Foundation Center indicates that in fiscal year 2012, the largest 1,000 foundation...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of acronyms
• 1. Renewed giving for science: the re-emergence of philanthropic support for the scientific enterprise
• 2. Tracing the past: the historical role of foundations in science and technology
• 3. Typologies of science philanthropy: linking philanthropic approaches with responsible research and innovation
• 4. Individuals, institutions, and networks: contemporary examples of science philanthropy
• 5. Case studies in science philanthropy network-building: the Rockefeller Foundation Searchlight network and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• 6. Reflections from the field: perspectives on the societal responsibility of science philanthropy
• 7. Novel modes of responsibility: new approaches to science philanthropy
• 8. Opportunities and challenges ahead: lessons learned and scenarios for the future of science philanthropy
• Index