Science moves at its own pace. Sometimes it can be downright glacial.
When physicist Isidor Rabi described a quantum phenomenon called nuclear magnetic resonance in 1937, he won a Nobel Prize. But it would take many intervening discoveries, and another 40 years, for the payoff: Work by Paul Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield, who would also win Nobels for science, led to the diagnostic tool known as magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI.
The link between a basic research finding like Mr. Rabi’s and an important tool we can use today, like MRI, can be hard to spot years or decades in advance. But without such seminal studies, the wheels of progress would grind to a halt.
Now, the leaders of several foundations and other nonprofits have banded together to offer support for fundamental lab work — the kind that doesn’t always or quickly lead to cures or tools. Called the Science Philanthropy Alliance, the group is trying to raise an additional $1 billion each year for basic research, hoping to rekindle donors’ interest in the cause and counter a slight decline in federal funding for such studies.
The idea for such an alliance sprang from a meeting between leaders of the Kavli and Gordon and Betty Moore foundations at the end of 2012.
“At the time the recession began in 2008, federal support for basic research was already declining,” says Robert Conn, chair of the Science Philanthropy Alliance and president of the Kavli Foundation, one of its member institutions. (The others, besides Moore, are the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, and the Simons and Alfred P. Sloan foundations.)
“Our economy relies on a kind of inventiveness and creative destruction that can come from basic findings in science and technology,” says Mr. Conn. “We worried that that mechanism would fall into jeopardy if the amount of money put it into it fell too low.”
The alliance recently hired its first president, Marc Kastner, a former dean of science at MIT, and will soon announce the hiring of a vice president. With leadership soon in place, the group plans to ask some of the nation’s wealthiest people, including signers of the Giving Pledge, to support basic science.
“The United States has an amazing history of recycling wealth,” says Mr. Conn.
So far, philanthropic progress, like much science, has taken its time. The group has no major gifts to announce.
But Mr. Conn says the alliance has laid the groundwork for success. Its members’ leaders gather monthly to discuss strategy. So far, they have met with groups of philanthropists to plead their case. The financial needs of bright young researchers, many of whom are ignored by federal grant makers, are finally becoming a public issue — something the alliance can use to point up its raison d’être.
And the alliance has sought out universities that would benefit if the organization is able to raise money, asking 16 institutions to establish a fund for basic sciences that would handle large gifts.
“We’re hoping to add two to three new foundations this year,” Mr. Conn adds, though he wouldn’t name the prospects.
Paul Joskow, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, says he has spoken to the presidents at 25 foundations about the need for more support for basic research.
“I’m hopeful,” Mr. Joskow says. “Science philanthropy has actually grown in recent years. If you look back 15 to 20 years, foundations like Kavli and Simons weren’t even around.”
