An unprecedented amount of private philanthropy is flowing into science and medicine these days. Multiple private foundations such as the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Wellcome Trust, Novo Nordisk Foundation, and Gates Foundation, each with over $20 billion endowments, focus mostly or solely on science, and there are more philanthropists than can be listed who are willing to donate hundreds of millions of dollars in one fell swoop.
But over the past several decades, philanthropy has become much more bureaucratic: if you want a grant from one of these well-endowed foundations, you have to be willing to navigate a large bureaucracy while specifying all of the legible ways in which your activity will have provable impact.
As a result, most of the current R&D philanthropy funds the usual suspects at traditional institutions. Look at some of the most prominent examples from recent years: Roy Vagelos, the former CEO of Merck, has given a total of $900 million to Columbia University, the most recent tranche of which was to launch the Roy and Diana Vagelos Institute for Basic Biomedical Research. In 2023, hedge fund CEO Ken Griffin gave $300 million to Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which was renamed after Griffin. In 2015, Nike founder Phil Knight gave $500 million to Oregon Health and Science University to support cancer research and, in 2021, he gave the second of two $500 million donations to the University of Oregon, to support the Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact.
There are many more examples of philanthropists who want to promote science and who simply write enormous checks to existing universities. In the past, however, large bureaucratic foundations didn’t even exist, and philanthropy was based on the whims of eccentric individuals with wealth to burn—sometimes at a great loss, but often to extraordinary benefit, including funding the creation of new fields. Such opportunities have not been exhausted. Katalin Karikó, the scientist who won the Nobel Prize for her work that led to COVID-19 vaccines, was penalized in academia because funders didn’t see the potential in her ideas.
Given the challenges of our times, we need to revitalize crazy philanthropy—that is, donations to unusual issues, to individuals outside the traditional university system, and to genuinely outside-the-box ideas that could lead to the creation of entirely new fields. Philanthropy can have much higher impact if it doesn’t just piggyback on existing institutions and ideas. Instead of giving more money to universities that are already sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars in endowments, why not give money to the Analogue Group, which tries to find the next Katalin Karikó, or to Convergent Research, which funds an entirely new type of research organization?
Even New Philanthropy Isn’t That Innovative
There are a few cases where major philanthropists create new scientific organizations rather than merely giving money to existing universities or medical centers. But their efforts still end up resembling the status quo in many respects, often despite rhetoric to the contrary.
For example, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (or HHMI) dates back to 1953 and has an endowment of over $24 billion. Its most famous initiative is the HHMI Investigator program, which gives outstanding scientists around $11 million each over a potentially renewable seven-year term. In other words, the program gives extra money over a long time-frame to existing university scientists.
Such funding can be wonderfully freeing for those individual scientists, but it is still parasitic on the existing system—HHMI essentially depends on the current system to identify “top” scientists, and then gives them a bit of extra money at their current job. There’s nothing in the HHMI program that would identify a potential Einstein working outside of academia at age 25.
Other new efforts in science philanthropy, however admirable, also look like they are largely piggybacking on the existing system. For a few examples: Sean Parker gave $250 million to launch the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, which is a collaboration “among 300 of the country’s leading immunologists at six academic cancer centers.” In 2016, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan gave $600 million to establish the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, which is basically a collaboration between the major Bay Area research hubs like Stanford and Berkeley. And, in 2021, the Arc Institute was launched with major funding from Patrick Collison, Ron Conway, Dustin Moskovitz, and other Silicon Valley and Wall Street funders. It is also collaborating with Stanford, the University of California, San Francisco, and Berkeley, but offers longer-term appointments with more financial stability than is typical for biomedical research.
There are many more such organizations. Many of them try to innovate in at least one respect, that is, new focus areas, different timelines, more intellectual freedom, or more job security. But in most of the cases so far, the new scientific organizations are still studying traditional scientific topics, usually in express collaboration with existing universities. While it’s dangerous to paint with too broad a brush—someone will always be able to find some exception, such as focused research organizations—we can say this about modern science and health philanthropy:
It mostly focuses on giving large amounts of money to existing scientific institutions such as universities and academic medical centers, or else launching new organizations that try to distinguish themselves in one or two ways, but that still function and look more like existing scientific institutions than like anything else because they rely on the same institutions to assess prestige and competence and thus utilize the same personnel.
Modern Science’s Institutional Isomorphism
None of the above is very surprising. Modern science, like much else about modern life, is characterized by what sociologists call “institutional isomorphism,” a term originated by Yale sociologists Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell in 1983. Their classic article begins by asking why there is “such startling homogeneity of organizational forms and practices.” The premise of their question is true across many sectors, but if they had been writing specifically about academic science, they might have asked: why is nearly every organization in this space devoted to principal investigators, who run labs of similar sizes, each of which might employ a few post-docs? Why is science itself organized into the same fields and subfields? Why does every university offer four-year undergraduate degrees, two-year master’s degrees, and PhD’s? Why does every university department have a dean, and why is there always a provost, a chancellor, a president, and a board of trustees? Why is there always a hierarchy of assistant professors with no tenure , associate professors with tenure, and still more prestigious full professors?
After all, there is no a priori reason that when Leland Stanford launched a new university in 1885, or when Amos Throop launched Throop University in 1891—now better known as CalTech—those institutions would end up looking like all other top research universities. They could, in theory, have had a very different structure or hierarchy.
Why do all major research universities look the same? Why don’t we have more organizational and institutional diversity?
DiMaggio and Powell have some possible answers. They note as an initial matter that it is in fact possible to find diverse organizations in areas that are early-stage and emerging, but as soon as organizations “in the same line of business are structured into an actual field (as we shall argue, by competition, the state, or the professions), powerful forces emerge that lead them to become more similar to one another.”
They suggest three main pathways how this happens. First, there are coercive forces. For example, non-profits have to comply with tax law, manufacturers have to comply with pollution regulation, and universities have to comply with accreditation requirements as well as state and federal funding requirements. Regulation and law are everywhere, and organizations find themselves coerced into having certain structures and functions.
Second, there are mimetic forces. DiMaggio and Powell noted that in areas of uncertainty and when “organizational technologies are poorly understood” or “when goals are ambiguous,” organizations are incentivized to “model themselves on other organizations.”
To make a concrete analogy: if you are launching a software startup in Silicon Valley, there is no law or regulation that says you need to have a cofounder. But you may well be drawn to imitate the many Y Combinator-funded companies that followed Paul Graham’s advice to get a cofounder or two.
Similarly, DiMaggio and Powell point to the historic example of Japanese officials in the 19th century who quite expressly studied and tried to imitate “the courts, Army, and police in France, the Navy and postal system in Great Britain, and banking and art education in the United States.” And if you’re Leland Stanford or Amos Throop in the 1880s, you look to what other major universities are doing.
Mimetic isomorphism can be all the more powerful because “despite considerable search for diversity, there is relatively little variation to be selected from.” Indeed, one instead finds playbooks or textbooks that describe the ideal form for everything from a community arts council to a software startup. Moreover, organizations imitate other well-known organizations based on fame or legitimacy, and the “ubiquity of certain kinds of structural arrangements can more likely be credited to the universality of mimetic processes than to any concrete evidence that the adopted models enhance efficiency.”
Third, there are normative pressures, which DiMaggio and Powell think are present mostly in the professions i.e., law, medicine, and the like. Due to filtering mechanisms—such as who is granted admission to professional schools—and licensure rules, professions end up with a “pool of almost interchangeable individuals who . . . possess a similarity of orientation and disposition that may override variations in tradition and control that might otherwise shape organizational behavior.” And socialization matters too: when “occupational socialization is carried out in trade association workshops, in-service educational programs, consultant arrangements, employer-professional school networks, and in the pages of trade magazines, socialization acts as an isomorphic force.” The result is a set of professional norms about such matters as “how a lawyer behaves” and “how a law firm looks.”
Perhaps most salient to a piece about funding, DiMaggio and Powell make a prediction about where institutional isomorphism will be more powerful: “organizations that depend on the same sources for funding, personnel, and legitimacy will be more subject to the whims of resource suppliers than will organizations that can play one source of support off against another.”
Back to the Golden Age of Science
There was once an older era of philanthropy, one that existed before large-scale institutional isomorphism, and which created far more diversity than we see with large-scale philanthropy today.
Prior to the exponential growth of government funding from the 1960s to today, many scientists and researchers relied on private patronage of some sort. The results were highly variable—and that’s the point. More failures and squandered opportunities, but more possibilities for people to create unexpected breakthroughs.
Crazy philanthropy can go off the rails, of course. Consider the career of Gottfried Leibniz, known mostly for inventing calculus simultaneously with Isaac Newton. Leibniz depended on the patronage of the House of Brunswick in Hanover from 1676 until his death in 1716. Thanks to the interest of one prominent family member—Ernest Augustus, who later became the prince-elector of the Holy Roman Empire—Leibniz ended up having to spend several years researching and writing an archival history of the House of Brunswick’s genealogy. One can imagine nothing more tedious than genealogical research circa the year 1700. To quote one resource:
In the end, Leibniz was never able to complete the history, although the three volumes of his history were eventually published after his death. The work on the history plagued Leibniz for the rest of his life, and in a letter to the Jesuit mathematician Adam Kochanski, he noted that writing the history bound him like the stone of Sisyphus.
Not ideal. That said, the genius of crazy philanthropy is how it allows for more variance than large-scale bureaucracies. More wasted time on obvious failures, but more innovation in areas that weren’t even foreseen at the time.
Take George Fabyan (1857-1936) and his private lab, called Riverbank Laboratories, outside of Chicago in the early 20th century. In 1915, he hired a Cornell graduate named William Friedman to study the “effects of moonlight on wheat maturation.” At the same time, Fabyan was obsessed with finding secret codes in Shakespeare, and hired Elizabeth Smith in 1916 to help with an ongoing project to prove that Francis Bacon was the actual author of Shakespeare, as shown by ciphers left behind. Smith became an expert in the new field of cryptography, and soon married William Friedman.
But then, World War I broke out. The Friedmans were among the only cryptography experts in the United States, and the government commissioned Fabyan’s lab to help decode German transmissions. In 1921, William and Elizabeth Friedman moved to Washington, D.C., to work for the government.
Long story short, their work to this day is credited as having helped lead to the founding of the National Security Agency (NSA), and an NSA building is actually named the “William and Elizabeth Friedman Building.” But no one would have ever thought that the NSA would owe its existence in part to a couple of scholars hired to examine Shakespeare some decades before. We need more of the latter type of philanthropy.
Another early 20th century example is Alfred Loomis, who graduated from Harvard Law School in 1912 and became wealthy due to his company’s well-timed investments around the Great Depression, reportedly making him “one of the richest men in America” at the time. Due to his passion for science, he bought a mansion called Tower House in 1926, located in Tuxedo Park, a small village outside of New York City. He renovated the entire mansion and converted much of it into a lavishly-funded physics and biology laboratory.
Einstein would later call it a “palace of science,” and Loomis helped fund and create everything from Enrico Fermi’s plans for a nuclear chain reactor to the Radiation Lab at MIT that developed radar systems used in World War II—many of those same scientists were then employed by the Manhattan Project. Nobelist Ernest Lawrence told an interviewer, “If Alfred Loomis had not existed, radar development would have been retarded greatly, at an enormous cost in American lives…. He had the vision and courage to lead … as no other man could have led. He used his wealth very effectively in the way of entertaining the right people and making things easy to accomplish.”
Can Crazy Philanthropy Find Its Patron Today?
Where is the crazy philanthropy today? Nat Friedman is perhaps the closest thing we now have. Friedman is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and, in early 2023, he and others launched the Vesuvius Challenge to see if modern machine learning experts could figure out how to decipher ancient scrolls from the Herculaneum Papyri that were mostly burnt in the ancient volcanic eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D.
In early 2024, the Vesuvius Challenge announced that three entrants had deciphered several passages and had won a $700,000 prize. Since then, he has advertised in a post that he wants to hire someone at $2,000 a week to work on the Shroud of Turin. In an interview, Friedman put it bluntly: “I think most rich people are boring, and they should do more cool things.”What remains in this domain? At least 2,800 square meters of scrolls, including possibly the location of Plato’s tomb and a copy of Aristotle’s Constitution of the Spartans.
Tackling outside-the-box problems can well lead to new insights or new techniques that are completely unforeseeable. What else could crazy philanthropy do today? There are more ideas than it is possible to list here. For just one example, Matt Wedel argues that we actually know little about the layout of the human body, and a creative philanthropist could fix this problem:
If I was a multi-billionaire, I’d hire 1,000 of the world’s best surgeons . . ., supply them with 10,000 ethically donated willed bodies representing as many geographic regions and genetic backgrounds of humankind as possible, and give each surgeon a couple of years to dissect their 10 bodies . . . . I’d also supply them with professional photographers to document everything they found, and a small army of research assistants to help them with library work and writing up. That wouldn’t be enough to declare the science of human anatomy a completed project, but we’d know a heck of a lot more than we do now.
A completely different example would be the search for extraterrestrial life. Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb became famous in 2017 when he claimed that he might have spotted a sign of alien life in the form of Oumuamua, a long cigar-shaped object that was floating through the solar system. He then founded the Galileo Project at Harvard, a search for extraterrestrial artifacts. The rest of academia, including at Harvard, might turn up their noses, but Avi Loeb has managed to find philanthropic support from the likes of crypto-entrepreneur Charles Hoskinson, early Google employee Eugene Jhong, Bill Linton, and Joerg Laukien. Loeb still remains, however, an institutional insider. How many young outsiders could use crazy philanthropy?
A third example might be Gabe Newell, founder of the video game company Valve. He recently announced that he is putting $300 million towards an “NFL-field-sized research ship that will take 70 scientists on months-long missions to the deepest parts of the ocean, deploy submersibles, map the abyss and share the discoveries for free with the world.”
In short, even today we can still find occasional wealthy people who are willing to put significant donations towards edgy ideas. That is what we need—arguably more than ever. Ever since World War II, both government and philanthropic funding of science has become larger and more bureaucratic, with the side effect of crowding out the sort of oddball ideas that once led to the discovery of germ theory, continental drift, or relativity. Given that science has now become so bureaucratic, we need individual philanthropists to fund oddball ideas more than ever.