Philanthropy Lessons
Philanthropic ambition has a track record for helping science take strides in directions that further the public good
By Marc Gunther
From its earliest days until now, American philanthropy has been intertwined with progress in science, technology, and medicine. Well-to-do donors have built and supported research institutions to deepen our knowledge of the world. Benjamin Franklin started the nation’s first public hospital and served as the first president of the college that would become the University of Pennsylvania. “It is prodigious the quantity of good that may be done by one man, if he will make a business of it,” Franklin once said. The philanthropist John D. Rockefeller co-founded the school of public health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore (known now as the Bloomberg School of Public Health) as well as the University of Chicago and Rockefeller University in New York. No fewer than 47 Nobel Prize winners enjoyed significant financial support from Rockefeller before they earned their awards, according to The Almanac of American Philanthropy. More recently, the Bethesda, Maryland-based Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which was chartered in the 1950s, has supported hundreds of scientists who do basic research in a variety of biomedical specialties. Just last year, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest foundation by far, spun off a nonprofit medical research institute, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that aims to develop novel drugs and vaccines to fight diseases that cause death and suffering in the global south.
Some philanthropists of science, though, have taken a different approach. Instead of building institutions, they chose to tackle a particular problem that, for whatever reason, had been neglected by governments, industry, and academia. They enlisted scientific partners and gave them the freedom to focus on the job at hand, without distractions. These donors brought to the task not just their financial resources but their vision, conviction, determination, and willingness to collaborate. They took on moonshots — challenges that appeared daunting at first but turned out to be doable — and their impact has been world-changing.
Patriotic philanthropy
Consider, for example, the story of Alfred Lee Loomis, an attorney, Wall Street financier, physicist, and philanthropist who ought to be as famous as Carnegie or Rockefeller but is not, in part because he was a deeply private man. Born into a prominent family, educated at Phillips Academy, Yale University, and Harvard Law School, Loomis was a quintessential establishment figure who grew up with a love of science but initially pursued an establishment career. He made a vast fortune on Wall Street because he anticipated the stock market crash of 1929. Then his life took an extraordinary turn.
“Loomis exiled himself from the glittering world of New York society because he wanted to devote all his time to science,” writes Jennet Conant in her 2013 biography Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II. “He set himself up in a castle on a high hill on Tuxedo Park [a gated enclave north of New York] and financed his own audacious investigation of the stars, the heart, the brain — the secrets of the world. He built his private laboratory not as a shrine to himself, but because he desired nothing more than to be actively involved in the daily research and progress.”
The Loomis Laboratory in Tuxedo Park became one of the world’s great research institutions, attracting visits from the top scientists of the day, including Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, a pioneer in atomic structure and quantum theory. Loomis’s interests and the lab’s research were wide-ranging, so much so that when Yale awarded him an honorary degree in 1933, the citation read: “In his varied interests, his powers of invention, and his services to his fellow man, Mr. Loomis is the 20th-century Benjamin Franklin.”
All that changed after Loomis visited Nazi Germany in 1938. He was alarmed by the sophisticated technology and military might of the Germans and thought it likely that the United States would be drawn into war. His laboratory would henceforth focus on military research, particularly the use of radio waves to detect the location of objects, the technology that became known as radar. He recruited leading scientists to Tuxedo Park, devised practical experiments to improve the accuracy of radar, and built prototypes to test the technology.
Loomis stepped up his efforts after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, with the encouragement of the government. (His cousin, Henry Stimson, was secretary of war under Franklin D. Roosevelt.) He moved equipment from his Tuxedo Park laboratory to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, which had its own radar research program. To support the project, he raised money from MIT and his friend John Rockefeller Jr. (Congress later repaid both donors.) Loomis “made it his personal philanthropic mission to ensure that America’s magnificently inventive industrial machinery would produce vital military innovations without getting gummed up by government bureaucracy,” wrote Karl Zinsmeister, in the Almanac. Building upon research by British scientists, the United States became a leader in radar technology. Eventually, the Army and Navy ordered more than 22,000 radar sets from MIT’s Rad Lab, as it was known. At its peak, the lab employed 3500 people.
Radar enabled Allied forces to detect German U-boats and shoot down Luftwaffe planes, while giving Allied pilots and ship captains the ability to operate at night and during bad weather. While the Rad Lab never achieved the fame of the Manhattan Project, it played a decisive role in the war. Lee DuBridge, the founding director of the Rad Lab, liked to say: “Radar won the war; the atom bomb ended it.” President Truman awarded Loomis the Medal for Merit, then the nation’s highest civilian honor, saying:
“His personal qualities and enthusiasm enabled him to enlist the services of many brilliant physicists and engineers in the coordinated development of [radar]… A brilliant experimentalist endowed with extraordinary foresight, Dr. Loomis was a central figure in this development program that contributed so significantly to the successful termination of the war.”
Preventing famine
During World War II, the U.S. government was more concerned with winning the war than the challenge of feeding the world’s hungry. But Vice President Henry Wallace was troubled after he witnessed widespread crop failures and malnutrition during a visit to Mexico. So Wallace, a former corn farmer and founder of a seed company who had served as U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, turned to the Rockefeller Foundation for help. The foundation, which had a history of fighting disease in poor countries, committed $20,000 for a survey of agriculture in Mexico. The investigation revealed that a disease called wheat leaf rust had ravaged the crop, requiring Mexico to import more than half of the wheat that it consumed. The foundation decided to take on the problem of food security in Mexico, setting off the decades-long global transformation of agriculture that became known as the Green Revolution.
The key architect and evangelist of the Green Revolution was an Iowa-born plant scientist named Norman Borlaug. The Rockefeller Foundation hired Borlaug in 1944 to start a research program based in Chapingo, outside Mexico City, with a specific goal: to help Mexican farmers grow enough wheat to feed their country. Importantly, the project from the start was a joint undertaking of Rockefeller and the Mexican government. Borlaug learned Spanish and worked side-by-side in the field with Mexican colleagues as they studied genetics, plant breeding, plant pathology, entomology, soil science, and cereal technology.
Progress was slow at first, but Borlaug was tenacious. The laboratory he had set up developed a new variety of wheat that resisted rust and delivered bigger yields, but the plants would topple over during storms because their stems couldn’t hold the heavier heads of grain. Only after cross-breeding the new Mexican varieties with an ancient strain of Japanese dwarf wheat did the plants grow strong enough to stand. The American scientists and their Mexican colleagues then had to persuade local farmers to experiment with the new seeds, and to adopt modern farming practices, including the use of fertilizer. By 1956, Mexico could grow enough wheat to meet its needs.
To help bolster Mexico’s food security for the longer term, the foundation supported the training of more than 700 Mexican scientists in agriculture, an accomplishment as important as the initial efforts to immediately boost wheat production.
“The philosophy of the Rockefeller Foundation was to help Mexico to help itself in solving its food production problems, and in the process work itself out of a job,” Borlaug said.
He and his backers at the foundation were just getting started. They recognized that the work in Mexico could become a model for agricultural development elsewhere. Gordon Conway, an agricultural ecologist who later became the foundation’s president, wrote: “[A] conscious objective of the Green Revolution from the beginning was to produce varieties that could be grown in a wide range of conditions through the developing world.” The foundation financed research into crop breeding and farming practices in Colombia, Chile, and later in India and Pakistan, where food shortages were a persistent worry.
Even as Borlaug and his colleagues made progress, however, doubts grew about whether agricultural productivity could be boosted fast enough to feed a fast-growing world population. Fears of mass starvation peaked during the late 1960s. The biologist Paul Ehrlich and his wife Ann wrote in their 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.” Pessimists held sway at this time. “All serious students of the underdeveloped nations agree that famine among the peoples of the underdeveloped nations is inevitable,” a California Institute of Technology professor named James Bonner wrote in 1967 in the journal Science in a review of a book titled Famine 1975.
Three years later, Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. His Nobel biography describes him like this:
“An eclectic, pragmatic, goal-oriented scientist, he accepts and discards methods or results in a constant search for more fruitful and effective ones… A vigorous man who can perform prodigies of manual labor in the fields, he brings to his work the body and competitive spirit of the trained athlete, which indeed he was in his high school and college days.”
Borlaug’s successes in wheat were replicated in other grains, sometimes by scientists he had trained. His research center in Mexico grew into a global center for wheat and maize research now known as CIMMYT, which in an English translation stands for the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center; the center has inspired a network of agricultural research centers around the world. From 1965 to 2005, global per capita food consumption rose to 2798 calories daily from 2063, with most of the increase in developing nations. In 2006, the United Nations declared that malnutrition stands “at the lowest level in human history” even as the global population approached 7 billion.
By then, Borlaug’s work had attracted a new group of critics — environmentalists opposed to the use of chemical pesticides and fertilizer, some of who continue to argue that the Green Revolution has reduced soil fertility and genetic diversity and, over time, impoverished small-scale farmers. Borlaug’s initial forays into Africa, where population growth continued to outpace food production, were backed not by the Rockefeller Foundation but by Ryoichi Sasakawa, a Japanese industrialist and philanthropist. In 2006, though, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation together launched the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, which works across the continent to help millions of smallholder farmers boost their farm productivity and incomes, following many of the practices pioneered by Borlaug. When Borlaug died in 2009, at the age of 95, the author Gregg Easterbrook wrote: “Borlaug saved more lives than anyone who has ever lived.”
The birth of the pill
Philanthropy has played a pivotal role in keeping billions of people from starving. It also would help Margaret Sanger bring transformative family planning options to the world.
Sanger opened the United States’ first birth control clinic in Brooklyn, New York, in 1916. It was a daring move; one of her first customers was an undercover policeman who bought a pamphlet on family planning and thereupon placed her under arrest. Five years later, Sanger founded the American Birth Control League, which changed its name to Planned Parenthood in 1942. For many years, as the nation’s leading advocate of family planning, she sought out scientists to ask if they would develop a low-cost, easy-to-use, and foolproof method of contraception that would not affect a woman’s fertility if she decided to bear children later. Some scientists told her that it was not possible, whereas others said such research would be pointless because most states and the federal government had laws that banned or restricted birth control.
Gregory Pincus, a brilliant and iconoclastic biologist who Sanger met in the winter of 1950, was not among these naysayers. He was not just willing but eager to take on the challenge. Pincus had researched the effect of hormones on the reproductive system of mammals while teaching at Harvard. He fertilized rabbit eggs in a test tube, transplanted them into the body of a female rabbit, and brought them to term, an accomplishment that attracted press attention as well as criticism and, he speculated, cost him his faculty position. He couldn’t find another college willing to hire him.
Pincus had managed to raise enough money to start a private laboratory called the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. He asked Sanger for $3000 from Planned Parenthood, to test whether the hormone progesterone could prevent pregnancy in rabbits. She scratched together $2000 and he went to work.
While the early results were promising, money was scarce. Neither the government nor the pharmaceutical industry was ready to research contraception. Feeling financial strains, Planned Parenthood too was losing its willingness to continue its support, putting the enterprise at risk.
Sanger then turned to a longtime patron named Katharine Dexter McCormick. By then in her mid-70s, McCormick was one of the first women to graduate from MIT and was a lifelong advocate for women’s rights, including birth control. She was also the widow of Stanley McCormick, an heir to the vast International Harvester Fortune, who was institutionalized for decades for mental illness. McCormick inherited more than $35 million when her husband died in 1947.
She was eager to support Pincus, but only if his lab would concentrate all of its efforts on developing a birth control pill. “I do not want him to be in any way held up on this work for lack of funds,” she wrote. Over the next decade, she provided him with an estimated $20 million, in today’s dollars.
“If it had it not been for the persistence and extraordinary beneficence of Katherine McCormick, the birth control project might have gone nowhere,” writes Jonathan Eig in The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution, a 2014 book about Sanger, Pincus, McCormick, and John Rock, a Catholic obstetrician and gynecologist who became an unlikely advocate for the pill.
All four were renegades, willing to buck conventional wisdom and risk their reputations in pursuit of a singular goal. Eig writes: “Their chances of success had seemed remote — almost ridiculously so. Sanger had been searching so long for her magic pill that even such a determined woman as she must have doubted at times whether she would succeed … But there had been something durable and determined in each of them that kept them going through the years and the setbacks.”
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the birth control pill in 1957, initially to regulate women’s menstrual cycles but soon after for contraception as well. G.D. Searle, a drug company that had supported Pincus, licensed and distributed the pill, making it widely available by the end of the 1960s. It’s hard to overstate its impact: The widespread availability of the pill enabled women to stay in school longer, to pursue graduate and professional degrees, and to delay marriage. Their lifetime earnings grew. What’s more, by limiting family size, parents were able to devote more time and money to each child.
McCormick’s philanthropy has been underappreciated, but she took pride in her contribution. In 1959, she visited a drugstore near her home in Santa Barbara, California, and gave the pharmacist a prescription for Enovid, the first commercial version of the pill. McCormick was then well past 80, and the pills were for a friend. But she could see first-hand the difference her philanthropy had made.
Philanthropic moonshots
These are just three examples of philanthropic moonshots. Others include the development of insulin to treat diabetes, the eradication of hookworm in the American South, and breakthroughs that made possible the treatment and control of AIDS. In each case, philanthropists — the Carnegie Corporation for diabetes, the Rockefeller Foundation for hookworm, and the Aaron Diamond Foundation for AIDS — funded crucial research that enabled governments or private companies to take their work to scale.
While it’s hard to generalize about what makes a philanthropic moonshot, patient money is key. So is a willingness to take risks. Private money is generally more flexible than government grants or corporate allocations for scientific research. “Private funders often take up work that is neglected by federal funders because it is too experimental, too obscure, pursued by scientists too young to have a record, and so forth,” Karl Zinsmeister writes in the Almanac. Borlaug’s pilot program in Mexico was, in essence, a startup. Loomis and Pincus led private laboratories, with few constraints (other than financial) and no bureaucracy.
There’s no formula to assure success in philanthropy, just as there’s none in business or the public sector. Philanthropic failures are mostly forgotten; the success stories are the ones that get told and celebrated. Ben Franklin had it right: The amount of good that an effective donor can do is prodigious.
Marc Gunther is a veteran journalist based in Bethesda, Maryland, where he covers a range of issues including philanthropy, global development, animal welfare, and climate change.
