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Related paulg tweet: https://x.com/paulg/status/1951996478555357530 "The Trump administration has suspended the funding of Terence Tao and the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics at UCLA."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is anything stopping private philanthropy from funding science today? Generally speaking it is in the government’s interest to support fundamental scientific research.
I’m not aware of anything stopping it except for perhaps how the system is set up. Like if I want to fund a pet study that I’m interested in, can I just call up Harvard and offer the lab $1M to work on it? I’ve never heard of anyone doing that, but I’m not really sure why it doesn’t exist (which is why I’m asking if anyone else knows).
Office for Sponsored Programs
1033 Massachusetts Avenue
5th Floor
Cambridge, MA 02138 USA
617-495-5501
osp@harvard.eduEarlier quoted context omitted.
Is anything stopping private philanthropy from funding science today? Generally speaking it is in the government’s interest to support fundamental scientific research.
I’m not aware of anything stopping it except for perhaps how the system is set up. Like if I want to fund a pet study that I’m interested in, can I just call up Harvard and offer the lab $1M to work on it? I’ve never heard of anyone doing that, but I’m not really sure why it doesn’t exist (which is why I’m asking if anyone else knows).
"This work was funded in part by NSF Award CNS-2054869 and gifts from Apple, Capital One, Facebook, Google, and Mozilla."
That said, private grant funding is just of a completely different scale than government grant funding. For example, NIH's annual budget is 48 billion and most of that goes to research (https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/organization/budget).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is anything stopping private philanthropy from funding science today? Generally speaking it is in the government’s interest to support fundamental scientific research.
I’m not aware of anything stopping it except for perhaps how the system is set up. Like if I want to fund a pet study that I’m interested in, can I just call up Harvard and offer the lab $1M to work on it? I’ve never heard of anyone doing that, but I’m not really sure why it doesn’t exist (which is why I’m asking if anyone else knows).
There's a reason the Americans discovered how to make atomic weapons first and it's because their researchers were living under a less oppressive state that wasn't motivated by anti-intellectualism and dumb ideology.
But the Soviets made them second…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is anything stopping private philanthropy from funding science today? Generally speaking it is in the government’s interest to support fundamental scientific research.
I’m not aware of anything stopping it except for perhaps how the system is set up. Like if I want to fund a pet study that I’m interested in, can I just call up Harvard and offer the lab $1M to work on it? I’ve never heard of anyone doing that, but I’m not really sure why it doesn’t exist (which is why I’m asking if anyone else knows).
If you want them to do a specific experiment you’ll likely first need to convince them that it’s a good use of their time.
Harvard itself plays approximately zero role in the decision to do a study or not. (There are ethical oversight committees, etc.)
$1M total cost ($600-800k direct cost depending on terms) will buy you a postdoc’s time and effort for 5 years. Unfortunately most labs aren’t set up for a time/money tradeoff, so 5 postdocs for 1 year would be unlikely absent a really exciting project.
It definitely happens quite a bit!
I don’t really understand why so much of science is funded by the government instead of by private philanthropy. It seems like an obvious channel for corruption of science. Sure private donors have interest driven motives too but it would be diffuse across many areas not concentrated like a political party’s interests.
I don’t really understand why so much of science is funded by the government instead of by private philanthropy. It seems like an obvious channel for corruption of science. Sure private donors have interest driven motives too but it would be diffuse across many areas not concentrated like a political party’s interests.
Two reasons.
First, private philanthropy is neither sustainable nor sufficient in scope.
Second, because government funded science is free from having to produce immediate results in order to satisfy the whims of a specific patron such that funding is continued.
> It seems like an obvious channel for corruption of science.
Yes, relying on private entities to fund scientific research does seem like an obvious channel for corruption.
There's a reason the Americans discovered how to make atomic weapons first and it's because their researchers were living under a less oppressive state that wasn't motivated by anti-intellectualism and dumb ideology.