When public science funding declined in 2012, major foundations formed the Science Philanthropy Alliance to step up their game. President Marc Kastner tells us what they’ve learned since about private funding’s role in basic research.

Kastner was 27 and just embarking on a career in condensed matter physics when he landed his first NSF grant in the early 1970s. He kept that federal funding almost continuously through his 40-plus years as a highly esteemed MIT professor and eventually dean of science, during a heyday of increases in government research funding.

“I lived in a charmed era, and I have a feeling that the government is just not going to get back to funding basic science, the way it should be funding it, for a long time,” says Kastner, who now helms the Science Philanthropy Alliance, a funder affinity group that aims to inspire and advise private support for basic research. He sees a harder road for young investigators kicking off their careers these days.

“It’s just a critical time for philanthropists to step in and fund some of the best research, and especially some of the best young investigators, so we don’t lose them. That’s a big part of the motivation for me.”

It was also the motivation for some of the largest science foundations in the world—Kavli, Moore, Simons, Sloan, HHMI, and the Research Corporation for Science Advancement—when they formed the Alliance back in 2012. Deep spending cuts known as sequestration following a fierce budget standoff led by congressional Republicans, prompted the funders to team up in hopes of bolstering private philanthropy. Research budgets have experienced some relief since, but the cuts sent a lasting chill through the community.

We’ve also seen philanthropy in the U.S. surge, with research funding becoming a massive priority for donors like James Simons, Gordon and Betty Moore, Paul Allen, Bill Gates, Yuri Milner, and many more.

“We have our hands full,” Kastner says. The Alliance’s membership has nearly doubled in the past year, and recently picked up the massive, U.K.-based funder Wellcome.

Since its founding, the Science Philanthropy Alliance has developed a strategy of advising new philanthropists interested in funding basic science, helped them figure out best practices and seek advice from others, and ultimately have a successful experience that will prompt them to keep the tap flowing.

Because it turns out that giving effectively to science research is pretty daunting. The proliferation of fields is mind-boggling—from the origins of the universe to the architecture of the brain—and the approaches to funding are also all over the place.

We cover this stuff at length, and it raises a bunch of questions about what role private money is playing in modern research, how it can best serve scientists, and where things are headed. So we were happy to spend some time talking with Kastner to get his perspective on the current state of science philanthropy.

The Rise of the Billionaire Science Donor

Whenever we write broadly about science philanthropy, two sorts of take-home messages arise, and Kastner backs them up. First, private funding for basic research is still not near what the federal government provides, even after steadily shrinking budgets. Second, while that may be the case, the role for private philanthropy in advancing basic science has grown more significant—and needs to increase.

On the first point, it’s often noted that billionaires are privatizing American science, but at least for now, that’s an overstatement. It’s true that large-scale government funding for science is a relatively new development, sparked by World War II and the Cold War, and later public health concerns that boosted NIH spending in the 1990s. So it’s fair to speculate on what the future holds.

But the days of major government investment in science are far from over. Public funding of research to academic institutions is around $40 billion a year. While the mission of the alliance is to urge more private philanthropy, it’s not seeking to swap government agencies with deep-pocketed billionaires, nor could it.

“The federal government should be supporting basic science—there’s no question about that,” Kastner says. “Most economists will tell you that research and development investment is what grows the GDP, and if we want the economy to grow, we should be spending more.”

But a few factors are leading to a bigger role for science philanthropy in research these days. Aside from spending cuts themselves, political pressure also tends to demand concrete results, which favors more conservative research and applied science, Kastner points out.

The alliance emphasizes basic or fundamental science, research that seeks purely to improve understanding rather than applications. Such work can have profound impacts, and lead to world-changing applications (GPS, CRISPR, lasers, etc.), but outcomes may take longer and are hard to predict.

“It’s extremely important for progress in all areas of life that we keep doing basic research,” Kastner says. “Government has a harder and harder time doing that when budgets are constrained, because government agencies have to justify their spending to Congress, and Congress wants to know what the voter is going to get out of it.”

We’re simultaneously seeing rising consolidation of wealth and private philanthropy overall in the United States, along with massive fundraising campaigns by universities across the country to augment their own budgets.

It is, however, hard to tell just how big a role private funds are currently playing, since it’s not centrally tracked like government spending. In an attempt to establish baseline numbers, the alliance recently conducted a survey of 2015 private giving to basic research. Respondents reported $1.2 billion in science spending and $2.2 billion across disciplines—and that’s a very low estimate, with some major players uncounted. An unrelated 2013 analysis put private funding of science, engineering and medicine at over $4 billion.

And it certainly seems to be on the rise, if only based on the occasional nine-figure research commitments emerging lately. Kastner said the Science Philanthropy Alliance is regularly approached by new philanthropists looking to get involved in funding research—everyone from hedge fund managers to tech billionaires. “It’s all over the place.”