Philanthropy’s Boost to Basic Science

Mark Abramson, for the Chronicle

Paul Joskow was in his new job as head of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for only a few months when he came face to face with his first hard grant-making choice. Sloan had connected with the Wikimedia Foundation, operators of Wikipedia, the open-source online compendium of knowledge. The website’s leaders had come to Sloan’s offices in New York to share their plans — and to ask for money. Wikipedia, then a new project, came well recommended by tech-industry leaders Mr. Joskow knew in Silicon Valley. But many of the online encyclopedia’s entries were incorrect — some even willfully wrong. Some observers wondered whether the site would ever become more than a curiosity.

“They were kind of fringey at the time,” says Mr. Joskow, now in his eighth year as Sloan’s president. “We had a chance to make a grant to them to improve the quality of their articles. I thought it was a good opportunity. But I was worried what my board might think. There was some risk involved.”

Despite some board members’ qualms, Sloan came through in 2008 with a $3-million grant. The risk paid off: Since that grant (later bolstered by an additional $6 million from Sloan), the site has grown into an established, if not always infallible, source of information on a galaxy of subjects, drawing 680 million online visitors a month.

The Wikipedia example points up Mr. Joskow’s modus operandi, say those who have watched him run Sloan. His tenure has been marked by taking calculated risks, supporting nascent research and media projects, and developing original program areas in science.

More important, under Mr. Joskow’s tutelage, Sloan — with nearly $1.9 billion in assets, making it one of the top-50 grant makers in the U.S. — has become even more tightly focused on making grants to researchers who attempt to unlock the basic secrets of science, they say.

By doing so, Mr. Joskow, an economist with no previous experience in philanthropy, believes Sloan is helping to reclaim a historic role of foundations. Many funds supported basic research before World War II. Yet increasingly, grant makers have embraced applied research instead, especially in health and medicine, when they support research at all. Mr. Joskow worries that in the long run, such strategies could short-circuit the flow of scientific discoveries.

“A lot of the postwar success of the United States had to do with our leadership in science and technology,” he says. “These days, foundations have moved away from supporting basic research. If we move too far away, then there’ll be no basic research to apply.”

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Championing Science

Despite lacking a background in hard sciences or foundation management, Mr. Joskow has become a groundbreaker in science philanthropy, says Robert Conn, president of the Kavli Foundation, which makes grants totaling about $30 million each year to science causes and research institutes.

“There’s no question that he gets the value of basic science,” says Mr. Conn. “As an economist, he understands the creation of wealth and the role science and technology play in it. He brings a point of view that a lot of us who run science-based foundations don’t have. That’s quite valuable to us.”

Under Mr. Joskow, Sloan “is a prime example of punching above its weight,” says Vicki Chandler, chief program officer for science at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Moore collaborates with Sloan on programs aimed at helping researchers wrangle big data, an area in which many philanthropy experts believe Sloan is making its greatest contribution.

She cites Mr. Joskow’s willingness to be blunt as a key factor in his success: “But he does it in a way that is articulate and respectful. He’ll ask things like ‘Where’s the data?’ and ‘What’s the proof of concept?’ He has a good sense of what questions to ask and how to ask them.”

As federal funding to basic science research has declined, Mr. Joskow has assumed a leadership role in expanding the number of private donations to science causes, including spearheading programs within the Science Philanthropy Alliance, a group formed in 2013 by a handful of foundations to raise an additional $1 billion a year for basic research by 2020.

Currently, philanthropy kicks in a little less than $4 billion, with much of it going to university research focused on applied work, which uses the building blocks of basic science to find a cure for a disease or to plot a space ship’s course through the cosmos.

Foundations account for about $2 billion of the total, according to the Foundation Center, a research group that monitors grant-making practices.

By comparison, the federal government awards about $30 billion annually in basic research grants, an amount that has declined slightly in inflation-adjusted dollars in recent years.

“Paul’s done a lot of work to show us exactly what the philanthropic support for basic research is,” says Mr. Conn. “The fact that he is very well connected within the science and university worlds gives him a perspective few of us have.”

A New Path at 60

Mr. Joskow has developed that perspective over a lifetime of measuring data and studying how organizations run.

Born in Brooklyn to an economist and a public-school teacher, he wanted to be an engineer or a scientist. But a course he took as a Cornell sophomore with the esteemed economist Alfred Kahn, a deregulation expert, turned him toward his father’s profession.

“I developed a strong interest in how organizations, especially industrial organizations, work,” Mr. Joskow says. “Alfred Kahn showed me that economics integrated a lot of things I like: math, public policy, and politics.”

After getting his Ph.D. at Yale, he accepted a teaching job at MIT (Alfred Sloan’s alma mater, Mr. Joskow notes) and held it for 35 years. He maintains an office there and continues to do research, focusing largely on public utilities, energy issues, the environment, and government regulation.

He’s written six books and more than 100 papers, covering topics that include the hidden costs of solar energy and the costs and benefits of Internet neutrality. A paper on that latter topic, written with several other economists, argued that offering all Internet consumers the same services, something net-neutrality advocates eventually fought for and won, might slow the development of the web.

He came to Sloan, founded in 1934 by the former chairman of General Motors, after seeing an ad for the president’s position in The Economist. “I was 60 at the time,” says Mr. Joskow. “I thought, if ever there was a chance to do something different, here it was.”

Sloan was already recognized as a powerhouse for grant making in both the hard and soft sciences, but Mr. Joskow found it in need of what he calls some “modernization.” He rewrote the grant maker’s original bylaws, streamlined its mission statement, created a code of conduct and a whistleblower policy, and revamped its corporate- governance structure.

He also set out to learn about science and grant making, soliciting the advice of Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Corporation of America; Paul Brest, then chief at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; and Jonathan Fanton, then the head of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Mr. Joskow was trying to figure out what other philanthropies were doing to support science and technology and what niche Sloan could fill.

Once he boned up, he began to decide what Sloan’s focus would be, further paring or outright eliminating some programs that didn’t have a strong basic-science focus. Over the next three years, he started five multimillion-dollar programs with the idea of creating completely new fields of inquiry for the world of science.

Sloan has continued its support in an area of science that investigates the role carbon plays deep within the earth; another that looks into microbiology within buildings and other public spaces, studying viruses, bacteria, and chemicals to figure out how they affect human health; and a third focusing on the issues surrounding an aging work force.

At Mr. Joskow’s urging, Sloan began forming external committees of scientists to judge whether its programs were feasible.

“We have smart people on staff, but we don’t have a monopoly on them,” says Mr. Joskow.

One program that investigated forests and their ability to absorb carbon was scrapped after committee members saw too little agreement among scientists to justify the grants.

Taking Action on Big Data

Observers say Sloan has made perhaps its deepest mark by starting a program in 2011 on how to compile and use huge data sets.

Since Mr. Joskow’s arrival, the foundation has spent a total of $80 million on programs as far-flung as an astronomical “sky survey” that helps scientists understand and map galaxies; “The Encyclopedia of Life,” run with MacArthur, which aims to provide information on all of the named 1.8 million species on Earth; and a program designed to sort out privacy issues surrounding the use of personal information.

Sloan’s big-data program goes beyond helping mathematicians and scientists find the most efficient and safest ways to use digital information, observers say. It has an inward-looking dimension as well, encouraging grantees to use the newest techniques and make their data available on multiple platforms.

“The amazing thing about what Paul does is that, even as a basic-science guy, he’s interested in how scientists apply what they have learned,” says Alberto Ibargüen, president of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. “Instead of looking to inform policy, he’s looking to make big data actionable. How do you make data practical and comprehensible? How do you help scientists, universities, and foundations think about piracy and privacy as their issues and not something someone else should worry about?”

On data and in other areas, Mr. Joskow has established himself as a thought leader among foundation heads, Mr. Ibargüen adds. By seeding new, important ideas and advances with what he calls “risk capital,” and then working with scientists and foundations to establish new fields, Mr. Joskow is breaking new ground.

“Paul is making his colleagues think about science philanthropy in a way that wasn’t thought of five years ago,” says Mr. Ibargüen. “He’s helped put science, or at least the awareness of it, in front of important groups, including foundation executives.”

Of Sloan’s $80 million in grants annually, nearly half goes to support basic science and math research (including big data), minority Ph.D. science candidates, and investigations involving energy and the environment.

The foundation also spends millions of dollars annually on economics research, STEM education, and increasing the public’s understanding of science issues by supporting science media, including NPR’s “Science Friday” and PBS’s “Nova.”

What it doesn’t spend money on is advocacy. Even during an age when influential scientists, such as the media-savvy astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, are encouraging those in science to more vehemently argue its case, Mr. Joskow insists that Sloan’s strength lies in giving people the best objective findings.

“It’s important to advocate for fact-based policy,” he says. “Listen, if you ask me if there’s enough evidence to say that CO2 is contributing to climate change, the answer is yes. But our basic approach is to get the facts out there.

“We want to be the place people go for unbiased information. We’ll leave it to others to get involved in the politics of it.”