Philanthropic Funding Makes Waves in Basic Science

Private funders are starting to support big projects, and they’re rewriting the playbook on fueling scientific research.

Written byBob Grant

| 8 min read

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In September 2016, Facebook cofounder and billionaire Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan announced an exceedingly ambitious plan to “cure, prevent, or manage all diseases by the end of the century.” Zuckerberg and Chan pledged $3 billion to be disbursed by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), the charitable foundation they had launched the year before.

With that announcement, the CZI joined the ranks of a handful of other philanthropic mega-donors pumping cash into biomedical research labs. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, for example, has devoted more than $40 billion to research on malaria and other infectious diseases that strike hardest in the developing world, while the Michael J. Fox Foundation has contributed more than $700 million to understanding Parkinson’s disease. Others, like the ...

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Meet the Author

Bob Grant
From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.
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