Scientific funding is one of the most consequential investments we can make as a society. Private wealth has underwritten some of the most important discoveries in history, from Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle to the Carnegie and Rockefeller research institutes. Yet today, wealthy individuals funding science are treated with implicit skepticism.
This critique has become bipartisan: the right condemns Bill Gates, the left condemns Elon Musk. This is happening as investment in science is needed most, as federal funding shifts unpredictably, academic institutions erode, the life sciences industry cuts R&D, and venture capital flows elsewhere.
It’s tempting to assume these critiques don’t matter, that contrarian billionaires will fund what they want regardless of public opinion. But even the most independent-minded wealthy individuals are influenced by the people around them (friends, families, social circles). Sustained skepticism shapes priorities.
Having recently raised ~$30M for Preventive, a public benefit corporation conducting research that would otherwise not have been funded, I can tell you firsthand that this hostility toward wealthy individuals funding research has a real impact.
If science funding becomes a reputational liability rather than a point of pride, capital will flow elsewhere. We should encourage private investment in fundamental research, not discourage it.
For most of history, private funding was the norm
To understand today’s funding landscape, it helps to look at how we got here, because the current model is more recent than most people realize.
For most of history, scientific inquiry depended on private wealth: aristocratic patronage, family fortunes, and industrialist philanthropy. The system was far from perfect, but it produced most of humanity’s foundational discoveries. Galileo’s astronomy was enabled by Medici patronage. Carnegie and Rockefeller built institutions that rivaled any university. Franklin’s electrical experiments were funded from his printing fortune. The Nobel Prize itself exists because Alfred Nobel wanted to do something better with his dynamite wealth.
This model offered patient capital with minimal bureaucracy, something modern grant systems struggle to provide. Darwin had no hypothesis, no plan for practical applications, no chance of passing modern grant review.
It wasn’t until the 1940s that the federal government became a major funder of science, and it was motivated by war. Roosevelt’s Office of Scientific Research and Development funded breakthrough work on radar, mass production of penicillin, and the Manhattan Project. Its success led Vannevar Bush to argue in “Science, the Endless Frontier” (1945) for sustained federal support. The NSF and expanded NIH followed. The Cold War cemented the model, federal R&D spending doubled after Sputnik, and public funding became the American default.
This system has been enormously productive. But decades of it have created a culture that treats government funding as legitimate and private funding as something requiring justification.
Private Funding’s Impact
A study covering 2000-2008 found that roughly half of Nobel-related papers that cited funding in the sciences had at least one private funder. This is despite private funding of research being less likely to be acknowledged or published in the first place. In most of these cases, private funding worked in conjunction with public support.
Meanwhile, as science funding has shifted toward public sources, research productivity has steadily declined. The suggestion isn’t that private funding should replace public funding; it’s that private capital has an outsized ability to identify and support breakthrough research.
This pattern has likely strengthened since. Recent Nobel Prizes have gone to work at large private organizations: AlphaFold at DeepMind, mRNA vaccines developed through industry partnerships, and HHMI-backed discovery of CRISPR.
Why does private funding disproportionately back breakthroughs?
Freedom from consensus and politics. Private funders can bet on unconventional ideas without navigating peer review committees invested in existing paradigms and can explore topics that become politically charged.
Patient capital for big ideas. Foundations and endowments can fund work that outlasts three-year grant cycles, giving researchers time to pursue high-risk, long-term projects.
Investigator autonomy. Researchers can pivot when they discover something unexpected, pursue speculative directions, and aren’t pressured to strictly follow their grant application.
These conditions attract ambitious scientists to privately funded environments, which further concentrate breakthrough work.
Let Them Fund Science
The skepticism toward private science funding is part of a broader anti-capitalist sentiment, likely fueled by real affordability problems in housing, healthcare, and education. These concerns are understandable. But directing private capital toward fundamental science benefits everyone, and treating this the same as other uses of wealth only ensures that money flows into megayachts rather than research.
The potential impact of more private funding for science is enormous. Private philanthropic funding currently represents roughly 2% of total research dollars. What if we could double or triple that? Imagine not one Arc Institute, but ten. Not just HHMI, but half a dozen similar organizations with different research philosophies. That’s tens of billions flowing into high-risk, long-term science rather than into hedge funds and art collections.
Right now, brilliant ideas go unfunded because they’re too speculative for NIH, too long-term for industry, and too expensive for academia. When we stigmatize private science funding, we’re not solving inequality; we’re just leaving discoveries on the table that could benefit us all.
If we want more scientific breakthroughs, we should celebrate this trend, not discourage it.