“Great science in a lab never treated anyone. Great companies are what make the difference. That is the mindset that tech company owners bring to science and, honestly, I’m thankful for anyone who puts money into science.”

That is the view of Fred Ramsdell, the US immunologist who was awarded the , on the striking recent increase in the funding of research by US tech billionaires.

Ramsdell has received funding from charitable foundations run by Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen, and, more recently, from the established by Facebook’s first president, Sean Parker. But unlike their philanthropical forebears, such figures rarely simply write a cheque and walk away with a warm feeling of satisfaction, Ramsdell noted. Gifts to support discovery science usually come with agreements on sharing the revenue from any commercial applications, particularly when they involve the biotech firms within which he spent most of his career.

“Some [foundations] are more commercially minded than others but…if someone has started their own company [financial returns] are always going to be part of the philosophy,” he said. “Bill Gates and Paul Allen funded my research because they saw it had value [and] they made some money on their investment. But it wasn’t going to deliver the 10-fold return that industry would have wanted, so this type of support was very useful.”

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With public support for science inevitably constrained, there is growing excitement that a new wave of funding from private sources could lead to a step change in the pace of groundbreaking discovery – not merely from a growing cadre of tech-bro philanthropists but also from investors seeking to turn a profit (in some cases, these are one and the same).

Many are already stepping up. Notable new research bodies include the Palo Alto-based non-profit backed by numerous tech investors, and the San Francisco-based , backed by OpenAI founder Sam Altman and Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son.

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Another example is San Francisco’s , which aims to build “AI agents to automate research in biology and other complex sciences”. Founded in 2023 by Sam Rodriques, formerly of the Crick Institute, and Andrew White, formerly of the University of Rochester, the venture is non-profit and has initial financial backing primarily from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy. Last year, the organisation launched a for-profit company, , which aims to raise money by commercialising FutureHouse’s research and raised an initial $70 million.

“Science is too slow,” Rodriques . “At Edison, we are integrating AI Scientists into the full stack of research, from basic discovery to clinical trials. We want cures for all diseases by mid-century.”

In the UK, Oracle founder Larry Ellison – the world’s second-richest man last year, with an estimated fortune of nearly $400 billion (£300 billion) – is investing a reported £10 billion into a brand new, Oxford-based Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT), whose research aims to deliver “scaled solutions to humanity’s important problems” around health, medical science, AI and climate change.

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Leon Neal/Getty Images

Yet not everyone is applauding the creation of these very well-funded research ventures. That ambivalence may chiefly centre on the controversial tech founders currently cheerleading for artificial intelligence, but it also stems from their explicitly for-profit mindset – seemingly very different from the foundations established by previous generations of philanthropical tycoons, such as Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and Howard Hughes.

With venture capitalists also investing large sums in some of these silicon-era research endeavours, the line between philanthropy and hard-nosed corporate R&D investment seems to have blurred. Indeed, the question arises: is this really philanthropy at all? And how should public universities engage given that many institutes seem intent on poaching their best staff on vastly superior remuneration packages. FutureHouse postdoctoral fellows, for instance, $125,000 a year, a very considerable amount for someone at that career level.

“They are raiding us,” a senior University of Oxford academic told ߣߣ��Ƶ, on the current recruitment by the EIT, which is due to open a massive 300,000 square foot Norman Foster-designed campus on the Oxford Science Park next year.

“The amount that Ellison is spending on buildings [alone] is simply staggering,” he added, with the Oxford campus alone set to cost £1.9 billion and a London outpost in Mayfair, bought for £163 million, set to .

The EIT’s most high-profile hire so far is the Laboratory of Molecular Biology’s Jason Chin, often tipped as Britain’s next Nobel prizewinner, who is now leading its . But many more are likely to follow.

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“I can see why it makes some people nervous when researchers are being offered huge salaries to leave Oxford, usually in AI, which is where the profits lie,” continued the scholar. Nonetheless, he felt it is “a good thing for scientists to have these big-money offers. There isn’t going to be any real uplift in money for UK research or higher education for at least two years, so it would be foolish not to embrace the Ellison.”

More importantly, bringing free-spending billionaires to the country is one of the best ways for UK higher education to gain sorely needed political support in Westminster, he added. “The government is always telling universities to show their relevance in the modern world and attract inward investment – this is an incredibly good way to do this, even if most of the intellectual property rights stay with Ellison.”

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Ian Bozic/Alamy

The are readily apparent, according to the science writer Ashlee Vance. If funders lose interest or money-spinning products fail to emerge, funding can quickly be pulled. One example is the for-profit Arena BioWorks research institute, the Kendall Square-based biotech firm that was backed by $500 million from the likes of Dell computers founder Michael Dell but , less than two years after opening.

Ellison’s spending, too, while often generous, has . For instance, he withdrew a $115 million pledge for a new institute at Harvard University in 2005, and he also pulled the plug on funding for his eponymous foundation at about this time, having spent tens of millions of pounds on infectious disease research. That’s maybe not surprising for a tech boss whose willingness to make huge calls – including cutting 21,000 jobs to respond to AI challenges last year – has been one of his greatest strengths. But can that hands-on approach provide the stability and patience required for frontier research?

The institution’s global president, Santa Ono, thinks so. The former president of the University of Michigan and the University of British Columbia, , said EIT researchers can “look forward to long-term horizons rather than quarterly deliverables. Larry Ellison’s commitment is itself a long-term one: this is patient capital, backed by an investor who is deeply and personally engaged in the science and strategy of the institute. This combination of stability and ambition is rare and wonderful. It’s why I believe this is one of the most exciting investments happening anywhere in the world in vital, solutions-focused research, and it comes at a moment when the world has so many serious problems that urgently need solving,” he added.

“What I find so exciting about the Ellison Institute is that it brings together fundamental research and real-world solutions and treats them as mutually reinforcing.” In that regard, he likened the EIT to the fabled Bell Labs, where, underwritten by US telecoms pioneers AT&T, work leading to 11 Nobel Prizes was undertaken, including the invention of transistors, lasers and photovoltaic cells.

“That is the model we’re following: an environment where researchers are given the time and security to pursue fundamental questions over years and decades [in pursuit of] both Nobel-calibre science and a remarkable stream of practical solutions and patents,” Ono said.

On whether Ellison’s vast investment represents science philanthropy as practised by the likes of Carnegie and Rockefeller, Ono responded that he “wouldn’t describe it as philanthropy so much as a strategic investment: capital deployed with real ambition to add scale to British science and to help solve some of the hardest problems facing the world. That strategic intent is exactly what makes it so powerful.”

Nor is Ono troubled by the EIT’s explicitly for-profit orientation, noting that universities, too, are in the business of seeking a return on their research investments.

“Oxford University already does a wonderful job of commercialising its research…[but the EIT] significantly expands what Oxford and indeed the wider golden triangle…is already doing so well,” Ono said. “I see it very much as a synergy and a contribution, [adding] scale and critical mass to a research ecosystem that is already among the best in the world.”

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He also rejected the suggestion that the EIT is “raiding” Oxford’s scientific talent, insisting that it would “strengthen and anchor British science rather than depleting it. Scientists of this [high] calibre, Jason Chin among them, are sought after all over the world, and historically the concern has been that the UK’s brightest are drawn abroad, most often to the United States. What this investment does is give that exceptional talent every reason to do their most ambitious work here.”

Moreover, “because EIT Oxford works hand in hand with the university, the benefits flow outward across the wider ecosystem: new collaborations, shared infrastructure, and fresh opportunities for postdocs and PhDs”.

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Archive Photos/Getty Images

Ellison’s investment in an explicitly for-profit model for scientific research is, according to some, a way to differentiate himself from the likes of Bill Gates and the investor Warren Buffett, who have been more vocal about the importance of giving away their vast fortunes prior to their deaths. But there is also a sense that at least some of the new generation of philanthrocapitalists are determined to improve upon the traditional approach to academic research.

Some believe, for instance, that “peer review takes forever and favours things that are already in motion”, said Steve Fuller, Auguste Comte chair in social epistemology at the University of Warwick. “It helps scientists take the ‘next step on the board’ that already exists, rather than supporting genuinely new ideas.”

Another concern is the pressure on academics to publish. “In universities you’re incentivised to get two Nature papers a year,” said Ramsdell. “But if you’re doing truly risky research, you’re never going to get two Nature papers a year.” This is why “90 per cent of the truly innovative stuff [in the biosciences] comes from biotech companies”.

The most extreme exponent of bypassing traditional academia is PayPal founder Peter Thiel, whose $250,000 encourage students to skip university and instead create a start-up or do scientific research. Other new institutes are also looking to bypass the traditional university incentive system. San Francisco’s is one example. Backed by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, this as “a new type of research and development company that recruits exceptional scientists to pursue high-impact ideas that have languished in traditional institutions”.

Episteme is looking for “visionary” scientists in a wide range of disciplines, from pharma and AI to battery technology, explained Priyamvada Natarajan, chair of Yale University’s department of astronomy and an adviser to the company. “We’re looking for those dreamy and idealistic ideas that might change the world but which might not advance in a university setting.”

Although Episteme will target financial returns, those visionaries will receive five years of funding to pursue work that might change the world, freed from the need to publish or deliver on short-term milestones, she continued: “The corporate world does invest but they expect returns on a very short timescales – PhDs are doing great work but they can’t deliver by quarter one or quarter two, so we need different long-term models to support them.”

That said, Natarajan also believes that Episteme’s approach – which includes day-to-day support for admin, hiring and intellectual property issues to allow scientists to focus on their ideas – will greatly accelerate the speed with which scientific advancements find their way into useful applications.

“Transferring fundamental science into an application used to take a very long time, but the pace of transfer is now much quicker. Einstein’s theories changed the world, but it took time. Breakthrough science is having an impact in a shorter time frame,” said Natarajan.

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Bettmann/Getty Images

Nor is the latest wave of mogul-funded scientific research really so different from that which occurred at the start of the 20th century, according to Warwick’s Fuller – not least in the mix of motivations.

“Ford, Alfred Sloan [the former General Motors president], Howard Hughes and Rockefeller wanted to avoid big tax bills, which is why they founded private foundations,” he said. But it was the director of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Division of Natural Sciences, Warren Weaver, who coined the phrase “molecular biology”.

“The foundation wanted to understand how human beings were composed and how the body worked,” explained Fuller. “These corporate guys were funding basic research – not just for the good of humanity but because they were thinking about the future of the nation, how to improve the productivity of the average worker and the kind of companies that their countries would need in the future.”

The foundations “recognised that if you wanted to get good ideas quickly then universities were a good place to invest” – hence the Rockefeller’s decision to buy equipment for the University of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, where the structure of DNA was discovered by Francis Crick and James Watson in 1953.

In addition, “rather than jockey for space and funding within an existing university, many moguls started their own institutes, and we’re seeing that again,” noted Fuller. But now, as then, universities will “also benefit”, he predicted.

Indeed, they already are. In addition to the longstanding Gates Foundation, which is charged with spending around $100 billion on health and development initiatives, many of them based at universities, there is also the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Founded in 2015 by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, this will commit $10 billion to “frontier biology” research over the next decade, more than double its spending over during its first 10 years.

The Arc Institute, focused on understanding “the root causes of complex diseases, and narrow[ing] the gap between discoveries and impact on patients”, operates “in partnership” with Stanford University and the University of California, San Francisco and the University of California, Berkeley, providing scientists “with multi-year funding to work on their most important ideas”.

And, in March, that its foundation will spend at least $1 billion in the next year: part of its $25 billion commitment to curing diseases with the help of AI and boosting “AI resilience” so that “people can fully benefit from AI in ways that support and expand human agency, creativity, and opportunity”.

The terms on which the money will be distributed are yet to become clear; the company will be “sharing more in the coming months”. But it seems safe to assume that a firm as fast-moving as OpenAI seems unlikely to be content with the pace and incentives of standard academic research.

According to one university president who has worked with billionaires, “There is an expectation and a cultural mindset” that such figures “will give away money – and they don’t mind being asked by a university president. In fact, they expect it.”

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However, modern donors “want to be much more involved than they were. Some want to go further. They want to go down in history – and that means writing that history yourself.”