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Poring over a list of the top 50 US philanthropists in 2014, physicist Marc Kastner noticed that 16 were based in California, compared with just 6 in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey combined.
“That made it pretty clear where I should be,” says Kastner, who established the offices of the Science Philanthropy Alliance in Palo Alto, California, when he was named the organization’s first president in February 2015. The alliance is made up of philanthropic organizations that encourage funding in basic research and advise other philanthropists — especially new ones — on how to go about it.
That bet paid off last month, when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and physician and educator Priscilla Chan announced that their Chan Zuckerberg Initiative would spend at least US$3-billion on medical research over the next decade. In remarks describing the initiative's plan to eliminate, manage or prevent all major disease by 2100, Zuckerberg urged fellow philanthropists to seek advice from Kastner.
“This is a milestone for the alliance, in the sense that its goal is to try to increase the funding for basic...
