Retired entrepreneur donates millions to sciences

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- He might be the most active philanthropist you've never heard of: a retired technology entrepreneur putting his stamp on science research centers at the world's top universities and sponsoring what he hopes will be 21st-century versions of the Nobel Prizes.\nWith his efficient use of a roughly $600 million fortune - big but hardly Bill Gates-ishly mind-boggling -- that 79-year-old philanthropist, Fred Kavli, could end up having an outsized impact on next-generation science.\nMany scientists lament that money for basic research is becoming harder to obtain, as governments, corporations and other big funders seek specific breakthroughs that can be applied relatively quickly. Kavli, however, is adamant about giving money for open-ended research whose ultimate fruits might not yet be in sight.\n"He's quite visionary," said Eric Kandel, Nobel-winning director of the Kavli Institute for Brain Science at Columbia University. "We need more people like him."\nJust a few years after seriously beginning his mission to stimulate advances in nanotechnology, neuroscience and astronomy, Kavli has launched 14 research centers in academia's most rarified halls, including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Caltech and MIT, plus schools in Europe and China. While some are using Kavli's money to probe the nature of "dark matter" in the universe, others are exploring the minuscule brain structures active in human cognition.\nAlthough Kavli requires universities to match much of the $7.5 million he typically puts up for an institute, no school has turned him down. Many find money for basic research so rare that they send Kavli's foundation unsolicited appeals.\nKavli expects to eventually create 20 such centers. And beginning in 2008, $1 million Kavli Prizes in nanotech, neuroscience and astrophysics will be awarded every two years by the Academy of Sciences in Norway, where Kavli was born and first yearned to better grasp man's place in the universe.\n"I like to look far into the future," Kavli said in his slightly lilting Norwegian accent. "I think it's important for the benefit of all human beings."\nElements of Kavli's philanthropy have been seen before. He's not the first industrialist to disperse money to multiple academic centers. Arnold Beckman, an inventor who died in 2004 at age 104, spread at least $400 million to support research and education at several institutions.\nAnd while Kavli's $7.5 million to inaugurate an institute is nice, by some measures it's small. New academic buildings, for example, often cost tens of millions of dollars.\nWhat makes Kavli's model notable is that it resembles how a business builds a brand.\nBetween the Kavli institutes -- expected to be fed by an annual pool of $20 million after his death -- the Kavli Prizes and regular Kavli gatherings of Kavli-funded researchers, Kavli hopes to create something larger than the sum of its parts: a growing organism of avant-garde research.\n"Fred's interest really is more abstract than most, because he wants to fund the very best of science and doesn't care where it is," said David Baltimore, a Nobel-winning biologist who helped launch Caltech's Kavli Institute for Nanoscience when he was the school's president.\nThe Kavli Foundation's momentum is widely credited to its president, David Auston, a former Bell Laboratories engineer who later headed Case Western Reserve University. Auston's connections and credibility have opened doors for the foundation, which is based in Oxnard, Calif.\nThe foundation is getting most of Kavli's money - the divorced Kavli does not believe in leaving significant sums to his two children - and his businessman's emphasis on streamlining. Its operations essentially consist of just Kavli, Auston, a communications director and a fund manager.\n"One of the problems with philanthropy is to make it effective, and to use money so that it's not wasted away," Kavli said.\nThat principle is partly why the foundation expects universities to put up resources of their own to snare a Kavli Institute. Kavli and Auston believe the rule ensures a university is committed to supporting its researchers in the long term."\nKavli is confident this simple recipe will grease the wheels for breakthroughs that deepen our knowledge of the universe or help solve our most intractable problems, from medicine to energy. \n"I am," he said, "a fully fledged optimist"