This is an online portal with information on donations that were announced publicly (or have been shared with permission) that were of interest to Vipul Naik. The git repository with the code for this portal, as well as all the underlying data, is available on GitHub. All payment amounts are in current United States dollars (USD). The repository of donations is being seeded with an initial collation by Issa Rice as well as continued contributions from him (see his commits and the contract work page listing all financially compensated contributions to the site) but all responsibility for errors and inaccuracies belongs to Vipul Naik. Current data is preliminary and has not been completely vetted and normalized; if sharing a link to this site or any page on this site, please include the caveat that the data is preliminary (if you want to share without including caveats, please check with Vipul Naik). We expect to have completed the first round of development by the end of March 2022. See the about page for more details. Also of interest: pageview data on analytics.vipulnaik.com, tutorial in README, request for feedback to EA Forum.
We do not have any donee information for the donee Life Sciences Research Foundation in our system.
| Cause area | Count | Median | Mean | Minimum | 10th percentile | 20th percentile | 30th percentile | 40th percentile | 50th percentile | 60th percentile | 70th percentile | 80th percentile | 90th percentile | Maximum |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 3 | 780,000 | 685,000 | 105,000 | 105,000 | 105,000 | 105,000 | 780,000 | 780,000 | 780,000 | 1,170,000 | 1,170,000 | 1,170,000 | 1,170,000 |
| FIXME | 1 | 105,000 | 105,000 | 105,000 | 105,000 | 105,000 | 105,000 | 105,000 | 105,000 | 105,000 | 105,000 | 105,000 | 105,000 | 105,000 |
| Scientific research | 2 | 780,000 | 975,000 | 780,000 | 780,000 | 780,000 | 780,000 | 780,000 | 780,000 | 1,170,000 | 1,170,000 | 1,170,000 | 1,170,000 | 1,170,000 |
| Donor | Total | 2019 | 2018 | 1987 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open Philanthropy (filter this donee) | 1,950,000.00 | 1,170,000.00 | 780,000.00 | 0.00 |
| MacArthur Foundation (filter this donee) | 105,000.00 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 105,000.00 |
| Total | 2,055,000.00 | 1,170,000.00 | 780,000.00 | 105,000.00 |
| Title (URL linked) | Publication date | Author | Publisher | Affected donors | Affected donees | Document scope | Cause area | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| How Life Sciences Actually Work: Findings of a Year-Long Investigation (GW, IR) | 2019-08-16 | Alexey Guzey | Effective Altruism Forum | National Institutes of Health Howard Hughes Medical Institute Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Open Philanthropy Amgen | Life Sciences Research Foundation Harvard University Massachusetts Institute of Technology Stanford University | Review of current state of cause area | Biomedical research | Guzey surveys the current state of biomedical research, primarily in academia in the United States. His work is the result of interviewing about 60 people. Emergent Ventures provided financial support. His takeaways: (1) Life science is not slowing down (2) Nothing works the way you would naively think it does (for better or for worse) (3) If you're smart and driven, you'll find a way in (4) Nobody cares if you're a genius (5) Almost all biologists are solo founders. This is probably suboptimal (6) There's insufficient space for people who just want to be researchers and not managers (7) Peer review is a disaster (8) Nobody agrees on whether big labs are good or bad (9) Senior scientists are bound by their students' incentives (10) Universities seem to maximize their profits, with good research being a side-effect (11) Large parts of modern scientific literature are wrong (12) Raising money is very difficult even for famous scientists. Final conclusion: "academia has a lot of problems but it's less broken than it seems from the outside." |
Graph of top 10 donors by amount, showing the timeframe of donations
| Donor | Amount (current USD) | Amount rank (out of 3) | Donation date | Cause area | URL | Influencer | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open Philanthropy | 1,170,000.00 | 1 | Scientific research/trasnformative basic science | https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/scientific-research/miscellaneous/life-sciences-research-foundation-young-investigators-2019 | Chris Somerville Heather Youngs | Donation process: Discretionary grant Intended use of funds (category): Direct project expenses Intended use of funds: The grant page says: "The funds will support six postdoctoral fellows for three years apiece. The fellows have proposed research projects investigating Alzheimer’s disease, infectious disease dynamics, forebrain development, cross-species transmission of bird flu, muscle stem cell function, and immune system evolution." Intended funding timeframe in months: 36; announced: 2019-06-26. |
|
| Open Philanthropy | 780,000.00 | 2 | Scientific research/transformative basic science | https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/scientific-research/miscellaneous/life-sciences-research-foundation-young-investigators | Chris Somerville Heather Youngs | Donation process: Discretionary grant Intended use of funds (category): Direct project expenses Intended use of funds: Grant "to support early-career investigators. The funds will support four postdoctoral fellows for three years apiece. The fellows have proposed research projects investigating immunology, virology, neurobiology, and tuberculosis." Donor retrospective of the donation: The followup 2019 grant suggests that this grant would be considered a success Intended funding timeframe in months: 36; announced: 2018-05-03. |
|
| MacArthur Foundation | 105,000.00 | 3 | FIXME | https://www.macfound.org/grants/ | -- | To support post-doctoral fellowships for researchers working in fields related to parasitic diseases. Affected countries: United States; affected states: Maryland; affected cities: Baltimore. |