Scientific development, especially in medicine and technology, has had a considerable effect in raising living standards by saving lives and improving the quality of life.

The vast majority of scientific developments are led by the government ― the main reason being the astronomical costs that can only be properly funded by the state. Even in the U.S., personal and private funding for scientific research barely reaches 10 percent of total funds.

Experts emphasize that donations from superrich individuals are crucial for scientific advancement, as they are able to support scientific research that the public sector is unable to fund due to budget constraints. The following shows billionaires who have willingly donated billions of dollars to various fields in the name of science.

Bill Gates

 

Microsoft founder Bill Gates is a billionaire well known for his donations. Gates has donated a total $30.2 billion for various causes as of last year, approximately 40 percent of his total assets, which Forbes recorded as $79.2 billion (as of Feb. 20, 2015).

Gates’ latest philanthropic endeavor is to help eradicate incurable diseases in less developed countries.

Through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, founded by Gates and his wife, Gates donated $1.5 billion to the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization last month.

Other major donors include the governments of the U.S., Norway and the United Kingdom. The total donations have reached the group’s target amount of $7.5 billion.

GAVI, which Gates also helped set up in 2000, plans to provide vaccines to children against diarrhea and pneumonia in poor countries over the next five years. The vaccine is expected to benefit at least 5 million children worldwide.

Gates had emphasized preventing disease and saving lives through vaccinations in the past, stating in a Forbes interview in 2011 that he would be “deeply disappointed” if his work cannot lower the death toll by 80 percent within the next 25 years.

Warren Buffet

 

Warren Buffet of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., who founded The Giving Pledge along with Bill Gates, is also a philanthropist acclaimed for his goodwill.

Buffett frequently donates to the James Redford Institute for Transplant Awareness, to which he had also donated funds from his annual “dinner auction.”

The James Redford Institute helps spread awareness for blood, marrow and organ donations by promoting public awareness through the Internet, films and educational outreach.

Buffett has also donated $2.1 billion last year (and $2 billion in 2013) to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is one of the largest transparently run private foundations in the world.

The Foundation’s Global division seeks to lift people out of poverty and hunger, while its U.S. division seeks to provide educational opportunities for children in vulnerable homes.

Buffet had pledged to donate all of his Berkshire Hathaway stocks to philanthropic foundations in 2006, and has so far given around $19.9 billion, approximately 27 percent of his entire assets of $72.4 billion.

Eli Broad

Eli Broad rose as a billionaire from founding the homebuilding company KB Home, as well as the insurance company SunAmerica. He and his wife participated in The Giving Pledge and announced that they would give 75 percent of their wealth away.

He has since donated $3.5 billion out of his $7.2 billion assets, most of it on the sciences and biomedicine. Broad helped set up the Eli and Edythe L. Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and donated $400 million in 2008.

The institute, commonly referred to as Broad Institute, is a biomedical research center that studies human genome and how it influences diseases.

Broad and his wife have also set up The Broad Foundations, which helps advance entrepreneurship in education, science and the arts through donations.

Elon Musk

With $12.2 billion in net assets, Elon Musk, founder of Tesla Motors, PayPal and SpaceX, is also on the list of billionaires who have donated in the scientific field, specifically on researching artificial intelligence.

In January, Musk donated $10 million to the Future of Life Institute, which was founded on the idea that artificial intelligence should be developed to a level controllable by humans, and works on mitigating potential risks.

Elon Musk said in the FLI press statement, “Here are all these leading AI researchers saying that AI safety is important,” and stated, “I agree with them, so I’m today committing $10 million to support research aimed at keeping AI beneficial for humanity.”

FLI cofounder Anthony Aguirre stated that Musk’s donation would have a major impact on AI research, noting that while government investment helped develop AI in its early stages, “relatively little funding has been available to help ensure that this change is actually a net positive one for humanity.”

By The Korea Herald Superrich Team (sangyj@heraldcorp.com)

Kwon Nam-keun, Hong Seung-wan, Sung Yeon-jin, Bae Ji-sook, Yoon Hyun-jong, Min Sang-seek, Kim Hyun-il, Sang Youn-joo