Kavli Foundation

November 13, 2006
SMH

He might be the most active philanthropist you have never heard of: a retired technology entrepreneur putting his stamp on science research centres at the world's top universities and sponsoring what he hopes will be 21st-century versions of the Nobel Prizes.

With his efficient use of a roughly $600 million (euro466.4 million) fortune _ big but hardly Bill Gates-ishly mind-boggling _ 79-year-old Norwegian-born philanthropist Fred Kavli could end up having an outsized impact on next-generation science.

Many 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 may not yet be in sight.

"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."

Just a few years after seriously beginning his mission to stimulate advances in nanotechnology, neuroscience and astronomy, Kavli has launched 14 research centres in academia's most rarified halls. The sites include Harvard, Yale, Stanford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Holland's Delft University of Technology, the University of Cambridge in England and, in China, Peking University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Although Kavli requires universities to match much of the $7.5 million (euro5.8 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.

Kavli expects to eventually create 20 such centres. And beginning in 2008, $1 million (euro780,000) 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.

"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."

While Kavli's $7.5 million (euro5.8 million) to inaugurate an institute is generous, by some measures it's small. New academic buildings, for example, often cost tens of millions of US dollars (euros). What makes Kavli's model notable is that it resembles how a business builds a brand.

Between the Kavli institutes _ expected to be fed by an annual pool of $20 million (euro15.5 million) after his death _ the Kavli Prizes and regular gatherings of Kavli-funded researchers, Kavli hopes to create something larger than the sum of its parts: a growing organism of avant-garde research.

"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 the Kavli Institute for Nanoscience at the California Institute of Technology when he was the school's president.

The Kavli Foundation's momentum is widely credited to its president, David Auston, a former president of Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. Auston's connections and credibility have opened doors for the foundation, which is based in Oxnard, California.

But Kavli is not just the guy who signs the checks. The vision at work here germinated in him long ago, when Kavli was a young dreamer in Norway, marveling at the ethereal glow of the Northern Lights.

Kavli appears to have always set his sights on achieving. At age 13, when World War II led to fuel shortages in Norway, he and his brother started a business making wood briquettes that could be burned to power cars. They also sold planks to furniture factories.

He studied physics in college, then left Norway in 1955 for America with a classic immigrant's narrative. "I was ambitious, let's face it," he said with a wink.

After a year in Canada, Kavli joined a small Los Angeles company that developed flight controls for Atlas missiles. Kavli rose to chief of engineering, but his entrepreneurial side beckoned. So he put a simple ad in the newspaper: "Engineer seeking financial backing to start own business."
What emerged was Kavlico, which specialized in navigational sensors for the defense and aircraft industries.

Kavli invested much of his resulting wealth in Southern California real estate. He also became a well-known community donor near his company's headquarters in Moorpark, California, putting his name on a local performing arts centre, and endowed some university professorships.

But not until he sold Kavlico for $345 million (euro268.2 million) to C-Mac Industries Inc. in 2000 did Kavli set his sights on a larger-scale legacy.

"It's important to realize this guy's kept a very low profile his whole life, until he came out with all this," said Charles Vest, former MIT president and a member of the foundation's board.

The foundation is getting most of Kavli's money _ he is divorced and 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.

"One of the problems with philanthropy is to make it effective, and to use money so that it's not wasted away," Kavli said.

That principle is partly why the foundation expects universities to put up their own resources to snare a Kavli Institute. Kavli and Auston believe the rule ensures a university is committed to supporting its researchers in the long term.

Kavli has few concrete expectations for scientists who get his money, other than that they attend interdisciplinary gatherings every so often to share ideas.

"We don't try to tell the institutes what to do," he said. "We try to just select the very best science teams and institutions and support them in what they want to do, and we expect them to choose the very best course of action."
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On the Net:

http://www.kavlifoundation.org/