It is hard to evaluate the social good
that charitable foundations actually do. The one area where the
results of charitable foundation work should be visible is in the field
of health. In the past sixty years charitable foundations have spent
the equivalent of a trillion dollars in current value on health
research. What have they got?
I'll start with my simple list of the most important medical contributions to human health and well being. I nominate eight Penicillin, Salk polio vaccine, birth control pill, the contact lens, the anti-AIDs cocktail, the MRI image machine , erectile dysfunction pills and tamoxifen the drug that has successfully kept nearly all post-menopausal breast cancer from recurring.
*Penicillin
was discovered by Alexander Fleming, working at a Catholic Hospital.
The active ingredient was discovered by two academics, Dorothy Hodgkin
and Howard Florey at Oxford University. The production method was
invented by Andrew Moyer an employee of an Illinois commercial lab. No
charitable foundation money appears in the long chain.
*Jonas Salk developed the final polio vaccine at the University of Pittsburgh Virus Research Lab and it was produced by five commercial pharmaceutical companies. A small amount of the long string of research project funding ($8 million total) came from the single purpose March of Dimes.
*The birth control pill was largely the work of Carl Djerassi while he was a professor at Stanford University. A tiny amount of money for the original work ($150,000) came from Margaret Sanger's personal gift.
The contact lens, the anti-AIDs cocktail, the MRI, the
erectile dysfunction pills and tamoxifen were all commercial
developments. In a few cases the commercial developer paid royalties
to patent holders of original research usually universities, hospitals
and laboratories. Charitable grants were irrelevant.
Looking backwards at the great leaps forward in medicine and health care the trillion dollars of charitable health care funding was like a few chunks of gravel thrown on the ground before a six lane concrete super-highway was built.
The rest of the charitable health funding is unaccounted for on a scale of human health or it competes with the well administered church religious care of the sick and the government care of the needy.