Fundraising for Science

They are buying the label on the bottle

“This is not my wine,” announced the billionaire as he sipped from the elongated crystal goblet that our university president had just poured. It was his wine. I had pressed my local distributor, a 30-something Virginian with a name straight out of Gone With The Wind, hard to find a case of his stuff. The plan had been to celebrate his promised big check in support of the Institute with a dinner at the President’s house, and his red wine would be the guest of honor.

We were all horrified. Our university president presented him the bottle, with his label, X Vinyards, prominently displayed.

“Of course it is,” the President said.

“No, this is fraud. This is not my wine.”

I focused intensely on my shoelaces. In my mind, I wasn’t at the President’s house. I was 500 miles to the north at my Woods Hole lab bench, working out the role of protein kinase C in sea urchin development. I wondered how fundraising for science had come to this.

“Mr. X,” let’s try some white, no? That’ll go with the first course, I think.” Distracting him with Chardonnay was my plan.

Disaster, right? Actually no. The check cleared three weeks later. A big one. And it was unrestricted.

What had just happened in that dining room wasn’t a near-disaster. It was, in retrospect, a perfectly normal evening — just with the subtext briefly visible.

Here is what I think major donors are really buying. Not the science. Not the graduate students who will spend five years chasing a result that may never arrive. Not the state-of-the-art equipment, the postdocs, the administrative overhead that your development office will explain in careful detail. They are buying the label on the bottle. They are buying the wing with their name on it, the lecture series, the endowed chair, the wall plaque that they think will outlast everyone in that dining room. The Institute exists, in their imagination, as an extension of themselves — a form of biological immortality dressed in the language of public good.

Your job, as Institute Director, is to make that narcissism feel like generosity. To them, and honestly, to yourself.

This is not cynicism. The science is real. The graduate students are real. The results — when they come — are real. In neuroscience, my field, some of those results can save lives. But the transaction at the center of scientific philanthropy is a negotiation between two kinds of legacy hunger: the donor’s need to be remembered, and the researchers’ need to do work that matters. An Institute Directorship is, among other things, the art of holding both of those needs in the room simultaneously without letting either reveal the reality of the other too clearly.

Nobody teaches you this. There is no course in graduate school called Asking Rich People for Money in the Service of Science. Your thesis advisor taught you to think carefully, to doubt your results, to follow the data wherever it went. That person, your mentor, had no idea what an Institute Director does on a Tuesday afternoon.

What you learn, slowly and mostly by humiliation, is that federal funding and philanthropic funding are different games with different rules and different currencies. There were many times when the audacity of asking for a lot of money in a personal, one-on-one context led me to disaster. On one occasion, the donor started laughing at the ask. It was two orders of magnitude too small. On another occasion, the donor glared at me and remarked that they had thought we were just having a friendly conversation about science, not money.

At NSF and the NIH, the currency of the realm has been peer review — you are accountable to your scientific community, and the process, whatever its flaws, is fundamentally about the work. In the world of major donors, the currency is relationship. The science is the framing context; the relationship is the product. You are not making a case to a peer review panel. You are making a person feel that their money will become part of something larger than themselves — and that you, specifically, are the right steward of that transformation.

This requires a particular kind of split attention. The version of me that spent years at a lab bench, working out how molecular signal transduction works in a living cell, had to be held in reserve — not abandoned, but kept somewhere safe. In contrast, the other version of me learned to read a room, manage an ego, and pivot to some white wine when necessary. The bench scientist and the Institute Director are not antagonists. But they are not quite the same person either.

The BRAIN Initiative taught me this at scale. Billions of dollars, multiple agencies, the White House, and, somewhere underneath it all, the actual neuroscience. Keeping those things in productive tension — that’s the job. The wine dinner, Mr. X, was just a smaller version of the same problem.

So, what do you do with all of this?

The honest answer is that you get good at it, and getting good at it changes you in ways that are hard to fully inventory. You learn to pick up social cues in the first seconds of a conversation. You learn that silence from a major donor is not the same as a no. You learn that the ask, when it finally comes, should feel inevitable — the natural conclusion of a relationship that both parties have been carefully tending, even if only one of them knew that’s what was happening.

And you learn, eventually, to make peace with the transaction. The donor gets their label, their legacy, their wall plaque. The Institute gets the unrestricted funds that quietly multiply into something a directed gift never could. The graduate students get their five years at the bench. Some of them produce results that matter. A few of those results, in a field like neuroscience, find their way into treatments and into lives that are measurably better because the science has been done.

That is not nothing. That is, in fact, quite a lot.

But I still think about that dining room sometimes. The crystal goblet. The bottle with his label on it, the wine he grew on his own land, and his absolute certainty — in the face of all evidence — that it was not his. What he was really saying, I think, is that the label was never enough. That what he wanted was something no check could buy: the certainty that the thing bearing his name was genuinely, irreducibly his.

Scientists understand this feeling better than donors know. Every result we ever cared about felt that way — earned, irreplaceable, ours in a way that had nothing to do with money.

We just learned, some of us, to work with people who express it differently.