美国科技慈善史上10件大事

武夷山

   美国慈善圆桌会即将推出一本书The Almanac of American Philanthropy（美国慈善年鉴）。该书主编之一Karl Zinsmeister在The New Atlantis杂志2015年冬季号发表文章，Philanthropy in Science, Technology, and Medicine（科学、技术与医学慈善事业），介绍了书中的10个例子，原文见http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/philanthropy-in-science-technology-and-medicine。

 1751 –  拯救患病的穷人和精神病人

当时，费城是全世界讲英语的地域中第二大的城市，仅次于伦敦。费城有一位英国培养的医生叫Thomas Bond，他呼吁建立一所扶危济困的医院，以拯救那些生病的穷人，收容和照料那些到处流浪的精神病人。他提出，如果宾夕法尼亚议会能匹配等额资金的话，他愿意捐助2000英镑。这2000英镑，一部分是他自掏腰包的，一部分是从朋友处募集来的。宾夕法尼亚议会匹配了2000英镑。于是，宾夕法尼亚医院就建了起来。 医院建成后，他就在医院里义务行医，直到33年后去世。

1846 – 史密森学会 

詹姆斯.史密森  (1765–1829) 是英国化学家、地质学家和矿物学家科学家，与美国并无任何关系，他从未出访过美国，在美国也没有亲戚。他自己没有后代，于是就立下遗嘱说，遗产中的50万美元要捐赠给美国政府，用于在美国首都华盛顿建立名叫“史密森学会”的机构，旨在知识的增长与扩散。

1866 – 动物福利运动的起源 

Henry Bergh (1813–1888) 继承了他父亲在纽约的造船生意，年纪不大就退休了，很有钱。一次访问俄国彼得堡期间，他亲眼看见一个人鞭打已经倒地的马，就上前干预。在返程途中，他逗留伦敦，会见了皇家防止虐待动物协会的会长。回到纽约后，他就约了一帮朋友，张罗成立类似的组织。1866年，他获得了许可，成立了美国防止虐待动物协会，并担任第一任会长。为成立这个组织，他投进去不少钱。

1892 – 巴氏灭菌奶拯救了无数人的生命 

Nathan Straus (1848–1931) 儿时随父亲从德国巴伐利亚移民美国。1902年即他54岁时，他的商店是全纽约最大的商店，他成为全城最大富豪之一。

   他有6个孩子，当时的有钱人都自己养奶牛，让孩子喝牛奶。有一回，他的一只牛突患患肺结核而死亡。他听说巴斯德灭菌法可杀灭牛奶中的大部分细菌，就决定从此以后，只让孩子喝经过巴氏灭菌法处理的牛奶。同时，他在纽约市贫穷的社区建立了供奶站，向穷人免费供应灭菌奶。1891年，纽约市出生的婴儿中有24%不满周岁就夭折了，但饮用他所赞助的巴氏灭菌奶的20111名婴儿中，不满周岁就夭折的只有6名。

 1922 – 胰岛素的发现 

    纽约的医生Nathaniel Potter于1916年向慈善机构Carnegie Corporation(卡内基基金会的前身)申请一笔经费以研究糖尿病。该机构给与他每年7500美元的经费，提出的条件是，他得自己另筹2万美元。1919年他去世了，来自芝加哥大学的William Sansum接替他，继续在实验室里研究糖尿病。

卡内基基金会也资助了加拿大方面开展类似研究，那里的科学家从猪胰脏中提取出了胰岛素，并因而获得诺贝尔医学奖。

由于都是卡内基基金会资助的对象，William Sansum对加拿大同行的研究进展很熟悉，加拿大的科学家也给了他很多指导，不久，他也能提取胰岛素了。在加拿大同行在世界上首次用胰岛素治疗糖尿病人的四个月后，他成为美国第一个用胰岛素治疗糖尿病人的医生。

（下面几项只列标题和附原文 ，没时间介绍了）

1930 – 发射火箭

Robert Goddard (1882–1945) was one of the world’s first great geniuses in rocketry, which existed almost entirely in science fiction when he penned his first articles about it in high school. After he earned a doctorate in physics at Clark University in 1911, his rocketry research expenses overwhelmed his salary, and he began fundraising. Goddard received scant financial backing and little interest from government or his fellow scientists, and the media (including, most infamously, the New York Times) attacked his ideas so mercilessly he came to shun publicity. In 1929, though, he was befriended by famed aviator Charles Lindbergh, who, in 1930, persuaded philanthropist Daniel Guggenheim to provide Goddard with a $100,000 grant. For the next eleven years, the Guggenheim family was Goddard’s primary supporter, providing the salary, research funds, and materials with which he created his many breakthroughs in rocket and jet propulsion.

Freed by these donations from the demands of fundraising and teaching, Goddard made bold progress on a range of problems and set the stage for the jet and rocket revolutions — and space exploration, including the multistage boosters that allowed the United States to be the first nation to land men on the moon. Subsequent Guggenheim-funded labs eventually yielded the Mars lander, and probes that traveled to Jupiter, Saturn, and beyond. “Today,” notes historian Claire Gaudiani, “all rockets and planes depend on some of Goddard’s three hundred separate aeronautical inventions.” Indeed, the federal government (which had largely ignored Goddard’s work) agreed after his death to pay his widow and his philanthropic patrons at the Guggenheim Foundation $1 million for infringing on the master engineer’s 214 patents during World War II.

1944 – 发现DNA

In 1944, three scientists working at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research — Oswald Avery, Colin MacLeod, and Maclyn McCarty — proved that DNA is the chemical basis of heredity. This discovery ranked with the findings of Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel in its scientific impact. It launched a new era in genetics.

Additional Rockefeller-funded work expanded on and deepened this discovery. Progress in X-ray imaging, for instance, and in understanding the nucleotides in DNA, was propelled by Rockefeller grants. New tools and understandings like these laid the groundwork for the 1953 discovery by James Watson and Francis Crick of the double helical structure of DNA (which earned them the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine). Indeed, the very Cambridge lab where Watson and Crick conducted their experiments owed its advanced state to the Rockefeller Foundation, according to researchers who worked there. Rockefeller grants funded many of the lab’s assistants. They also made possible the purchase of X-ray diffraction equipment that was central to the mapping of DNA.

1952 – 消灭小儿麻痹症

2002 – 支持基础科学研究

Texan George Mitchell (1919–2013) spent his work days peering downward, deep into the earth, where he was one of the most successful men of his generation at finding valuable oil and gas, especially by the method of hydraulic fracturing that he largely invented. As a philanthropist, though, he often gazed at the heavens, where he loved to support astronomy and other basic sciences. Mitchell had considered becoming a physicist before majoring in petroleum engineering, and by the time he passed away he had donated an estimated $360 million to major scientific efforts — like construction of the Giant Magellan Telescope in Chile, and his 2002 creation of a “fundamental physics and astronomy” program at Texas A&M University. The $100 million he gave to A&M also endowed thirteen academic chairs — several in physics, others in astronomy, three in marine sciences. He built the campus physics building and other structures, and endowed fellowships, lectures, and meetings related to astronomy and physics. Mitchell’s giving during the last decade of his life has been described as one of the greatest philanthropic campaigns ever in support of basic science.

2011 – 含有阿基米德遗作的羊皮纸卷

In 1998, an anonymous billionaire purchased a horribly preserved medieval prayer book at a Christie’s auction for $2 million. The reason for the gaudy price? The battered volume also contained the most important scientific manuscript ever sold at auction. The book was a palimpsest — a text written on top of an older text (because parchment was once so precious that books no longer prized often had their pages washed or scraped clean, and then recycled into new books). Underneath the thirteenth-century prayers were the erased contents of seven ancient works, nearly all of them previously lost to civilization, including two hitherto unknown essays by the third-century B.C. Greek mathematical genius Archimedes.

Portions of the previous text were visible as ghostly shadows, and had been translated in the early 1900s. But after the anonymous donor purchased the palimpsest he deposited it at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, and donated additional funds, supplemented by gifts from the Selz and Stockman Family foundations, so that the manuscript could be studied, conserved, and then presented to the public. Curators proceeded to disassemble, clean, and analyze the work. Over a twelve-year period, more than eighty experts contributed to this philanthropically funded effort, culminating in an X-ray scan at Stanford that detected residual iron atoms from the iron-based ink of the original texts. That allowed scholars to read large sections of previously hidden text.

In addition to previously unknown works of history, philosophy, and politics, there were the two important treatises by Archimedes: “The Method of Mechanical Theorems,” which explores the concept of infinity and anticipates many of the techniques of calculus, and “Stomachion,” the earliest Western theorizing in mathematical combinations of a sort that are now central to modern computing.

The Stanford scan also discovered the name of the scribe who erased the Archimedes text and other ancient writings and transcribed the prayers on top: Johannes Myronas, who finished his work on April 14, 1229, in Jerusalem. The prayer book was apparently then used for centuries in the Monastery of St. Sabbas in the Judean desert. All of this is fascinatingly documented in a layman’s book, open Internet postings, and a multi-book set from Cambridge University Press that presents actual images of the processed pages with transcriptions — thanks to the anonymous donor who started the whole investigation, and his insistence that all findings and images be shared directly with interested scholars and members of the public.