Harvard turns to the private sector to finance research after losing federal funding
https://reason.com/2025/06/26/harvard-turns-to-the-private-sector-to-finance-research-after-losing-federal-funding/
Harvard turns to the private sector to finance research after losing federal funding
https://reason.com/2025/06/26/harvard-turns-to-the-private-sector-to-finance-research-after-losing-federal-funding/
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> Despite being a private institution with a $53.2 billion endowment, Harvard University is a large beneficiary of federal funding, receiving $686 million in federal dollars in FY 2024. Recently, the university has come under fire from the Trump administration, which has cut away billions of dollars of Harvard’s research grants. This action has especially impacted the T.H. Chan School of Public Health, home to a large contingent of Harvard’s medical research labs, which relies on government funds for nearly half of its annual budget. **In response, the school has turned to the private sector for assistance.**
> In June, İş Private Equity, a Turkish-owned private equity firm and subsidiary of Türkiye İşbank Group, said that it would commit nearly $39 million over 10 years to support Gökhan Hotamışlıgil’s “research on new antibodies for obesity and other metabolic diseases”.
> Hotamışlıgil, a professor of genetics and metabolism, has spent over 20 years studying FABP4, a fatty-acid–binding protein. When secreted into the bloodstream, FABP4 forms “a hormone complex called fabkin,” which causes adverse health effects like inflammation and obesity. Hotamışlıgil and his team have been working on ways to reduce fabkin levels and have developed a lab-engineered antibody that they think could “**prevent or treat various metabolic diseases and diseases of aging.**”
> This pivot to privately funded research would not only reduce the burden on taxpayers, but it could lead to more scientific breakthroughs. The federal government is the largest financier of research in the U.S., which has crowded out private sector investment and raised concerns about scientific integrity and groupthink.
> “If you’re a scientist and you make an observation which can be tested…then as a scientist you have to be honest because **you’ll soon be found out**”. “But if your money comes from the government and it comes by peer review from committees, and **the committees subscribe to a false paradigm**, no one is going to test your paradigm.”
Conservative news outlet thinks that privately funding things will magically make it better, shocker. Obviously only the government can have targeted agendas when funding research, the private sector would NEVER.
It is incredibly ignorant to claim that this is a replacement. Private research won’t touch most of what the federal government would fund because there isn’t a guaranteed or extremely probable return on a lot of this research. The private companies then swoop in and fund the next level of research to build on the foundational research funded publicly.
Also, private research is private. Publicly funded research is made available to everyone and advances science as a whole…. There are dozens of other reasons this is just magic thinking from ignorant conservatives who distrust science and have no idea how research works. The quotes that peer review makes the process bad or less transparent is pure doublespeak.
And this is how we get tons of proprietary research, and not great contracts about what data can be published (if it doesn’t make a particular product or target attractive). Private can definitely subsidize research, and public/private collaborations have done great things. But public funding, with public and honest disclosure of the data, cannot be replaced.
Good, they should continue sitting on that endowment, it’s for rainy days, wait a sec….
This is bad because corporations will have a route to get their tentacles dug into higher ed.
Do you want to make a Jurassic Park? BECAUSE THAT’S HOW YOU MAKE A JURASSIC PARK!
Unfortunately, any company with a US goverment contract wouldn’t touch this. The risk of losing those contracts would be far too great a risk.
Harvard University’s endowment was worth $53.2 billion as of June last year.
Let that sink in for a moment lol.
Glad to see people are being critical of this catastrophe.
They use their endowment to fund themselves. It pays for research, faculty, buildings, ECT… They have enough to go for years without federal aid. Any institution that has a few billion in the bank should be telling the feds to give the money to institutions that truly need it. They can fund all their research and keep it public no problem on their own.