Dear Breakthrough Prize Billionaires: Fund the Science You’re Watching Trump Destroy

By Megha Satyanarayana

In a lavish party they called the “Oscars of Science,” the billionaires behind the Breakthrough Prizes handed out $3-million awards in April to the researchers in life sciences, physics and math they’ve deemed “heroes of our society.”

The 1 percenters behind the prizes include Sergey Brin and Mark Zuckerberg, who attended and helped fund Donald Trump’s inauguration, as well as Yuri Milner and former 23 and Me CEO Anne Wojcicki, who also have ties to the Trump family.

It’s ironic, of course, that Zuckerberg and Brin rolled out the red carpet for science while the autocrat they helped take office ruthlessly carpet-bombs the U.S. scientific enterprise. It’s hard to feel any sympathy for these modern-day Rockefellers, who cast their lot with a man whose mind-boggling trade war has suddenly punched holes in their net worths.

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So here’s a suggestion for the redemption tour, fellas: Fund more basic research. Back more science. Put your money into the beginning of the next Breakthrough Prizes instead of at the end. And while you’re at it, make sure that work you fund is open source, peer-reviewed, well-designed and ethical, not subject to anti-DEI lunacy, undue influence or conflict of interest. Do your best to help re-create the scientific juggernaut that helped enrich you and understand that it will still not be enough.

This about-face would not save face, but it could help save science. The damage you’ve enabled is simply unfathomable.

Since the president’s first days in office, science has been under the guillotine at every turn. From freezing federal funding that goes to universities to firing in-house scientists at multiple federal agencies, Trump and Elon Musk’s plan to reduce the size of the federal government and cancel all research that doesn’t fit into their right wing ideology of cisgendered, heterosexual whiteness has threatened the immediate livelihoods of hundreds of scientists, not to mention the American public. Clinical trials have abruptly stopped, public lands have been opened to private extraction, and the average American has woken up each day with fewer evidence-based safeguards and less accountability for what remains.

That the Breakthrough billionaires can throw a Hollywood party and laud the kind of science that has given us powerful weight-loss drugs and insight into the inner workings of the atom is simply insulting, as they not only watch Rome burn in the process but have used their cash to kindle the fire.

Science and innovation in the U.S. are a trillion-dollar endeavor. For every public dollar we spend on research, we get more than twice that back in economic returns. Publicly funded science gave us nearly every single thing these people celebrated last week. Joel Habener, one of the scientists awarded with the Breakthrough Prize for the discovery of GLP-1, the basis of the blockbuster drugs Ozempic and Wegovy, has had funding from the National Institutes of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases for decades. Stephen Hauser, one of the scientists awarded for work in developing rituximab, a biologic drug for multiple sclerosis, has multiple grants from Health and Human Services agencies. David Liu, gene editing savant? Federal dollars fund his research, too.

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN is an international scientific venture. Guess who funds 20 percent of some of the prizewinning research there? The National Science Foundation. And Rebecca Jensen-Clem, one of the astronomers who won a physics prize, is funded in part, by NASA.

Whether or not these particular scientists or these particular projects get caught up in the administration’s ideology sweep is irrelevant. Trump showed us, over and over during his first administration, how little he cared about science and how little he cared about evidence, unless he could take credit for it. Gutting federal research, pausing academic research, all of it slows the R & D engine that has made this country such a superpower, such an ambassador of goodwill around the world. What DOGE and the Trump administration are doing isn’t just awful. It’s incredibly bad policy, both foreign and domestic, and our best minds will leave. Science is an undeniable tool for diplomacy. But not if scientists can’t trust their government.

Meanwhile the Carnegies of a new era celebrated Trump’s ascendence for what it might do for them—remove regulations and ease the ability to use artificial intelligence for anything and everything.

It hasn’t worked. Trump took the money. He hasn’t delivered. And no one could’ve imagined this was coming, right?

So, now, tech billionaires, comes the reckoning. Now comes the realization that the team to which you hitched your wagon has its own agenda, one that easily sacrifices you. Understand that people may not forgive you – some of you once campaigned against Trump, but now you want his favor. But make amends. Shore up American science. Put your money where your red carpet is until evidence-based thought leads our country once again. If you want the innovation that will make your businesses thrive, pay for it.

Fix the wrong you helped realize. Fund the science that Trump and his administration want to erase.

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.