Harrop: What happens when private money pays for science?

• Paul Allen, a co-founder of Microsoft, gave $100 million to set up the Allen Institute for Cell Science in Seattle.

• Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy, created the Schmidt Ocean Institute in Palo Alto, Calif., writing checks for more than $100 million.

Under federal guidelines, government grants for scientific research must be spread around geographically. The 2016 spending bill restores some of the science funding ruthlessly cut in the past decade. But it’s unclear what difference that will make on a map that shows concentrated science spending in a few research centers.

In 2004, Fred Kavli, a tech and real estate magnate, set up a foundation establishing 14 science research institutes in the United States. Where are they? In California, at Stanford University, the California Institute of Technology, and three campuses of the University of California. In the Northeast, at MIT, Harvard, Cornell, Yale, Johns Hopkins, and Rockefeller University. And there’s one at the University of Chicago.

Big begets big

Big private money begets more big private money. When Charles Munger, Warren Buffett’s partner in Omaha, decided to make his $65 million gift to science, he chose the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara.

The Broad Institute, to which Stanley made his huge gift, was created through $700 million in donations by Eli and Edythe Broad, who grew rich off housing and insurance.

The federal government remains the biggest supplier of science research dollars, but years of cutting back has forced American universities to turn to private donors for funds. A study of National Science Foundation data shows that by 2012, Americans had to find money for over 19 percent of their research, way up from just under 9 percent in 1962.

The institutions in the best position to tap donors are those where the donors live and party. And frankly, a lot of donors want their names plastered on the sides of buildings that their friends will see — at powerhouse institutions.

Facebook zillionaire Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, put $45 billion in an LLC that they say will concentrate on “advancing human potential and promoting equality for all children in the next generation.” They say they want to cure diseases.

Those goals may be widely shared across this big, diverse country of ours. But one can bet the bulk of those billions won’t be spent in the congressional districts of the politicians who created the conditions that have privatized spending for the public good. The law of unintended consequences at work.