How a Big Donation Will Help Stanford Scientists Team Up to Unlock Secrets of Brain Disease
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Tom Robertson/SHUTTERSTOCK
We can safely identify one theme in the philanthropy of Nike co-founder Phil Knight and his wife Penny: very large gifts to universities. In 2020 alone, the Knights reportedly gave $465 million to the University of Oregon, and with other commitments in the hundreds of millions, they've supported the school, Phil's alma mater, with something like $1.5 billion. A few years before, they committed $500 million to Oregon Health & Science University. There was $400 million to Stanford University the next year, which had followed a 2006 gift of $105 million to Stanford's business school.
The Knights don't maintain a website for their family foundation, nor do they talk much publicly about their giving, but we can probably expect such substantial contributions to continue. One estimate puts the Knights' current net worth at $57 billion, and though their wealth will fluctuate with the stock market, from any perspective, it's immense.
A recent gift from the couple continued the trend: $75 million to Stanford University to launch the Phil and Penny Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience. The program, which will be housed at the university's Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, aims to answer questions like what happens to brains as people age, why some people experience cognitive decline — and equally important, why some people retain their mental faculties into old age without losing a cognitive step.
"The brain is the most sophisticated organ in our body and understanding it is the most complex question you can ask in biology," said Tony Wyss-Coray, who has been named director of the new Knight-funded research initiative. "Even though we have had some understanding of genetic causes of rare forms of these diseases, the neurodegenerative conditions that affect most people have been very difficult to tackle."
Evolving medical treatments for cancer, heart disease and other ailments enables more people to survive potentially fatal conditions, but they also increase the number of seniors at risk for neurological breakdown and dysfunction.
"People live to an age where the brain is old and shows a lot of structural changes in every cell type, but we have not been able to figure out exactly what are the key problems and why people get different forms of neurodegenerative disease," Wyss-Coray said.
Teasing apart the complexity of brain function is the task for the new Knight initiative. To achieve this, Stanford researchers will use various technologies and tools developed in the last decade or two — such as new imaging technologies, or optogenetics (which uses light to control the activity of neurons) among others. Scientists believe these newer tools can better reveal function at the level of individual cells, and to enable a leap in understanding of how the brain and nervous system work, and how they falter. The hope, of course, is that this basic science will lead to medicines or other interventions that can stop, treat or even reverse neurodegenerative conditions.
Key to this research are cross-department teams of researchers who collaborate to dig into various areas necessary to advance understanding of brain and cell function. That sounds good — and research leaders have been increasingly advocating for more cross-campus science — but funding such teams can be tricky. It’s one area that philanthropic dollars can make an important difference.
The Knight donation will facilitate and expand Stanford's ability to create the funding and work structure that will enable these multidisciplinary teams. "The vision we have is that we can bring people together, incentivize them to work together and bring in knowledge that was not previously applied to these specific questions," said Wyss-Coray. "This donation allows us to build this to a much larger scale and really tackle these major questions." It's the kind of flexible funding that is hard to come by in the standard format of individual NIH grants that fund one lab at a time.
This $75 million Knight gift doesn't rise to the epic level of some of the couple's multi-hundred-million-dollar donations to academia, or to university-directed gifts from other mega-donors. It pales in comparison, for example, to John and Ann Doerr’s recent $1.1 billion climate gift to Stanford.
But it still invokes the simmering debate surrounding giant donations to already-wealthy universities, like Stanford and Harvard, when many public and otherwise lesser-endowed educational institutions could obviously use the money. These are complicated questions — see our pieces here and here exploring the issue — as transformative gifts to less-wealthy schools are wonderful, but as we’ve noted, carry potential risks, too. The need for research funding further complicates things. It's worth pointing out that the benefits of the Knights’ funding reach beyond the Palo Alto campus: scientists at institutions around the the world can build on the work conducted at Stanford.
