Smart Charity

How do you follow up the largest donation in Harvard University history? You donate the record amount a second time. At least, that is the approach of Hansjörg Wyss, the Swiss billionaire who received his M.B.A. from Harvard Business School in 1965. This month, he followed up a $125 million contribution to the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering with a second $125 million gift for the Institute. The eponymous donor chose a worthy source. His new, generous influx has the potential to elevate an already formidable array of cutting-edge technologies and research.

Harvard’s Wyss Institute, founded in 2003 in partnership with other Boston-area schools, hospitals, and research institutions, operates on the basic assumption that millennia of evolution have produced powerful biological solutions. Per its mission statement, the Institute’s research “aims to discover the engineering principles that Nature uses to build living things, and harnesses these insights.” A quick survey of the work already in process hints at the value of Wyss’ latest donation. A large portion carries a medical bent, from engineering superior insoles for the elderly to clot-busting nanotherapeutics. The work extends beyond the pure medical field, too. In an example once reserved for science fiction, the Wyss Institute has even constructed insectile robots, with a bevy of possible applications from automated pollination to survivor-finding in crises.

A particularly heartening and illustrative case is the development of synthetic human organs for use in drug testing, including a lung-device capable of breathing and of fighting bacteria. On the one hand, these have the potential to deliver faster, cheaper, and more accurate results. But they also alleviate the need to use animals as test subjects, a need we have lamented—and one which has resulted in particularly tragic outcomes for Harvard Medical School’s Primate Research Center. Innovation of this sort refuses to endorse a dichotomy between efficacy and ethics. That calls for a doubling of both effort and capital. Mr. Wyss is helping to supply the latter; the onus is on Harvard as a research institution to apply the former.

Wyss Institute researcher Kevin K. Parker made an important point when he told The Crimson last summer that “Harvard is in a good position to compete and dominate in this field.” He explained, “A lot of [other researchers] are using similar techniques to ours, which indicates Harvard is kind of the path-setter in this area.” Harvard should continue leveraging its competitive advantage in bold, creative areas like the Wyss Institute’s. Harvard serves as a vital conduit between research funding—public or private—and the solutions to make our world better.

Today, of course, in an epoch of cinctured budgets and federal sequesters, private munificence has a heightened value for universities. But the basic act of donation is no panacea. Cotton Mather, Class of 1678, commented centuries ago on the conundrum of unhelpful giving: “Instead of exhorting you to augment your charity, I will rather utter an exhortation … that you may not abuse your charity by misapplying it.” Hansjörg Wyss did augment his charity. But he did not misapply it.