Philanthropist Making Imprint : Latest Beckman Largess Endows Science Facility
“It’s harder to give money away than it is to make it,” said Dr. Arnold O. Beckman, 85, the Orange County philanthropist and scientific pioneer who has had plenty of experience in doing both.
Beckman made the observation Monday, just before announcing the latest example of his largess--$20 million for construction and endowment of the western headquarters and study center of the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering in Irvine. Beckman in an interview last month had confirmed his intention to make the grant.
In the last decade, the Corona del Mar resident’s vest-pocket Arnold O. and Mabel Beckman Foundation has dispensed approximately $100 million, more than $75 million in the last year alone, in the process leaving Beckman’s name and imprint on American medical and scientific research.
“Either we dispose of it ourselves or it gets handed over to our estate and the government gets it,’ Beckman said of attempts by him and his wife of 60 years to distribute the money before they die. “I think Mrs. Beckman and I can be a little more effective than the bureaucrats in Washington.”
The most recent gift, the largest single contribution in the history of the National Academy of Sciences, follows the general pattern of Beckman’s accelerating disposition of a personal fortune estimated to be in excess of half a billion dollars. Much of the money was realized from the sale in 1981 of the Fullerton-based Beckman Instruments Inc. to the SmithKline Corp. of Philadelphia.
Beckman steadfastly declines to say how much money remains in the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation, a private, tax-exempt organization.
“We live simply and we’ve accumulated a little surplus that we’re not going to take with us,” Beckman told an interviewer last May, when his $12-million gift to Stanford University for a Center for Molecular and Genetic Medicine was announced.
Neither of the Beckmans’ two adult children had an interest in their father’s business.
Beckman’s overriding concern has been to shorten the period of time between breakthrough research in academia and its practical application.
“As I look back over the years,” Beckman said in an interview, “it seems to me that universities, by and large, do not have the interest or structure to speedily develop basic discoveries and quickly convert them to everyday needs.”
Began Tinkering at 9
Such a concern is not surprising, inasmuch as Beckman’s own success was grounded in just such application. His father, a blacksmith in Cullom, Ill., built a backyard shed for Beckman when he was 9 years old, and it was in that shed that the tinkering began.
In 1935, while still a member of the faculty at Caltech, Beckman founded his company to market an “acidimeter,” which enabled Southern California citrus processors to gauge the level of acidity in lemon juice. That device became a widely used tool for analytic chemists, and was followed in 1940 by two equally profitable inventions used for precision scientific measurements, the Beckman DU Spectrophotometer and the Helipot, which was an essential component of early World War II radar systems.
Beckman has not strayed far from his personal history in making his larger grants.
The University of Illinois, thus far the recipient of the largest gift, is where Beckman earned his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering and master’s degree in physical chemistry in the early 1920s. Caltech, in Pasadena, is where he earned his doctorate in photochemistry in 1928 and served on the faculty until 1940, when he began devoting full time to Beckman Instruments. Beckman is chairman emeritus of the Caltech board of trustees. The UC Irvine campus is less than four miles from Beckman’s Corona del Mar home. The Beckman Scientific Instruments division of SmithKline Beckman, where the founder still maintains an office, is also located in Irvine, just off the UCI campus.
In general, Beckman said Monday, the goal of the foundation is “to use the available funds in the best possible way to advance medical science and scientific research.”
More often than not, recipient institutions name the donated facility for the Beckmans, who frequently appear in person for the announcements. Some of the larger grants, like that to the University of Illinois, require a form of matching participation by the institution. The University of Illinois agreed to raise $10 million to augment Beckman’s $40 million. The grant to Stanford and one to the Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation in La Jolla were part of larger fund-raising campaigns that included equal or larger grants from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
The Arnold O. and Mabel Beckman Foundation, incorporated in Costa Mesa, has only five board members. In addition to the Beckmans, the members are former Commerce Secretary Maurice Stans, former Defense Secretary Harold Brown and Donald A. Strauss, a longtime Beckman Instruments executive who handles many of the foundation’s day-to-day details. Both Stans and Brown attended Monday’s announcement of the National Academy of Sciences grant and went directly from the Irvine Hilton to a board meeting of the foundation.
No Foundation Staff
The board, Brown said, meets between twice and four times a year at Beckman’s Irvine office, which is also the foundation’s office. Beckman’s personal secretary serves as the foundation’s secretary. There is no independent staff, but Monday’s agreement with the National Academy of Sciences provides for office space in the facility for the foundation.
There is no formal application procedure for grants, Beckman said Monday, and “in many cases we initiate proposals. We’re run very informally compared to many foundations.”
However, there are some guidelines. Only institutional proposals are considered, and most of those approved have to do with scientific research--where “my heart and soul are,” Beckman said--although smaller grants to area colleges like Chapman have been made. Beckman said that in the past 12 months the foundation has received approximately 1,300 proposals. He declined to say how many had been approved, pointing out that publicity surrounding the grants is at the complete discretion of the recipients.
“I have a stack of proposals this high in my office,” Beckman said, indicating a point about three feet off the ground. Among those submitting proposals, he said, were all nine campuses of the UC system, MIT and Princeton, which told him “they’d be happy to name a molecular lab for me if I gave them a certain amount of money.”
Humorous, Self-Deprecating
The soft-spoken Beckman appears healthy and is acute in personal conversation. He has a gift for humorous and self-deprecating understatement.
“We hope he lives forever,” said Charles Mathews, a spokesman for the City of Hope, another foundation recipient. “The City of Hope is very grateful for his generosity.”
Both Beckman and Brown discounted the notion that the foundation has some master plan for American scientific research for the next 50 years. “I don’t think anyone can shape the future,” Beckman said. “We’d like to do what we can.”
Brown, president of Caltech from 1969 to 1977, said that the foundation’s grants are “not all that much money,” in light of the $100 billion spent annually in this country on scientific research. “It does act as seed money for things that will flower decades later,” the former defense secretary said.
According to UCI Chancellor Jack Peltason, grants such as those made by Beckman--while not of the same magnitude as those of the larger Ford or Rockefeller foundations--provide “the margin of excellence” for research programs. Peltason, who served as chancellor of the University of Illinois and later as president of the American Council on Education in Washington, called Beckman “the leading figure providing flexibility and entrepreneurship” in the field of scientific research.
Still unresolved is the question of a major applied research center in Southern California, perhaps on the same scale as the $40-million University of Illinois centers. Beckman acknowledged Monday that discussions had been held, both with Caltech and UCI, on the subject, but said agreement had not been reached. The location of such a facility, including the possibility of a jointly or cooperatively administered center not located on either campus, is also under consideration.
Other Grants and Gifts Made by Beckman and Foundation
Among gifts and grants made by Arnold Beckman personally and the Beckman Foundation are:
- $40 million to the University of Illinois last month for the Beckman Institute, composed of a Center for Materials Science, Computers and Computation and a Center for Biology, Behavior and Cognition.
- $12 million to Stanford University last May for the Center for Molecular and Genetic Medicine.
- $3.5 million to UC San Francisco last month for the Beckman Vision Center.
- $10 million last year for the Beckman Research Institute of the City of Hope in Duarte.
- $7 million to Caltech in 1984 for the Beckman Auditorium and the Mabel and Arnold Beckman Laboratories of Behavioral Biology.
- $3.5 million to UC Irvine in 1982 for the Beckman Laser Institute and other campus activities.
- $1 million to the Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation in La Jolla in the late 1970s for the Arnold Beckman Laboratory.
Related stories in Part II.
