Another Beckman Gift for Advancement of Learning : $20 Million Given for Science Center

“It’s harder to give money away than it is to make it,” said Arnold O. Beckman, 85, the Orange County philanthropist and scientific pioneer who has had plenty of experience in doing both.

Beckman made the observation just before the announcement this week of 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.

In the last decade, the 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, formally announced on Monday, is the largest single contribution in the history of the National Academy of Sciences. It follows the general pattern of Beckman’s accelerating disposition of a personal fortune estimated to be in excess of $500 million. Much of the money was realized from the sale in 1981 of the Fullerton-based Beckman Instruments Inc. to 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.

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 a recent 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.”

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 University of California, 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 has 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 Beckman foundation, incorporated in Costa Mesa, has only five board members: the Beckmans, 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.

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.”

There are some guidelines nonetheless. Only institutional proposals are considered, and most of those approved have to do with scientific research--where “my heart and soul are,” Beckman said.

Beckman said that in the last year 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, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 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.”

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 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.