MB Civic

Ralph Kaplan & Harvey Silverglate | July 23, 2006 | The Boston Globe

AMERICAN PHILANTHROPY, in the news lately due to huge donations to wealthy foundations devoted to worthy causes, is nonetheless missing a critical opportunity to turn the private sector’s attention to the most urgent threat to human life. As the pace of scientific and technological developments continues to accelerate, the potential for enormous benefits is coupled with the potential for far more severe — indeed, lethal — costs.

While eradicating disease, creating humanlike robots, and harnessing the uses of nanotechnology could all lessen human suffering, their development could also lead to our demise, something that the leaders of American philanthropy seem not to fully appreciate.

The focus of American philanthropy should shift to reflect the severity of this threat. Defensive measures have always lagged behind offensive ones; more than a half-century after development of the atom bomb, we are further from a defense against the use of atomic weapons than ever. Therefore a new project — akin to the Manhattan Project of an earlier era — should be undertaken to overcome people’s sense that dwelling on this subject is unrelievedly depressing and efforts to deal with the threats are destined to be ineffectual.

In March 2002, knowing of Warren Buffett’s decades-long interest in the dangers from weapons of mass destruction, one of us, Ralph Kaplan, wrote him a letter commenting that “humanity is hurtling toward extinction” as these weapons get continually more lethal, portable, cheaper, and widely available. The letter recommended that a permanent group be established: longer-term in its outlook, devoted to examining the potential uses of newer technologies to deal with these catastrophic dangers.

In his reply, Buffett — who in the same year said that a nuclear attack on American soil was “virtually a certainty” — said: “I agree with almost everything in [your letter] particularly that `humanity is hurtling toward extinction’ (though I might phrase it `toward something equivalent to extinction’) but disagree with your recommendation. In my view it simply would not be effective.”

Buffett has now announced his plan to donate the bulk of his estimated $50 billion fortune to the Gates Foundation, which is largely concerned with health conditions in developing countries.

Given the bleak prognosis for our current trajectory that Buffett shares, how can he not earmark at least a part of this fortune toward a search for new approaches, especially those that might not be even imaginable today?

Bill Joy, cofounder and former chief scientist of Sun Microsystems and an astute observer of these catastrophic dangers, is clearly not in agreement with Buffett on the futility of trying to deal with them. He was instrumental in the recent creation of the Kleiner Perkins Pandemic and Bio Defense Fund. One ponders what might be accomplished with what would be a small portion of Buffett’s charitable gift.

The project we are suggesting could easily be started for a small fraction of the wealth that Buffett is giving to the Gates Foundation. Buffett is not the only philanthropist with the means to make a huge difference in pursuit of human survival. Indeed, the now-rescinded $115 million donation that Larry Ellison, chief executive officer of Oracle Corp. , was going to give to Harvard, for instance, could provide the base funding for a creative undertaking.

Warren Buffett is the most successful investor of our time. His ethics and good faith are unquestionable and his charitable goals indisputably worthy. It is true, moreover, that the effort to ameliorate the effects of specific diseases is likely to have tangible results in reasonable time periods, whereas the rewards of working to avoid Armageddon are far less tangible. But what sense does it make to direct all of one’s enormous assets toward ameliorating diseases while firmly believing that on our present course we are all heading toward extinction?

As more retiring moguls face the question of how to allocate their fortunes, one hopes that the survival of life on the planet assumes an appropriately important position.

Ralph Kaplan is a managing member of Penbrook Management LLC. Harvey Silverglate is a Cambridge lawyer and writer.