Beckman Foundation: Lasting Impact
By VITA REED
Orange County icon Arnold O. Beckman is gone. But his foundation is set up to live on.
Back in 1990, the founder of what’s now Fullerton-based Beckman Coulter Inc. changed the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation with an eye toward keeping it going long after his death.
“He changed the nature of the foundation from one with a limited lifespan to one in perpetuity and he set up all the guidelines accordingly,” said Jacqueline Dorrance, executive director of the Irvine-based foundation, which funds scientific research and education programs.
Researcher Zhongping Chen at Beckman Laser Institute: facility started with $2.5 million gift in 1986
(photo)
The foundation is set up to use investment proceeds to run indefinitely, Dorrance said. Beckman died May 18 at the age of 104.
Arnold Beckman and wife Mabel, who died in 1989, started their foundation in 1977. The foundation, based in the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center of the National Academy of Sciences near the University of California, Irvine, makes grants to various nonprofit research groups.
During Beckman’s lifetime, he and his foundation gave some $400 million to advance scientific research. UCI, California Institute of Technology and Stanford University are beneficiaries.
According to the foundation, its goals include “promoting research in chemistry and the life sciences, broadly interpreted, and particularly to foster the invention of methods, instruments and materials that will open up new avenues of research in science.”
Arnold Beckman became among the wealthiest people in California after he sold Beckman Instruments Inc. to SmithKline Corp. in 1982 for $1 billion.
About half of that figure went to the Beckmans. SmithKline, now part of GlaxoSmithKline PLC, spun off Beckman seven years later.
In 1997 Beckman Instruments bought Miami’s Coulter Corp. to create Beckman Coulter, which sold more than $2 billion of centrifuges, DNA sequencers, laboratory testing systems and other gear last year. It counts a recent market value of $3.7 billion.
The Beckman foundation, which has three full-time workers and 10 board members, including Arnold Beckman’s daughter, Patricia, and grandson Arnold W. Beckman, gives away $18 million to $22 million a year.
Some of that money, Dorrance said, supports five Beckman institutes and centers around the country, including the Beckman Laser Center at UCI. The foundation gave $2.5 million to start the Beckman Laser Institute in 1986.
The Beckman Laser Institute is devoted to developing lasers and related photonic systems for medical uses.
Michael Berns, the Beckman Laser Institute’s founding director and UCI’s Arnold and Mabel Beckman professor, said he first met Arnold Beckman in 1980 at an open house for executives at his laboratory on campus.
“He came because he was interested and very curious,that was part of his key characteristics, his curiosity about everything,” Berns said.
At the time, Beckman was “a young 80,” Berns said.
About a year later, Berns said he asked Beckman for money to build an institute.
“At that particular time, he was not interested in funding projects at the University of California because he said, ‘You know, it’s a state institution, I already pay taxes, blah, blah, blah,'” Berns recalled Beckman saying.
“That old feeling of his kind of mellowed with time,” Berns said.
Besides the laser institute, the Beckman foundation made other gifts to UCI. About seven years ago, the foundation gave UCI $1 million to start a brain research center.
To form the laser institute, Beckman and Berns formed a nonprofit corporation that received money from the foundation.
“The nonprofit corporation made an agreement with the university that it would fund the building of a building on campus for the laser programs of the campus, which were my programs,” Berns said. “So there really are two entities called the Beckman Laser Institute.”
Other Beckman institutes are at Caltech in Pasadena, where Arnold Beckman received his doctorate and taught from 1928 to 1940; Stanford in Palo Alto; and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where Illinois native Beckman received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees.
Duarte-based City of Hope medical center hosts the Beckman Research Institute.
None of the five Beckman institutes and centers competes with the others for foundation money, according to Berns. To ensure that, he said, the foundation set up a formula that gives the institutes and centers a certain percentage of money every year.
“And none of us are able to lobby for more money, so we’re not competing at all,” Berns said.
The facilities also get money from other sources, Berns said.
Berns described his relationship with Arnold Beckman as “very close,” saying they often saw each other on a daily or weekly basis.
“I put together a book, had it bound,it’s about four inches thick,of all the correspondence between him and me just as a historical document,” he said.
The Beckman foundation also supports researchers. In 2000 it started the Beckman Fellows Program to support post-doctoral work at the institutes and centers.
Another program backed by the foundation: Beckman Young Investigators, which gives money to younger scientists who do research at U.S. universities and research institutes.
Through 2003 the Beckman Foundation’s provided some $41 million to 196 people in the Young Investigators program.
“What we’re really looking for is innovation, with the potential that it might lead to some new technological advances,” Dorrance said about what the foundation seeks when choosing to fund Young Investigator candidates.
The foundation wanted to look at areas that other entities, such as the National Institutes for Health or other governmental organizations, wouldn’t typically fund because “they’re a little bit too risky, a little bit too new,” Dorrance said.
On the academic level, the foundation also has Beckman Scholars, which provides money and recognizes undergraduate students in chemical and biological science research at selected U.S. universities. The foundation established Beckman Scholars in 1999. It’s provided some $5 million in funding to 412 undergraduates at 61 universities.
The foundation calls on schools it thinks would be eligible for Beckman Scholars and invites them to apply for money. On any given year, Dorrance said, it calls on 175 to 250 schools.
For younger students, the foundation has given money to the Discovery Science Center in Santa Ana and Beckman @Science, a program started in 1998 to provide teacher training and community support for 15 elementary school districts across OC.
That program didn’t come about because of budget cuts, according to Dorrance, who joined the Beckman Foundation in 1996, after an 18-year career at Arco.
“Dr. Beckman could see that science education, at the elementary level, was deteriorating,” she said. “He wanted to find a way to sustain the child’s natural curiosity about science.”
Ultimately, Dorrance said Beckman @Science was trying to increase the number of American scientists.
Beckman himself was “fairly involved” with his foundation until the past seven or eight years, Dorrance said. He retired from active participation at the age of 96.
“He and his wife, Mabel, were the foundation,” she said.
The Beckman foundation is grounded in Arnold Beckman’s love for science, said Louis Rosso, Beckman Coulter’s chairman emeritus and chief executive from 1982 to 1998.
“When the philanthropy started, it was interesting the way he thought about it,” Rosso said. “He said it was science and the business of science that created all this money for him. And he wanted it to go back into science. All of the money that comes out of the Beckman Foundation goes into science, and mostly biomedical sciences. That’s the way he wanted it.”
Arnold Beckman was “particularly happy” about the foundation’s Young Investigators program, according to Rosso. It gives money to “brilliant young people” who are just starting out on their careers, he said.
