Just last month, Inside Philanthropy’s Michael Kavate outlined several of the most notable developments in climate giving this summer — always timely in light of regular reports of record-breaking temperatures, extreme weather events and other impacts on our quickly warming planet. The majority of climate philanthropy aims to address the causes of human-induced climate change, including through policy and practices to reduce greenhouse gases or encourage green technology and industry. But in the last year, we’ve also seen philanthropy tackle the ramifications of climate change in an area of more basic science — specifically, its impact on the neurobiology of humans and animals.
Today, the Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group, a division of the Allen Institute, announced the launch of the Allen Discovery Center for Neurobiology in Changing Environments. Based at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, the new center will investigate the impacts of climate change on the behaviors and nervous systems of marine animals.
The announcement from the late Microsoft cofounder’s organization comes almost exactly a year after the Kavli Foundation, another pace-setting science funder, launched its Neurobiology and Changing Ecosystems grantmaking program. Operated in partnership with the National Science Foundation, that program supports research into how brains and neural processes — both human and animal — are affected by changing environments.
As I wrote at the time, Kavli saw this emerging area of science as necessarily interdisciplinary in its mission to understand how brains and neural systems adapt to warming and other changes in the planetary climate. The same will be true of the new Allen Discovery Center.
Scientists will focus first on four marine species: staghorn coral, the slipper snail, the painted sea urchin and the three-spined stickleback fish. They’ll use genetics and other specialties to accomplish goals such as developing neural maps for each species, understanding environmental impacts on behavior and sensory perception and identifying genetic variations that may be involved in adaptation to changes in the oceans, such as temperature, acidity and other factors, according to Scripps Marine Biology Professor Martin Tresguerres, who will lead research at the center.
“If you want to see what happens when you have climate change or some other stress, it’s essential to first know how things work normally,” Tresguerres told me. “We know the importance of neural maps and their fundamental mechanisms for neurobiology, but in the past, it’s been very difficult to study them.” In just the last decade, advances in genetics, imaging and related technologies have given scientists the ability to answer questions about neurobiology and behavior that would previously have been difficult or impossible to study.
Laying groundwork for more effective conservation
Scientists at the new Allen Discovery Center will seek to identify the mechanisms behind resilience or vulnerability among species and populations as they face rapid changes in ocean conditions. Such knowledge will be crucial for predicting and potentially mitigating the impacts of climate change on marine ecosystems, Tresguerres said. Along with Tresguerres, the new center will be co-led by Scripps scientists Amro Hamdoun and Deirdre Lyons. They’ll work with interdisciplinary researchers in from several institutions: UC San Diego, the University of Southern California, the Carnegie Institution, the University of Virginia and MacEwan University.
The center’s transdisciplinary approach will engage specialists in genetics, population genomics, cutting-edge microscopy and animal behavior, among others. As one of the world’s top oceanographic research institutions, Scripps operates several ocean research vessels that let scientists study marine organisms in their natural habitats. Those findings from the field will in turn guide research in the laboratories to understand basic function, and ultimately, potential biological changes to cells, neurons and genes, Tresguerres said.
All this research can eventually have practical applications in conservation and elsewhere as governments and private organizations seek to adapt to a warming planet. “The molecular genomics and the functional basis of these mechanisms can help identify vulnerable species or resilient species, and then move forward with conservation or more active intervention,” Tresguerres said.
The research center is funded at $10 million over four years by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, with a total potential for $20 million over eight years. (Technically, the Allen Frontiers Group recommends funding directions to the Allen Family Foundation; the money comes from the family foundation.) For a deeper dive into the still-evolving philanthropy of the Allen Family Foundation, including the Vale Group LLC (formerly Vulcan), and the $20 billion fortune Paul Allen left after his 2018 death from cancer, take a look at Ade Adeniji’s recent overview of Allen ecosystem giving.
This new climate and neurobiology center at Scripps is the latest in the Allen Discovery Center program, which has been running since 2016. The Allen Institute and the Frontiers Group have launched six Discovery Centers in total, but two have cycled off, leaving four currently in operation. Last year, I wrote about the establishment of Allen Discovery Center for Neuroimmune Interactions at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai. Like the center at Scripps, it was initially funded with $10 million over four years, and will potentially continue with $20 million over eight years.
A new iteration on the Allen funding playbook
The new Allen Center’s focus on neurobiology comes straight out of Allen philanthropy’s scientific DNA: The Allen Institute was initially founded in 2003 to map gene activity and cells of mouse and human brains. Teams at the Allen Institute for Brain Science and the Allen Institute for Neural Dynamics continue to study basic mammalian neurobiology in behavior, decision-making and memory.
But for Allen, the interest in climate change in neurobiology was new, according to Kathryn Richmond, executive vice president at the Allen Institute. The Scripps proposal for climate and neurobiology studies came in response to a call for a new Discovery Center that the Frontiers Group announced in summer of 2023.
Dozens of applications were submitted, Richmond said, but the Scripps proposal stood out for its scientific ambition, its multidisciplinary approach and its commitment to open science. “Obviously, we have a huge footprint in neuroscience,” Richmond said. “But the things that excited us most about the Scripps proposal were not only the audacious effort to go and make some of these neural maps, but also to run it with an open science approach — we’ve seen how that can be catalytic, how it can really lift all boats in the field. We’re excited about supporting the Scripps center, and we’re excited to see what other funders, like the Kavli Foundation and the [National Science Foundation] are doing in this and in working together to have the most impact.”
Much remains unknown about the impacts of climate change — including its implications for human and environmental health, water resources, agriculture, and so many other areas, and I suspect that more funders of basic science will follow Kavli and Allen’s lead in the coming years, developing funding strategies that directly address how climate change impacts biology and other fields of research.
