The article doesn't talk it about it much, but it is not entirely inconsequential that he has started a company which for a while was at the cutting edge of hig

The article doesn't talk it about it much, but it is not entirely inconsequential that he has started a company which for a while was at the cutting edge of high performance computing for protein structure prediction. The field has moved a little away from this idea lately. The billionaire owner of Renaissance has done something similar. It's interesting. Rather than giving the money away to academia or other philanthropic causes à la Bill Gates, they choose instead to micro-manage it. Shaw and the Renaissance guy both formerly worked in academia, and I can see why this would make them skeptical about large donations to academic institutions (beyond the motives proposed in the article).