Fund Mission: Weird Science And Pet Projects -- Multimillionaire Redmond Couple Seek Unusual Causes To Finance

REDMOND - Quick-witted and blunt with their words, Sandra Lerner and her husband, Leonard Bosack, have minds that seem to race at twice the speed of an average human's. Chemistry, literature, biology, physics - the breadth of the Redmond couple's knowledge is dizzying.

The two computer entrepreneurs would be just another smart couple in an industry full of smart people, except for one thing. Not only did they get rich, unexpectedly becoming multimillionaires in their 30s, but Lerner and Bosack have been unusually generous with their wealth. They say they have given away roughly 70 percent of their wealth, estimated at $190 million in 1990. What's more, they seek unusual causes to fund:

-- They bought Chawton House in England, once owned by the family of novelist Jane Austen, and founded a center to study early English women's literature.

-- They sent 275 tons of grain to the St. Petersburg Theological Academy in Russia to help feed the hungry.

-- They funded research at Harvard and Stanford universities to search the cosmos for extraterrestrial intelligence, a project once funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

-- They developed PetNet, a computer network of Northern California animal shelters to help people find missing pets or animals for adoption.

Lerner and Bosack made their millions by inventing a router, which is a combination of software and hardware that links clusters of computers. They founded a company, Cisco Systems Inc., in California's Silicon Valley in the 1980s, selling the stock in 1990, after it had skyrocketed in value.

"We have an unreasonable amount of money," Lerner says.

Two years ago the couple moved to slower-paced Redmond to form a new company, XKL Systems Corp., where they're currently working on a device to speed up a computer's input-output ability. In their off times, Lerner and Bosack are picking projects to fund through the Leonard X. Bosack and Bette M. Kruger Charitable Foundation. They formed the $20 million foundation, named for his father and her mother, in 1991.

Leonard Bosack, 41, is an intense man with a habit of asking point-blank questions when he is talking and staring intently out the window when he is not.

Sandra Lerner, 38, peppers her brisk, eloquent speech with such phrases as, "Well, duh!"

The projects they fund through the Bosack-Kruger Foundation fall into two categories: "weird science" and animal welfare. Bosack picks the recipients of the science grants; Lerner chooses the animal-welfare awards.

Last year, the foundation backed eight animal-welfare projects, including one in Topeka, Kan., in which prisoners at a correctional institution bathed, groomed and socialized pets from an animal shelter before putting them up for adoption.

Lerner - an avowed animal lover who rescued her favorite cat, Lilly, from certain death at a shelter because the animal is retarded - makes no excuses for financing projects that benefit animals.

"People say, `There are so many people things - why are you helping animals?' " she says. "Well, I think it goes hand in hand."

Bosack's gifts have subsidized the work of an evolutionary biologist seeking a reason for why menstruation occurs in humans; provided money to buy vehicles for three field scientists to study tigers in Russia, Indochina and India; and sponsored a three-year scholarship for a University of Washington student to perform atmospheric research.

Running science experiments for science's sake often yields unexpected, exciting discoveries, Bosack and Lerner say.

Take lightning: Do you know what causes it? Bosack asks a visitor, expecting an answer. Well, do you?

Bosack doesn't want the dictionary definition - the one about how it's produced by a discharge of atmospheric electricity from one cloud to another. That's too vague. He wants to know, specifically, what causes lightning.

"In general we know, but we don't really know," he says.

That's why the fund is supporting the UW student, who is building a one-of-a-kind apparatus in the basement of a physics lab. This apparatus may help explain what causes lightning.

Or maybe it won't. "There's no assurance of success with any of these things," Bosack says.

Bosack and Lerner say science for science's sake used to be a hallowed American tradition, funded by the U.S. government and corporations alike. In recent years, only research that is likely to result in a new product or practical knowledge is getting funded. Their desire to support speculative science was a major reason they set up the foundation.

One of the couple's favorite recent donations was to a Denver chemist who has found a way to measure auto emissions using a mobile device. Not only is it a more efficient way of tracking polluters but potentially it could put emission-test stations out of business. Lerner and Bosack say the chemist is meeting resistance from bureaucrats whose jobs are to run auto-emission stations.

"Sometimes weird science is political science," Lerner says.

Weird science and pets aren't the foundation's only interest. Last year Lerner went to England and made an important purchase: The longtime Austen fan bought Chawton House, which was owned by the novelist's family and was where she wrote many of her late 18th- and early 19th-century books.

Lerner wants to fund research to learn more about the women authors who preceded Austen. And the couple probably will turn the 300-acre farm that came with the property into a rural English working manor farm.

"It's amazing," Lerner says, "what you can do with money." ------------------------------------------------------------------- No applications: Sandra Lerner and Leonard Bosack find their beneficiaries through their own efforts. They do not accept applications for grants.