In one of his last gifts, biotech investor and philanthropist Bill Bowes made a 2016 gift to the University of California, San Francisco to establish special support for medical research that is unconventional or outside of standard health-science boundaries. The program offers biomedical investigators $250,000 per year for five years so they can test new ideas, including ones with a high probability of failure, without endangering their lab support. Young and pioneering faculty will particularly benefit. The gift brought Bowes’s total giving to the university to $100 million. His previous donations also tended to encourage experimentation. Bowes “has a history of funding cutting-edge research…at a time when federal funding tends to reward more established scientific approaches,” commented the San Francisco Examiner shortly before his death in 2016.