Huntsman Cancer Institute
Both of Jon Huntsman’s parents died of cancer. In 1992, he was diagnosed with the disease himself—the first of his four separate personal battles with the killer. His stints in Read more…
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Clark Center for Biomedical Engineering and Sciences
Former Stanford University professor of computer science James Clark established a clutch of successful business ventures: Silicon Graphics, Netscape, Healtheon, and myCFO. Feeling indebted to Stanford as the site where Read more…
Volunteers in Medicine
In 1994, retired physician Jack McConnell, best-known as the developer of Tylenol while a researcher at Johnson & Johnson, had the idea of recruiting other retired doctors and nurses to Read more…
Prostate Cancer Foundation
Business financier Michael Milken, a longtime anti-cancer donor, detected inefficient patterns in medical research similar to those he had worked against during his career in high finance. He discovered it Read more…
Bill Gates Helps Mass-produce DNA Arrays
One of the first major philanthropic projects of Bill Gates, launched long before he shifted his gaze steadily to philanthropy, came back in 1992. The University of Washington Medical School Read more…
Aaron Diamond Foundation Unmasks HIV’s Weak Spots
In 1985 the Aaron Diamond Foundation was founded in New York City to honor the eponymous real-estate developer, who passed away suddenly of a heart attack in 1983, by his Read more…
Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization
Bill Gates has described how his perspective changed when he read a 1996 New York Times story about how hundreds of thousands of children in the developing world die every Read more…
Fisher Houses Created for Families of Hospitalized Military
In 1990, New York City real-estate developer Zachary Fisher learned about a servicewoman who had recently received medical treatment at a military hospital. Her husband, unable to afford a hotel, Read more…
Development of the Automated DNA Sequencer
In the early 1980s, longtime Caltech biology professor Leroy Hood had conceptualized an instrument that would automate the slow, labor-intensive process of sequencing DNA. The tedious hand process, which required Read more…
Health Surveys and Patient-centered Care
Harvey Picker had played an important role in commercializing X-rays and other forms of electronic imaging and became a significant donor with the money he made in the process. Making Read more…
Guinea Worm Eradication
Only one infectious disease has ever been eradicated: smallpox (gone as of 1980). Soon though, a second affliction will disappear, likely around 2018, when the Guinea worm becomes extinct. This Read more…
Markey Trust Launches Biomedical Careers
By the time Lucille Markey died in 1982, at age 85, she had seen a lot of death, sickness, and suffering, so she left her fortune (derived from her father-in-law’s Read more…
Komen Races to Cure Breast Cancer
In 1977 Susan Komen was diagnosed with breast cancer and her sister Nancy promised her she would help change the odds on that frightening disease, so more women would know Read more…
Putting Geriatric Medicine on the Map
The number of elderly Americans is in the midst of doubling in less than one generation—to a total of more than 70 million. And they are heavy consumers of medical Read more…
Battling Substance Abuse
For whatever reason, philanthropic activity in alcohol and drug treatment gets relatively little attention or public visibility. At the grassroots level, the most effective force for sobriety in the U.S. Read more…
Braun Labs Opens Up a New Biology
In the late 1970s, researchers at the California Institute of Technology were ramping up new investigations in human biology, talking about establishing a specialized cancer center, and doing all of Read more…
Nurse-Family Partnership
Research has shown that unmarried, poor, and teenage mothers are much more prone to problems of infant mortality, neglect and abuse, fetal-alcohol and drug damage, accidental injury, household poisonings, impaired Read more…
Biomedical Engineering Willed Into Existence
Uncas Whitaker had an unusual combination of expertises: He was both an engineer and a lawyer. Each came in handy as he expanded electronics parts maker AMP from a small Read more…
The Hospice Movement
Historically, hospices were institutions run by religious charities to offer short-term care to terminally ill patients too poor to afford alternatives. They began to be adapted to modern circumstances in Read more…
Emergency Medical Services
In the early- to mid-1970s, much of the U.S. had no well-developed system for stabilizing victims of accidents, fires, crashes, crimes, and other traumas while rushing them to hospitals appropriately Read more…