It’s turning out to be a boom year for gifts to medical school.
Ruth Gottesman gave $1 billion in March to support free tuition at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and Michael Bloomberg’s Bloomberg Philanthropies gave the same amount to Johns Hopkins Medical School in July.
Now, retired Merck chairman Roy Vagelos and his wife, Diana, are giving $400 million to Columbia University’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons to advance biomedical research, the university announced Thursday.
The gift will establish the Roy and Diana Vagelos Institute for Basic Biomedical Science and back programs in cell engineering and gene therapy.
The institute aims to help scientist-physicians transform their biomedical research into advanced treatments for a wide range of diseases, including blood and immune-system disorders, cancers, metabolic disorders, and inflammatory, neurological, and cardiovascular conditions.
Part of the donation will support construction of a new biomedical research facility with 55,000 square feet of lab space. It will be named the Vagelos Innovation Laboratories.
This latest gift builds on two previous nine-figure donations the couple have given the university in recent years.
Last year, they gave $175 million to Columbia’s Irving Medical Center to launch the Vagelos Institute for Biomedical Research Education. That gift created an endowment to offer doctoral candidates in biomedical science, particularly students from historically marginalized backgrounds, greater flexibility to explore their early-career research interests and to help already established physician-scientists further develop expertise in fundamental biology and clinical medicine.
The other donation, a $250 million naming gift from the couple in 2017, mostly endowed scholarships aimed at helping to eliminate student-loan debt for medical students who qualify for financial aid — roughly half of the school’s students. About $100 million of that gift also backed medical programs and basic science research.
Longtime Focus on Columbia U.
Roy Vagelos is a physician who served as chairman of the Merck & Company pharmaceuticals corporation, where he worked for nearly two decades. Earlier in his career, he was chairman of the Department of Biological Chemistry at Washington University in St. Louis. He has served as chairman of the board of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, a biotechnology company in Westchester, N.Y., since 1995.
He and his wife are the children of Greek immigrants. Each relied on scholarships to attend college, and Columbia has played a significant role in the couple’s life. They met on campus there in 1951 while Roy was attending medical school and Diana was an undergraduate at Barnard, a Columbia affiliate. Roy graduated from Columbia’s medical school in 1954, and Diana graduated from Barnard College with a degree in economics in 1955, and they married that year.
While they have donated extensively to an array of organizations over the past 50 years, including for scholarship funds at Barnard and the University of Pennsylvania — where Roy got a bachelor’s degree — the couple have devoted most of their charity to Columbia.
Including this latest donation, they have given the university at least $875 million of the nearly $1.2 billion total they’ve contributed to nonprofit institutions since 2005. Serial givers, the couple landed a spot on the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 list of the most generous donors five times since 2010.
To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated regularly, and our searchable Philanthropy 50 interactive, which shows the biggest donors over the last 24 years.
