November 4, 1999 | Read Time: 1 minute
Netscape founder James H. Clark announced last week that he had donated $150-million to Stanford University to construct a biomedical-engineering center.
Mr. Clark — who also established Silicon Graphics and Healtheon, a company designed to streamline health-care communications using the Internet — taught at Stanford from 1979 to 1982. He cited a debt to the university for allowing him to develop technologies that were seminal to his business success.
His gift will help construct the James H. Clark Center for Biomedical Engineering and Sciences, which Stanford hopes to open in summer 2002. The plans call for the center to recruit approximately 400 scientists and technicians who will conduct research in biocomputing, biomedicine, medical imaging, and neuroscience.
The donation ranks as the seventh-largest ever made for higher education, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.
In addition to building the 225,000-square-foot facility, Mr. Clark designated his gift to purchase equipment and to endow professorships and graduate fellowships. The goal of the center is to provide new therapies and cures for diseases.
Mr. Clark’s personal assets total approximately $1.8-billion, according to Forbes magazine.
The San Francisco Bay Area is shaping into a major location for research in the health sciences. Stanford’s announcement came two weeks after the University of California at Berkeley unveiled plans to build a $500-million facility for health-related technology. That project, which received $50-million from an anonymous donor, will also support the work of 400 scientists.
