Astor Foundation Gives Med School $1,100,000

The Program for Harvard Medicine has received an unrestricted $1,100,000 grant from the Vincent Astor Foundation of New York. This grant brings the Program more than half-way toward its $58,000,000 goal.

To date, $29,753,499 has been collected by the Program. These funds will be used to create more full-time positions with tenure, to increase Faculty salaries, and to support research. Since the beginning of the Program, eight full-time professorships have been established at the Medical School and its Associated Teaching Hospitals. The Program is also supplying funds for the construction and endowment of a new Medical School library.

The major share of the funds to be collected by the Program, $33,500,000, will be allocated to clinical training, while $14,500,000 will be used to support work in the basicsciences and $2,500,000 in the behavioral sciences.

Last December, George P. Berry, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, explained that the Program funds allocated to research would not be used to attempt to compete with the federal government in the field of grants for research projects, but rather to provide long-term support for basic research.

Drive Began In '56

The Medical School fund drive began in 1956, the same year the Program for Harvard College was launched, as the Harvard Medical Center Fund. Solicitation was limited to foundations and individuals particularly interested in medicine, however, until the completion of the College drive in 1960, when the present Program for Harvard Medicine was organized to seek funds on a nationwide basis.

By November of 1960, contributions to the fund totaled $21,627,838, over $16,000,000 of which had come from gifts and grants of $1,000,000 or more each.

The funds collected for teaching and research will be used by the Medical School and its Associated Teaching Hospitals, which include Beth Israel Hospital, Boston Lying-In Hospital, the Children's Hospital, the Free Hospital for Women, Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, the Massachusetts General and McLean Hospitals, and Peter Bent Brigham Hospital.

These hospitals and the Medical School have simultaneously been conducting their own fund campaigns to finance construction not provided for by the Program.

Accepting the gift, Berry said that "the opportunities to create and exploit new advances in the basic medical sciences are unparalleled. Medical education must have the resources to utilize fully for the benefit of mankind the present explosion in medical knowledge.