UCI Medical School Gets $5.7-Million Gift
O Irvine computer-chip billionaire Henry Samueli announced Wednesday he and his wife are giving $5.7 million to UC Irvine to support alternative medicine research.
The donation comes less than a month after Samueli, who helped launch the wildly successful high-tech company Broadcom Corp., handed a record $20 million to UC Irvine and $30 million to UCLA for their engineering schools.
The Samuelis’ most recent gift will create the Susan Samueli Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine at UCI’s College of Medicine.
The money will be used to fund research that will bridge the gap between traditional and alternative medicine, sponsoring research on therapies that range from acupuncture to St. John’s wort.
Susan Samueli said she had a long-standing interest in alternative health care, and has studied and used homeopathic remedies and Chinese herbs.
“I’d like to take away the idea that alternative medicine is quackery or hocus-pocus. There is some very scientific reasons why it works,” Samueli said Wednesday.
“I have three children--my oldest is 14--and none of my children had need of antibiotics because we’ve always used alternative methods,” she said.
The marriage of traditional and alternative medicines could lead to tremendous advancements in the treatment of various chronic and acute illnesses, including cancer, she said.
Dr. John Longhurst, chairman of UCI’s Department of Medicine, said the use of alternative therapies has become an intrinsic part of modern-day health care that doctors cannot ignore.
“It’s an area that physicians have to pay a lot of attention to these days, because more and more of our patients are accessing this type of care,” he said.
This is especially true in Southern California, where nontraditional therapies are popular among the region’s substantial Asian and Central American immigrant populations, said Longhurst, who researches acupuncture and its effects on the cardiovascular system.
The new center will sponsor research on alternative medicines and therapies under the same strict scientific guidelines used in traditional medical research. Doing so will add scientific credence to therapies that prove effective, and help expose those remedies that are not, said Dr. Thomas C. Cesario, dean of UCI’s College of Medicine.
“We think some of these forms of therapy need to be put to a standard test,” he said. “Hopefully, we’ll render a service to society in general.”
The Samuelis’ donation reflects a growing trend among the technology elite to share the billions in riches they’ve collected in the exploding high-tech industry. Henry Samueli hit the jackpot when Broadcom went public last year, catapulting his net worth to more than $4.3 billion.
Broadcom makes communications chips, the tiny pieces of silicon that allow computers and other machines to talk to one another.
