An alumnus who made a fortune selling car insurance has pledged $35 million to a new genome research center at Princeton University. The gift from Peter Lewis, CEO of Progressive Corp. in Cleveland, Ohio, will cover almost half the planned $75 million budget of the Institute for Integrative Genomics.
The donation marks the latest gain for genome studies at major research universities. Harvard recently decided to spend $40 million on a center to apply genomics to the study of evolution, while the California Institute of Technology is more than halfway toward a goal of raising $100 million for interdisciplinary research on the brain and development. The Princeton center, launched last year, is probing how a cell's many molecular components fit together as a functional unit of life, says cell biologist Shirley Tilghman, the institute's director.
"This is a trend you are going to see more of," says Bruce Umminger, division director of integrative biology and neuroscience at the National Science Foundation.
