Alums, Friends Keep Initiative On Track To Reach Goal Dennis O'Shea ------------------------------------ Homewood News and Information The Johns Hopkins Initiative has raised virtually three-fifths of its $900 million goal, with almost four years left to go. Recent seven-figure commitments have helped push total gifts and pledges in the campaign to $537.8 million--59.75 percent of the goal--as of Feb. 29. Commitments specifically for endowment and facilities are up to $363.9 million, 69 percent of the $525 million goal in those two areas, which are the primary focus of the campaign. The Johns Hopkins Initiative is a joint campaign of the university and the Johns Hopkins Hospital and Health System. It was publicly launched on Oct. 1, 1994, and is scheduled to end in 2000. The campaign made it past halfway to its goal last October, the first anniversary of the public launch, with the announcement of a $55 million commitment from trustee Michael Bloomberg, who chairs the campaign. It was the largest gift in Hopkins history. Commitments announced since then include a $5 million bequest pledge for Public Health from Katharine E. Welsh, a protozoology student there in the early 1930s. Alumni Council members Scott M. Black (A&S '68) and his sister, Barbara C. Black (A&S '77, SHPH '81) have pledged $2 million to endow a professorship in economics in the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. The family of the late Julian Smith (WSE '52), founder of the Sinclair Broadcast Group and WBFF-TV in Baltimore, has pledged $2 million for a chair in electrical engineering. Albert "Cubby" Broccoli, producer of the James Bond films and a former Hopkins patient, and his wife, Dana, gave $1 million to the Wilmer Eye Institute and $1 million to create the Dana and Albert Broccoli Center for Aortic Surgery. Other recent major gifts: * Burton and Miriam Grossman, members of the Wilmer advisory council, have doubled their original $1.5 million commitment to support blindness prevention. * U.S. Healthcare has pledged $1.5 million to endow a professorship in genetics at the School of Medicine. * Sylvia Friedberg Nachlas, late vice president and treasurer of Fair Lanes Inc., left a bequest of $1.2 million to be shared by the Peabody Institute, the Krieger School and the School of Medicine. * Karl H. Hagen, a Wilmer patient, has given real estate valued at $1 million for an endowment to support research and treatment of macular degeneration. * Annette Strauss, a former mayor of Dallas, her husband, Theodore, and their daughter and son-in-law, Nancy and Jeremy Halbreich, pledged $750,000 toward the endowment of a professorship at the Gastrointestinal Motility and Disorders Center at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. * Trustee Naneen Neubohn and her husband, Axel, both graduates of SAIS's Bologna Center, have given $500,000. Together with $500,000 from the Robert Bosch Foundation and additional funds from other sources, the gift will establish the Steven Muller Chair in German Studies at the Bologna Center.