The Danforth Foundation on Friday announced that it would give away its final $70 million to the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center and close its doors at the end of May.
The latest grant brings to $226 million the amount that the foundation has given to the Plant Science Center since the center was founded in 1998.
The new money will be used in the first phase of a three-part expansion of the center’s staff and facilities.
“The foundation was built on stock of the Ralston Purina Co., which defined its business as feeding the world,” said John C. Danforth, a former Missouri senator and chairman of the foundation.
“There is nothing better we can do than transfer the assets to the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center,” he said. “St. Louis should never be just another rust belt city. We should be satisfied with nothing less than greatness, and with plant science that is what we are becoming.”
Plant science, he said, holds enormous economic promise for St. Louis but its great mission is nothing less than to feed the world.
Danforth said he had seen real hunger – on the Cambodian border, for example, and in rural Mozambique, where forests have been destroyed because hungry people have stripped bark from trees for food.
He noted the center is in the middle of America’s grain belt and has cooperative programs with universities in the region, with Monsanto Co., and with the Missouri Botanical Garden.
His brother, Dr. William H. Danforth, a former chancellor at Washington University as well as chairman of the Plant Science Center and vice chairman of the foundation, followed his brother to the podium. “This is a time for gratitude,” he said.
He also observed that “St. Louis has quickly become a world leader in plant science, and the Danforth Center and its partner institutions are at the core of this effort. The future is bright for St. Louis and for the results of our work.”
James C. Carrington, incoming president of the center, said the funds would be used to keep “the center at the forefront of creative science’s work.”
Carrington said the money will pay for hiring five new scientific researchers, expanding the center’s ability to perform work in bio-informatics and biocomputing, and enlarging opportunities for training so that talented scientists and students will be encouraged to remain in the St. Louis area.
“We will focus on addressing some of the major unanswered problems in plant science, such as how genes interact with changing environments to control crop yield, growth and resistance to stress,” Carrington said.
“The grant will also accelerate the translation of basic discoveries into commercial applications, which the St. Louis region is particularly well suited to accomplishing.”
The grant from the Danforth Foundation will be used to support the Plant Science Center’s endowment of $200 million; income from that money will help pay for the first stage of its planned expansion.
Both William and John Danforth are sons of the man for whom the Plant Science Center is named and grandsons of William H. Danforth, who established Ralston Purina and began the foundation 84 years ago.
Over its history, the Danforth Foundation has awarded more than 4,700 grants valued at more than $1.2 billion. It began in 1927 with a concentration on education on a national scale, but in 1997 it sharpened its focus to the St. Louis area, specifically on plant and life sciences, neighborhood redevelopment and downtown revitalization.
Edited and reprinted with permission from www.stlbeacon.org.
Â