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By Larry B. Dendy
Atlanta businessman Sanford H. Orkin is contributing $750,000 to help establish a new UGA faculty position for an expert on some of the world’s most deadly parasitic diseases.
The gift will be applied toward a new Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar position in UGA’s Center for Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases. Scientists in the center study parasites and vectors that cause diseases such as malaria and African sleeping sickness, which annually kill millions of people and animals throughout the world.
Orkin and his wife, Barbara, attended UGA in the 1950s and live in Atlanta, where Orkin is active in business and civic affairs.
In addition to $750,000 to help create the new faculty position, Orkin is also giving UGA’s athletic department $100,000 to help build an indoor athletic facility.
President Michael F. Adams says Orkin’s gift will significantly strengthen a major research initiative at the university.
“The Orkin name is known widely for expertise in eradicating disease-carrying pests in our homes and workplaces,” says Adams. “This gift will support research that will attack some of the world’s most feared diseases and help improve the well-being of people and animals around the globe. It is a gift of significant scientific and humanitarian value, and we are deeply grateful to Sanford Orkin for his extraordinary generosity.”
Orkin says the gift reflects both his interest in medical research and his desire to help improve life for others.
“After visiting the Center for Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases, and meeting with Dean Wyatt Anderson of the College of Arts and Sciences and Rick Tarleton, director of the center, I came away most impressed with the work being performed,” Orkin says. “We are delighted to play a part in this most important endeavor.”
Orkin was a UGA student when he was drafted into the military in the Korean War. After the war, he joined the family pest-control business. When the company was sold in 1964, he remained in Atlanta, where he has real estate and other business interests. He is a former member of the board of directors of Georgia Federal Bank, an emeritus trustee of Pace Academy, and serves on other boards of directors and advisory boards.
College of Arts and Sciences Dean Wyatt Anderson says Orkin’s gift will be applied toward creating the Barbara and Sanford Orkin-GRA Eminent Scholar Chair in the Center for Tropical and Emerging Diseases. The center, created in 1998, brings together UGA scientists who specialize in the immunology, biochemistry, cell biology and molecular biology of disease-causing parasites and other infectious agents. The scientists come from departments in UGA’s colleges of Arts and Sciences, of Veterinary Medicine and of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.
Eminent Scholar positions are established through the Georgia Research Alliance, a consortium of Georgia research universities, state government and private industry. The process for creating a GRA Eminent Scholar chair involves a number of steps, and probably no one will be hired into the position until 2002, Anderson says.
Parasitic diseases and infectious diseases are the leading cause of death in the world, affecting up to 80 percent of the human population. In 1997, these diseases killed 17.3 million people, and they annually account for billions of dollars in expenditures or lost revenues in agriculture and billions of hours of lost job productivity.
Plant-parasitic nematodes destroy 12.3 percent of all global crops, resulting in nearly $80 billion in lost revenues annually. America’s $100-billion-per-year poultry and livestock industry functions at only 65 percent efficiency because of infectious diseases.
Scientists in the Center for Tropical and Emerging Diseases target such diseases as malaria, which infects 300 million people and kills up to 1.5 million people annually; African sleeping sickness, which threatens more than 55 million people in 36 sub-Saharan African countries; elephantiasis, which infects 120 million people in at least 73 countries; and leishmaniasis, which threatens 350 million people in 88 countries.
The center works in collaboration with the Emory University Vaccine Center and the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. Recently the center was named one of only four National Institutes of Health Tropical Disease Research Units and received a $3.4 million grant to work on development and testing of vaccines against the parasite that causes Chagas disease.
Rick Tarleton, professor of cellular biology and director of the center, says a decision has not been made on a specific disease or research area for the new faculty member.
“This gift will enable us to recruit an outstanding scientist whose talents and experience will greatly advance the work of our center, regardless of his or her specific area of expertise,” says Tarleton.
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