Endowment's gifts appreciated

The Lilly Endowment has been extremely generous to IU in the past years, and for this we are grateful. The Endowment's Dec. 16 $53 million Metabolomics and Cytomics (METACyt) grant to the University to study how cells work is just the latest in a stretch of generosity dating back to 1958.\nIn October the Lilly Endowment gave $26 million to IU for the statewide "Initiative to Recruit and Retain Intellectual Capital for Indiana Higher Education." In all, its contributions to IU in 2004 totaled nearly $90 million. Though the METACyt grant is the largest IU-Bloomington has ever received, it is dwarfed by the staggering $105 million the Lilly Endowment gave to the IU medical school in 2000 for the Indiana Genomics Initiative. The Lilly Endowment can claim some responsibility for IU's receiving $413 million in grant money for the fiscal year 2004, an all-time record for the University. Indeed, in its history, the Lilly Endowment has given nearly $448 million to IU. \nThe continued financial support of the Endowment and other such organizations is important to maintain the national stature of IU as a research institution. Although the Lilly Endowment has been making news recently for its big donations, it is not the only group generous to IU. The Simon family gave $9 million in early April to IU for the construction of a multidisciplinary science building that will bear its name.\nWith its strong support of the life sciences, the Endowment will help IU rise to among the top in that field.\nIU's vice president for research, Michael McRobbie, illuminated the University's appreciation of the Endowment's support well when he said, "The University is enormously grateful to the Lilly Endowment for the METACyt grant. It's put about $150 million into life sciences research at IU and put about $1 billion into research statewide."\nA grant of this sort will help draw the finest chemists, biologists, neurologists and other scientists to this campus and to the University as a whole. In turn, these scholars will help draw the finest graduate students and provide the best and most cutting-edge science to undergraduate students, graduate students and faculty. Bringing scientific clout to IU can do nothing but bolster all of the other programs and increase the good reputation of the University. \nThe Lilly Endowment's commitment to helping Indiana and the nation is both commendable and considerable. It focuses on community development, education and religion.\nThe Endowment gave millions of dollars to help relief efforts in hurricane-stricken Florida. In addition to supporting life science research, it has strengthened efforts to enhance the intellectual capital of Indiana by giving grants to colleges across the state to hire new faculty and foster new research. One of its top educational priorities is to spread the educational wealth of the state to as many Hoosiers as possible.\n"The best way to ensure the higher rate of educated residents is to have an educated workforce," said Gretchen Wolfram, the communications director for the Lilly Endowment. \nWe only can hope the Endowment will continue to support research and educational excellence at IU in the future as strongly as it has in the past.