The Whitaker Health Sciences Fund, which for nearly two decades has supported interdisciplinary and innovative research by young investigators and doctoral students, will cease operations on or about July 1, 1992. The fund was established in 1974 by the late Uncas A. Whitaker, Class of 1923, founder and former chairman of AMP Incorporated. Mr. Whitaker was one of MIT's major benefactors. He and his family provided major support for construction of both Building 56 and the Whitaker College of Health Sciences and Technology Building, each of which MIT named in their honor. Mr. Whitaker was succeeded by his late wife, Helen, and subsequently by his daughter, Ruth Holmes, as a member of the Whitaker Fund's board.
Support is provided for research in both the life sciences and biomedical engineering.
Dr. Irwin W. Sizer, president of the fund and former dean of the graduate school at MIT, said the termination date for the Whitaker Fund was chosen after the Whitaker Foundation, the source of the fund's money, concluded that all its future programs should be national in character, but intellectually limited to the area of biomedical engineering. Dean Sizer said support for doctoral students and faculty will end July 1, 1991. Those involved in the fund's Fellowship Program would receive support for one more year beginning July 1, 1991. Whitaker grant recipients include Nobel laureates David Baltimore, former head of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and now president of Rockefeller University, Har Gobind Khorana, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Biology and Chemistry, and Professor Susumu Tonegawa, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator in the Department of Biology and the Center for Cancer Research.