Charles Fipke, left, with Fipke Professor in Alzheimer’s Research Haakon Nygaard. — Photo courtesy Brian Kladko, UBC. The University of British Colum
Charles Fipke, left, with Fipke Professor in Alzheimer’s Research Haakon Nygaard. — Photo courtesy Brian Kladko, UBC.
The University of British Columbia’s quest to understand and treat Alzheimer’s disease is being bolstered intellectually and technologically thanks to three gifts from Charles Fipke, whose geological discoveries made Canada one of the leading producers of diamonds.
Fipke has given $3 million to endow a professorship dedicated to Alzheimer’s research, and has pledged $600,000 to outfit the professor’s lab with cutting-edge equipment at the Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health, a partnership between the UBC Faculty of Medicine and Vancouver Coastal Health. He has also committed $5.5 million to support the purchase of the most novel and coveted brain imaging technology.
Fipke, from Kelowna, was moved to make the gifts by the plight of his longtime friend, Bill Bennett, the former premier of British Columbia, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. His son Brad expressed the Bennett family’s gratitude at a ceremony today honouring Fipke’s philanthropy to UBC.
“Our family is incredibly grateful to Chuck Fipke for this generous donation to Alzheimer’s research and we are very moved by his reasons for doing it,” Brad Bennett said. “The end game has to be to find a cure for this. We still don’t know what causes this disease and there are far too many people afflicted with it and far too many families like ours suffering the horrible consequences. They say with Alzheimer’s patients you say goodbye twice, the first of those being the most difficult because you’re saying goodbye to the person you knew and loved while they are still alive.”
UBC President Dr. Arvind Gupta said Fipke is putting UBC at the global forefront of Alzheimer’s research. “Investing in the most creative, dedicated and determined scientists, and putting the most sophisticated technology at their fingertips is the surest means to making breakthroughs against this disease,” Gupta said.
Dr. Haakon Nygaard, the new Fipke Professor in Alzheimer’s Research, has joined the Faculty of Medicine from the Yale School of Medicine. He will be seeing patients and conducting research in the recently opened Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health, which unites under one roof UBC’s and Vancouver Coastal Health’s scientific and clinical expertise across neuroscience, psychiatry and neurology.
Fipke also pledged funds for a machine that combines positron emission tomography (PET) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The PET-MRI will enable Dr. Nygaard and other scientists to conduct studies that wouldn’t be possible using two machines separately.
“I was stunned to learn about Bill Bennett’s illness – yet another great mind stricken by Alzheimer’s,” Fipke said. “I want to do anything I can to help UBC’s researchers find a cure.”
A UBC alumnus, Fipke had previously given $8.7 million to the University, mostly for buildings and equipment at UBC’s Okanagan campus.
These gifts contribute to UBC’s start an evolution campaign, the most ambitious fundraising and alumni engagement campaign in Canadian history, with the twin goal of raising $1.5 billion and involving 50,000 alumni annually in the life of the university by 2015.
BACKGROUND | Charles Fipke’s philanthropy for Alzheimer’s research
A Canadian pioneer: A geologist, prospector and entrepreneur, Fipke’s latest donation stems from a lifelong passion for exploration. After earning his B.Sc. (Geology) from UBC in 1973, he travelled the world (Papua New Guinea, South America, Australia, South Africa) for various mining companies, and opened his own mineral separation lab in Kelowna, becoming an expert on “indicator minerals” that signal the presence of diamonds. Later, he struck out on his own, spending weeks in the back country near the Arctic Circle before finding high concentrations of diamonds at Lac de Gras, in the Northwest Territories, in 1991. He partnered with BHP Billiton to establish the Ekati Mine, the first commercial diamond mine in North America, thus jump-starting the Canadian diamond industry, which in 2011 accounted for 18 per cent of the world’s rough diamond production by value, ranking third behind Russia and Botswana.
An avid horse breeder whose stable has included Golden Soul, a second-place finisher in 2013′s Kentucky Derby, Fipke has given or pledged more than $17 million to UBC. The Charles Fipke Centre for Innovative Research on the Okanagan campus honours his first gift of $6 million in 2006.
