THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
March 26, 2007

A noble Nobel

BERKELEY has been home to many controversial trends over the decades: free speech movements, organic eating, public nudity. But there's at least one trend emerging from that city that everyone can support: Nobel Prize winners donating their prize money to charity.

George Smoot, a professor of physics at UC Berkeley, just became the most recent winner to dedicate the majority of his 2006 prize to the Oakland-based East Bay Community Foundation. This makes him the second winner in the past decade to donate his winnings to the foundation -- the first was Daniel McFadden, another Berkeley professor and a 2000 winner for his work in microeconometrics. Foundation officials are modest about their outreach activities -- "We didn't reach out to either of them," said Chris Nicholson, the foundation's vice president of development -- but clearly there's some magic water flowing into the taps at their marketing department.

It helps, of course, that the foundation is doing excellent, donor-friendly work: managing philanthropic funds for individuals, families and organizations, providing community organization grants from its $268 million endowment, and working on education reform and sustainable community planning initiatives. Its flexible donor-advised funds were particularly attractive to Smoot and McFadden, both smart and passionate men, who wanted to be involved with the way their money was spent -- without the enormous responsibility of setting up a personal foundation. Smoot's fund matches his passion for mentoring -- it will focus on granting scholarships and fellowships to graduate and postdoctoral students.

"I saw two ways to use the prize money," Smoot said. "First, I could give the government half of it in taxes and use the rest to pay off my mortgage and maybe buy a new car. Second, I could take all of it and hopefully get matching donors and that way help out so many more young people who need to get launched into their careers. I thought it was more important to help people who could carry on the work, and maybe even develop a new way of thinking about the universe."
With his donation, Smoot joins a short list of illustrious laureates who have chosen to give their money away -- among them Gunter Blobel, who donated his 1999 prize in medicine to rebuild a cathedral in Dresden, Germany, in honor of the city that sheltered his family during the waning days of World War II, and Mother Teresa.

We applaud professor Smoot, who is already on to his next big project at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory -- "solving energy crises," he said -- and the East Bay Community Foundation. All cities should be so fortunate as to have so many who are both bright and generous.