Donor Story - John Moores

For more than a decade, John Moores has been among the most generous philanthropists in the world, supporting a variety of causes from America to Africa.

In the process, John has given $24 million to Scripps Research and was instrumental in establishing the campus's Institute for Childhood and Neglected Diseases. Through it, he found an opportunity to turn his lifelong love for rare coins and exotic cars into tangible support by making the gift of 26 collectible cars to create the impetus for the fundraising campaign which established the institute's extraordinary interdisciplinary program and built its state-of-the-art facilities on the Scripps Research campus in California.

The Institute for Childhood and Neglected Diseases applies the new molecular understanding of biology to find causes and treatments for the most serious diseases of childhood and under-treated diseases that effect populations primarily in developing countries. The result: scientists, recruited to Scripps Research from throughout the world, studying childhood cancers and leukemia, cystic fibrosis, Duchenne's Muscular Dystrophy, autism, and malaria, the number-one killer of children in Africa.

John recently established the Worm Institute for Research and Medicine (WIRM) at Scripps Research to combat the painful disfiguring, and debilitating diseases borne by worms that afflict millions of people in much of the world. WIRM will look for ways to detect the presence of parasitic worms in a person's body as a diagnostic tool for public health efforts in the field.

John serves as chairman of the San Diego Padres Baseball Club, which he bought in 1994; serves on the Scripps Research Board of Trustees; and chairman of the Carter Peace Center. He is a former member of the Board of Regents of the University of California. He received a B.S. in economics and a law degree from the University of Houston while working for IBM and Shell Oil Company. In 1980, after working as an independent software consultant, he founded BMC Software, writing the highly successful software products that improved mainframe computer operating system performance at a critical phase of the digital revolution.

The extraordinary generosity of John Moores continues to help make it possible for Scripps Research to access the knowledge amassed by sequencing the human genome for deeper understanding of the mechanisms underlying human disease.