Sean Parker gives $24M for new allergy research center

Parker himself suffers from severe food allergies, which affect around 40% of the world population

I don't know what it is, but there seems to be something about being close to Facebook that leads people to give money to philanthropy and education. Not only people in the company itself, but those it has acquired and those who have invested in it.

Or, you know, it could just be a big coincidence.

The latest Facebook adjacent person to donate money is Napster co-founder, Facebook investor and man who had Justin Timberlake play him in a movie, Sean Parker, who revealed on Wednesday that he is giving a total of $24 million over the next two years to build the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy Research at Stanford University.

That amount makes it one of the largest private donations to allergy research in the United States so far.

Allergies are a bigger problem than most of us probably realize, with between 30% and 40% of the entire world population suffering from them. That includes roughly a third of all Americans; around 1 in 12 American children have a food allergies; as do 1 in 50 adults. 

But here's the really scary part: around a quarter of those people who have those food allergies will, at some point, nearly die from them. And none of this even mentions to the cost, which is around $25 billion spent each year on reactive food allergy care.

This is a problem that is close to Parker's heart, as he himself suffers from pretty severe food allergies, including a severe allergy to nuts, which nearly killed him in Davos in 2011.

Kari Nadeau, an associate professor at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford and Stanford University School of Medicine, whose research focuses on allergies, will lead the Center.

The $24 million will go toward training allergy immunologists, while $4 million "will be used to establish a dollar-for-dollar challenge match for all other new gifts to the Center."

Silicon Valley philanthropy

As I said earlier this is hardly the first time that someone connected to Facebook has made a philanthropic donation.

Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan were named the most charitable people in 2013, having donated 18 million shares of Facebook stock, which amounted to a total of $992.2 million. If no one else was going to step up to help, they would. 

A big portion of their charity has so far gone toward education. Zuckerberg founded the Startup: Education foundation in Newark, New Jersey, and personally donated $100 million to the Newark public school system. In December of last year, Startup: Education, along with Bill Gates’s The Gates Foundation, participated in a $9 million philanthropic investment in EducationSuperHighway, a non-profit aiming to help K-12 schools get connected to reliable, high-capacity Internet access.

Most recently, Zuckerberg donated $120 million to Bay Area schools. 

Recently, Oculus co-founders Brendan Iribe and Michael Antonov, gave $35 million to their alma mater, The University of Maryland. Iribe's $31 million portion of the gift was the largest the university had ever received since it was established in 1856.

The vast majority of the money will be used to build a new computer science building, called the "Brendan Iribe Center for Computer Science and Innovation." $1 million of the gift will be used to establish the Brendan Iribe Scholarship in Computer Science.

If that all weren't enough, Iribe’s mother, Elizabeth Iribe, also donated another $3 million, bringing the total from all three to $38 million altogether.

(Image source: campalleghany.com)