The University of California, San Francisco's annual Founders Day observance will honor the recipients of the UCSF Medal, as well as the recipients of the UCSF Academic Senate’s 2002 Faculty Research Lectureship, the 2001 Distinguished Clinical Research Lectureship and the 2002 Distinction in Teaching Award. The recipients of the three Academic Senate awards will be announced at a later date.

UCSF Chancellor J. Michael Bishop, MD, will present the UCSF medals at the Founders Day banquet on Thursday, April 25 at the Westin St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. The UCSF Medal is the University's most prestigious honor, given annually to individuals who have made outstanding personal contributions associated with the university’s health science mission.

Four distinguished individuals will receive the UCSF Medal at this year’s event:

Harold P. Freeman, MD, Director of the Center to Reduce Cancer Health Disparities, National Cancer Institute; Chairman of the President's Cancer Panel; and Medical Director of The Ralph Lauren Center for Cancer Prevention and Care in New York City, is a national advocate for poor and underserved patients who has focused critical attention and research on their needs and has argued that poverty and diminished access to healthcare are the principal underlying causes of racial disparities in death rates from cancer and other diseases; Dorothy P. Rice, DSc (Hon), UCSF professor emerita, Institute for Health and Aging, social and behavioral sciences, UCSF School of Nursing, a nationally prominent medical economist and health demographer whose research has been widely used in the field of public health; Donna E. Shalala, PhD, former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services and now President of the University of Miami, who has overseen health and welfare policy for the federal government, including Medicare and Medicaid programs, the NIH, Food and Drug Administration and all welfare, childcare and child welfare programs; and Alejandro Zaffaroni, PhD, founder and director emeritus of ALZA Corporation and director, UCSF Foundation, who has spent the last 50 years giving birth to new drug delivery ideas, secured 43 patents, founded seven companies and, in so doing, has improved the quality of life for millions of people.

All are welcome to attend the Founders Day Banquet and Medal Ceremony at
6:30 pm on Thursday, April 25 at the Westin St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. The cost of the black tie optional event is $70 per person.

For more information or reservations, please send email to jpierucci@support.ucsf.edu or call (415) 476-4454.

Biographies of 2002 UCSF Medalists

Harold P. Freeman, MD, began his career in the ‘60s at Memorial Sloan-Kettering as a surgeon in oncology. He has said that nothing prepared him for encountering the overwhelming majority of his patients with hopelessly advanced cancer. “I was really raring to go out and do what I could,” he recalled, “but it was somewhat of a shock to be trained to do all this cancer work and then be faced with such late-stage cancer that it was difficult for me to be effective technically.” As a young surgeon, Freeman asked questions that had not been asked of him in medical school; for instance, “What are the reasons why people come to the doctor too late for treatment?”

Over the next 40 years, Freeman became a preeminent authority on the subject of poverty and cancer. Freeman’s landmark 1986 report “Cancer in the Economically Disadvantaged” established fundamental links between poverty and the risk factors for cancer. In 1979, Freeman set up two free breast and cervical cancer screening centers in Harlem Hospital in New York City. By the ‘90s, the percentage of neighborhood patients at Harlem Hospital whose cancer had been discovered and considered to be highly curable jumped from six to 33 percent. Freeman was Harlem Hospital’s director of surgery for more than 25 years and created a program in which uninsured or low-income patients were assigned to an advocate to navigate through the health care bureaucracy. “Now you had a system where a patient was not just in touch with a clinic or a building or a yellow line to follow,” he said. “There was a real person.” Honored nationally and internationally for his contributions to health care and cancer treatment in America, Freeman has become a national expert who addresses the disparities of heath care in medically underserved communities and advocates for greater resources and public attention to the issue.


Dorothy Pechman Rice, DSc (Hon), has devoted her professional life to helping develop and manage the nation’s health care information system. Rice is a medical economist and health demographer who has analyzed and documented the costs of illnesses such as heart disease, cancer, stroke, and smoking related diseases and laid a foundation for medical programs to treat them. When her research found that half of the nation’s elderly had either no or very limited health insurance, Rice’s work set the stage for Medicare legislation.

Rice was an economist in the ‘40s with the U.S. Department of Labor and became Director of the national Center for Health Statistics in the Public Health Service in 1976. When Rice retired from working for the federal government in 1982, she was recruited by the Institute for Health and Aging at UCSF. Rice said, “One of the great things about leaving the federal government was that I could become a public health advocate who makes statistics come alive.”

At UCSF in the ‘80s, Rice worked with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention studying the economics of AIDS, and delineated the costs of this disease. Rice’s research on “Costs of Injury in the United States” in 1989 provided more insights on the impact of behavior on the economy.

In the area of alcohol and drug abuse, Rice’s studies on costs to society have been widely disseminated and used to estimate state and local expenditures for these conditions. For the past dozen years, Rice has been studying Alzheimer’s disease and the economics of aging.

According to UCSF School of Nursing Dean Kathleen A. Dracup, RN, FNP, DNSc, "Dorothy Rice’s research has made and continues to make a significant difference in the lives of many. Throughout her long and wonderfully productive career she has shared her time and knowledge with colleagues, mentoring many in the analysis of health economic issues.”


Donna E. Shalala, PhD, was the longest serving U.S. Secretary of Health and Human services in history, working for eight years in President Clinton’s Cabinet. As HHS secretary, Shalala ran a department with more than 61,000 employees and implemented welfare reform legislation. Shalala also started a program to provide health insurance to children in “working poor” families. She helped build support for a patient bill of rights that gives patients and doctors more power in negotiating with health insurance companies, although Congress has yet to approve this legislation. Shalala also tried to win passage of sweeping tobacco legislation that would have raised tobacco taxes and set new restrictions on cigarette marketing.

As secretary of HHS, Shalala outlined five major policy initiatives for her first year: revision of health-care financing, expansion of the Head Start Program for preschool children, universal childhood immunizations, expansion of AIDS research and welfare reform. Shalala said, “American children are healthier and wealthier as a result of this administration; not just the economy, but what we’ve been able to do to strengthen families, get more families to work, and extend health care to American children.”

Shalala has alternated in her career between academics and public service, beginning in the ‘60s as a teacher after spending two years in the Peace Corps in Iran. Shalala taught politics at Bernard Baruch College and at Columbia Teacher’s College in New York City. Then Shalala’s career turned toward public service as the director and treasurer of the Municipal Assistance Corporation, the organization which helped reverse the New York City financial collapse in the late ‘70s. Shalala moved on to the Department of Housing and Urban Development as assistant secretary for policy research and development. At HUD, she promoted women’s issues, working toward the creation of battered women’s shelters, mortgage credits for women and anti-discrimination measures. In 1988 she was named Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the first woman to head a Big Ten school.

Shalala said, “I believe in smaller government, a more targeted government, about being careful about what the federal government does. I have a commitment to the great scientific institutions, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, the NIH. These are institutions with no substitutes at the state or the local level, ones that protect our food and drugs. These organizations help us to prevent infectious disease and have launched this golden age of biomedical research.”


Alejandro Zaffaroni, PhD, is an inventor. He was born in Uruguay and studied medicine in his home country, earning a doctorate in biochemistry (University of Rochester, New York). In 1951, he went to work for Syntex, pioneering the production of synthetic steroid hormones. The work that Zaffaroni did with Carl Djerassi at Syntex became the basis of the oral contraceptive pill. Zaffaroni also created a contraceptive that with one dose would work for a year.

Zaffaroni said that his research in endocrinology made a tremendous impact on him when he learned how the endocrine system affects the total health of an individual. He said he was interested in many hormones: the ovarian hormone required for female physiology and the whole aspect of gestation, testosterone, cortisone and the renal hormones.

Following his work with contraceptives, Zaffaroni’s next puzzle was to develop a new polymeric film for the eye which could release medication smoothly, at just the rate necessary to maintain control, and without side effects. When the polymeric film was effective for glaucoma, he moved on to work on another concept, developing a transdermal (across the skin) adhesive which released medication and maintained that level of medication over time. “What’s interesting,” he said, “is that 20 years following the implementation of this concept, there are maybe 50-100 companies working in the field of drug delivery and the pharmaceutical industry has sales of products of about $10 to $15 billion.”

Zaffaroni has been called a drug delivery czar because of his impact on the foundations of the industry; many of his companies have gown to be successful. Syntex was acquired in 1994 for $5.3 billion by Switzerland’s Roche Holdings. ALZA is a publicly traded company with $2 billion in annual revenues.

Selling startups as soon as they are up and running is part of Zaffaroni’s modus operandi. “We go directly to the academic laboratories that have time to pursue the more novel ideas,” he said. “Once a technology shows promise, much larger environments are necessary to apply the technology.” In 1980, Zaffaroni founded Dnax, which merges the technology of genetic engineering and immunobiology to make macromolecular products for medicine. Eight years later he founded Affymax, a company that combines advancements made in the semiconductor field, like photolithography, miniaturization and parallel processing, with drug discovery methods.

Some say that Zaffaroni’s career has been even more impressive for taking place within the realm of pharmacology on the edge of biotechnology where research costs have exceeded what even the most well endowed venture capital firms can fund. As a result, little research is conducted outside the industry’s six large pharmaceutical giants. Zaffaroni could have chosen to manage one of these titans, but their charters are to earn profits; Zaffaroni’s goal is to “provide a new dimension for the treatment of human suffering in the world.”