ShareThisBy CAROLYN ABRAHAM
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
The Canadian diamond hunter behind one of the largest science prizes in history _ the catalyst for a race firing up researchers the world over _ rarely allows himself to be caught in the spotlight.
Multimillionaire Stewart Blusson _or "Stu," as he likes to be called _ is more comfortable riding the bus, flying the red-eye or fixing his neighbors' vehicles.
The only car the 67-year-old owns himself is a 1979 Ford Mustang, a battered gray beast with no heat and a broken window. He parks it for free at the Yellowknife airport, about 190 miles from the billion-dollar diamond mine he co-discovered.
"I don't really have a sense of being wealthy," said Blusson, a geologist. "I'd just as well be living in a tent or sleeping under a spruce tree than in a fancy hotel."
All the same, Blusson's spending is forcing him out of comfort's closet.
Thursday, he's to give $4.4 million to an educational program at the Vancouver Aquarium. Later this fall, about $9 million will go to the spinal-cord research center that activist Rick Hansen is backing. And this month, he's earned a place among the world's noted philanthropists by putting up $10 million to fund the next X Prize.
The first X Prize, won by a team of engineers in 2004, launched a high-profile international competition for the first commercial spacecraft. Blusson's edition is to go to anyone who can develop a quick and inexpensive way to sequence a human genome. To prove it, the winner must decode the DNA of 100 people in 10 days.
Three U.S. biotech firms have already signed up and The Toronto Globe and Mail has learned that a Canadian team, led by senior scientist Steve Scherer at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children, is in the running.
"I've got a few people in my group who are completely working day and night on the problems," said Scherer, whose researchers are collaborating with colleagues in Hong Kong.
"The great thing about this X Prize ... is it generates a huge amount of interest from many people of diverse disciplines who will try to do it just for the challenge of doing it. It is very refreshing to hear a Canadian is behind the entrepreneurial spirit this time around."
Of course, Blusson would have preferred no one heard a thing about him.
In 1998, he donated $44 million for basic research to the University of British Columbia, his alma mater. It ranked as the largest gift from a single individual in Canadian history at the time, but Blusson wanted neither wing nor wall to be named in his honour. At the press conference announcing the money, he was nowhere to be found.
In 2002, he gave $28 million to the private Quest University in Squamish, British Columbia. The donation became public only after Blusson's mining and exploration company, Archon Minerals Ltd., filed disclosure documents with the provincial Securities Commission two years later.
"I'd rather be totally anonymous and reserved about all of this," he said. "I don't like to think of myself as a philanthropist."
But Blusson understands that the X Prize is different. To tweak the imagination of potential competitors, the nonprofit, California-based foundation that administers the award has to spread the word.
"I understand that we have to get the message out. I understand that not (making myself) available can hurt a campaign," Blusson said. "I feel so appreciative, so privileged to be able to do this. We could be talking here about a rebirth of medicine."
Celebrities such as CNN's Larry King, physicist Stephen Hawking and Google co-founder Larry Page have added to the buzz by volunteering to be among a separate group of 100 people who would have their genomes sequenced by the winner _ a possibility Blusson is considering.
But winning will be no small feat. The first draft map of the human genome, announced in 2000, still contains gaps in the 3 billion chemical units that make up its code. It has taken more than a decade to compile.
Yet hopes for personalized medicine _ in which diagnoses and more effective treatments could be tailored to your DNA _ hinge on figuring out a way to make genome sequencing cheaply and quickly available for any patient.
