Setback & Achievement

From their lofty offices in the highest building of Manhattan's Rockefeller Center, the Rockefeller Foundation looks down on great liners moored in the Hudson River. Among the ships on which the Foundation's chairman, John Davison Rockefeller Jr., and its president, Raymond Elaine Fosdick, looked last week were the German steamers Deutschland and Columbus, the Italian Rex. Fresh from the printer was the opinion of the governments symbolized by those ships, which President Fosdick was about to deliver to Mr. Rockefeller and the other 18 trustees of the $150,000,000 philanthropic Foundation. Wrote this great almoner:

"From the beginning of its activities 25 years ago the Foundation has been guided by the objective written into its charter: 'the well-being of mankind throughout the world.' In accordance with this purpose the aim of the trustees has been to maintain the work of the Foundation on an international plane without consideration of flags or political doctrines or creeds or sects. . . . We are all of us, under whatever flag, the joint beneficiaries of the intellectual property of the race. . . .

"This ideal . . . has in recent years encountered serious difficulties. And these difficulties are increasing. ... In some fields it is now profitless to go where we formerly went. We find ourselves stopped at some frontiers--not because the frontiers have any greater geographical significance than they had a few years ago, but because behind them the search for truth by eager and skeptical minds has been made impossible."

Therefore, of the $9,849,697 which Mr. Fosdick last year distributed for the Rockefeller Foundation, no Italian, Japanese or Russian institution received a cent. In Germany the only beneficiary was the University of Freiburg, which received $19,600. But English institutions received $671,980; French $216,800; Scandinavian and Finnish $191,225. To help the Chinese Government "make over a medieval society in terms of modern knowledge," the Rockefeller Foundation last year allotted $843,875. But "the work, the devotion, the resources, the strategic plans of Chinese leaders for a better China, have disappeared in an almost unprecedented cataclysm of violence. . . . The Foundation still maintains its office in Shanghai. Whether there will be an opportunity to pick up the pieces of this broken program at a later date, no one can foretell."

Besides these events to view with alarm, Messrs. Rockefeller, Fosdick and their fellow trustees had, however, one particular achievement at which they could point with pride: a vaccine to conquer yellow fever. From 1900 (when the late Dr. Walter Reed proved that a mosquito transmitted yellow fever from man to man) until 1932, sanitary experts fought yellow fever by taking measures to prevent mosquito breeding. In 1932. however, Brazilian medical men discovered yellow fever cases in jungles where no yellow fever mosquitoes existed. How jungle yellow fever is transmitted remains a mystery.

Rockefeller scientists, led by Dr. Wilbur Augustus Sawyer, developed a preventive vaccine for both types of yellow fever with which they last year immunized 40,000 people in Brazil and Colombia. To prevent airplanes from carrying yellow fever from South America into disease-free U. S. the personnel of Pan American Airways are now taking this Rockefeller vaccine. The U. S. Public Health Service and the Pan American Sanitary Bureau will soon give it to all willing airplane passengers.

As important as recent setbacks and achievements was a plan announced for eventually winding up the affairs of the Foundation. Of the $530,000,000 which the late John D. Rockefeller Sr. set aside for philanthropies (chiefly medical), little more than $150,000.000 (capital of the Rockefeller Foundation) remains undistributed. Last week the Foundation announced that it will get rid of the balance, depending "upon the opportunities for expenditure which lie ahead." Henceforth, five years after receiving grants recipients may begin spending 5% of the principal every year; after ten years they may begin spending income or principal for purposes different from but allied to those for which the gift was made; after 25 years they may spend all or part of the principal for such purposes.

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