Fox personifies staggering wealth behind cloning
By Staff
June 14, 2005
JEFFERSON CITY – Perhaps the state’s most prominent backer of embryonic stem cell research/human cloning is St. Louis Philanthropist Sam Fox, who has chaired Washington University’s $1.3 billion capital campaign since its inception in 1998.
Fox has served as a member of Washington University’s Board of Trustees since 1989. The Sam Fox Arts Center, a $56.8 million project involving five buildings on campus, is scheduled to be completed next year. In addition to tying his legacy to the arts center, it is evident that Fox, a 1951 graduate of Washington University, wants the school to become a national leader in embryonic stem cell research.
Fox’s desire for his beloved university is matched by that of William Neaves for the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City. Neaves, president and chief executive officer of Stowers, is seeking to oversee a $250 million to $300 million expansion of embryonic stem cell research on that campus. Economic titans such as John McDonnell, retired chairman of the board of McDonnell Douglas Corp. and former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Mark Jorgenson, president and chief executive officer of US Bank, Kansas City, and David Kemper, chairman, president and chief executive officer of Commerce Bancshares Inc., have been enlisted by the Missouri Coalition for Lifesaving Cures.
Cindy Province, Missouri Baptist Convention Executive Board member and nurse ethicist with the Center for Bioethics in St. Louis, said Fox showed his true colors a few years ago when he wrote a letter to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch supporting Betty Sims in her state Senate race against a pro-life candidate — in essence concluding that pro-lifers ought to be run out of the Republican Party.
“He is quite hostile to pro-lifers in the Republican Party,” Province said. “I think we need to acknowledge what we’re up against. This is a person with a lot of money, with tremendous influence in the Republican Party. He is not at all respectful of our belief that human life is sacred, so now we need to put our faith in action by working for the kind of public policies that we feel are pleasing to God, specifically those that uphold the dignity of every human being.”
More recently Fox was quoted by St. Louis media as referring to pro-life Christians in Missouri as “religious zealots,” a remark that got him an admonishment even from the liberal opinion page of the Post-Dispatch.