Archives

Photo booth magnate awards million dollar prizes

TEL AVIV, Wednesday (Reuters) Entrepreneur Dan David, chairman of the British company Photo-Me International, made millions setting up photo booths in shopping malls around the world.

So when the price of his company's London-listed share skyrocketed at the height of the Internet bubble, the Romanian-Israeli decided to give back some of his fortune in the form of three annual prizes, each worth $1 million. He established the Dan David Prize to recognise outstanding contribution to humanity in three time dimensions -- past, present and future -- awarding $1 million in each category.

The awards are funded from a $100 million Dan David Foundation endowment, created with the donation of David's entire 18.2 percent stake in Photo-Me International as well as shares in other companies.

"I had an idea I could give back some of what the world had given to me," David told Reuters before this year's awards ceremony. "I wanted to help people who learn about the past, build the present and dream about the future."

The prize has a "pay it forward" aspect, where $100,000 of each award goes to scholarships for young researchers or scholars in the winner's field of studies.

Committees for each category choose the nominees and the permanent board selects the winners. Besides David, the board includes, among others, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, World Economic Forum President Klaus Schwab and Bruce Alberts, president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

The board is chaired by Itamar Rabinovich, president of Tel Aviv University, where the prize is administered.

In 2002, the first year the prize was awarded, two of the winners -- Sydney Brenner and John Sulston -- went on to win the Nobel Prize in medicine.

This week Tel Aviv University awarded the prize to the 2003 winners. For the past dimension, paleoanthropologist Michel Brunet won for his discovery in Chad of a seven-million-year-old skull which many scientists believe is the earliest member of the human family found to date.

In the present, documentary film maker Frederick Wiseman shared his prize with photojournalist James Nachtwey while for the future, John Bahcall, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, won for pioneering the development of neutrino astrophysics. Nachtwey, who photographs war and conflict as well as critical social issues, found out he had won while working in Baghdad, the night before the U.S. began its attack on Iraq.

"I don't know how I was nominated. It was a surprise to me," said Nachtwey, a contract photographer since 1984 with Time magazine.

www.crescat.com

News | Business | Features | Editorial | Security
Politics | World | Letters | Sports | Obituaries |

Produced by Lake House
Copyright 2001 The Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd.
Comments and suggestions to :Web Manager