U.S. Business Hall of Fame. In 1999, he became a recipient of both the Bower Award for Business Leadership, as well as the Othmer Gold Medal. In 2013, Vagelos was invited to speak at the first annual Stony Brook University Research Your Future Symposium. River blindness In the mid-1980s, Merck & Co. discovered the drug ivermectin, capable of combatting the parasite that causes river blindness. At the time, the World Health Organization and the World Bank were conducting a campaign against the vector-borne disease in West Africa, and ivermectin was the most important drug in their arsenal. But the newly discovered drug was too expensive for those patients or their governments. Vagelos "wanted to see the drug widely used," so he influenced Merck & Co. to "make needed quantities of the drug available to these governments and patients, at no cost to them, for the treatment of onchocerciasis.” Over two decades, beginning in 1986, the drug reached more than 55 million people. The public health campaign was successful, and now river blindness is no longer a major public health issue in the savannah areas of West Africa. Philanthropy Together, Roy Vagelos and his wife Diana Vagelos donated over $15 million to the University of Pennsylvania to create the Roy and Diana Vagelos Laboratories. These funds also made possible the founding the Vagelos Scholars Program in Molecular Life Sciences, an intensive program offered to University of Pennsylvania freshmen. In addition, they donated funds to launch the Vagelos Program in Life Sciences and Management, a joint program between the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and its College of Arts and Sciences. Later, they founded the Vagelos Integrated Program in Energy Research, supporting the necessity of energy research. In 2010, Vagelos, who had earned his medical degree at Columbia University, and Diana, an alumna of Barnard College at Columbia University, donated 50 million dollars to the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, towards the construction of a new building named the Roy and Diana Vagelos Education Center; it opened in August 2016. In 2017, it was announced at the Crown Awards that the College of Physicians and Surgeons would be renamed the Columbia University Roy and Diana Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons in recognition of a $250 million gift given by Vagelos to the college. A substantial part of the donation ($150 million) would be used to endow a fund