"I just want prostate cancer research at UCSF to be at the edge - wherever the edge is," Philip Greer says of the Greer Family Foundation's $250,000 gift to UCSF. "When you have a great doctor like Peter Carroll, you trust him to take it wherever he can take it."

Greer helped establish the Peter R. Carroll Endowed Chair in Urologic Oncology at UCSF, which is named for urologist Peter Carroll, MD, and is held by stem cell scientist Robert Blelloch, MD, PhD.

"I wanted to acknowledge what Peter did for me," says Greer. "I asked him how I could support him and he told me about the research that goes on behind his work - it's an enormous amount of research and I don't know who will support it if people like me don't."

Greer was diagnosed with prostate cancer in April 2006 and Carroll performed the surgery. "It's been a fantastic experience at UCSF," Greer says. "Peter is one of the country's leading experts in prostate cancer, and he dealt with me in a beautiful way. If you look in my rolodex, you'll see that I have Peter's work, home, mobile, pager and fax numbers. I never had to use any of those, but to have one of the world's experts so available is pretty amazing.

"Beyond Peter, what impressed me about UCSF was how everyone made my surgery as painless and as comfortable as it could be. From admissions to pre-op testing, everything was made very easy."

Greer doesn't do anything he isn't enthusiastic about, and he counts supporting UCSF at the top. He also serves on the boards of Tulane University, Deerfield Academy in Deerfield, Mass., and Santa Catalina School in Monterey, Calif. He was a founding partner of the New York investment firm Weiss, Peck and Greer, which was the first investor in FedEx. He and his partners sold the firm in 1998 and Greer has since co-founded Opus Capital, a venture capital fund in the San Francisco Bay Area.

He says, "If I work, it's all to create money to give away. This gift to UCSF is significant to me because of the incredible job that Peter and everyone around him did. He's done the ultimate good job for me. I've got to support this doctor, and I'm not through yet."

For more information about supporting prostate cancer research at UCSF, contact Ann Carollo at 415/502-2404 or acarollo@support.ucsf.edu.