Philanthropy

What's in a name? A lot, at least at two engineering schools in Southern California named after high-tech billionaire and generous donor Henry Samueli. The Samueli name could be stripped from engineering schools at UCLA and UC Irvine as a result of his recent guilty plea to a felony charge of lying to financial regulators. A review of the issue is being launched by the University of California's general counsel, officials said.

Shards of glass, bumpy grass and rocks are what Jose Serna was used to as a kid. Lights and modern turf on a baseball field were luxuries. "If the ball took a bad hop, you lose a tooth," the Roosevelt High School senior outfielder said. So now, as he watched with his teammates on the edge of the baseball infield at Evergreen Recreation Center in Boyle Heights, Serna was pleased to hear the news.

Peeking to advance stem cell research in California, philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad announced Wednesday that they will donate $25 million to UC San Francisco for a state-of-the-art laboratory that will bring together some of the world's leading scientists in the field. The gift was hailed by Gov.

The Santa Claus of this bleak desert outpost wears a polo shirt with a pack of Camel Lights in the pocket and a pair of suspenders stretched tight over his stomach. Larry Bai is 60, balding and Jewish. He shuffles through the post office doors this blustery morning, gripping a cane topped with a lion's head. He opens Santa's post office box, No. 133. There are eight more letters.

JUSTICE Eta, 14 months old, held out his tiny thumb. An ink spot certified that he had been immunized against polio and measles, thanks to a vaccination drive supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. But polio is not the only threat Justice faces. Almost since birth, he has had respiratory trouble. His neighbors call it "the cough." People blame fumes and soot spewing from flames that tower 300 feet into the air over a nearby oil plant.

Developer Rick Caruso is best known for transforming Southern California's retail landscape with his splashy open-air shopping villages, such as the Promenade at Westlake Village and the Grove in Los Angeles' Fairfax district. But if his projects are sometimes criticized as facsimiles of city life, Caruso couldn't be prouder of the location of the one building that bears his name: skid row.

A billionaire biopharmaceutical executive and his wife said Tuesday that they were giving St. John's Health Center $35 million to complete its reconstruction and help put it on the frontier of biologically based research and treatment. The gift from Patrick Soon-Shiong, founder and chief executive of Los Angeles-based Abraxis BioScience Inc.

ALBIE HECHT is an old hand at philanthropy. The former Nickelodeon president who greenlighted such hits as "SpongeBob SquarePants" has long been generous to children's charities. He has produced public service announcements and telethons, organized community outreach projects and created the Big Help, a campaign aimed at getting kids to participate in community service.

Oprah Winfrey is the lone living entertainer to make the Chronicle of Philanthropy's annual list of the 60 most generous Americans. Winfrey, ranked 35th, gave $58.3 million in 2006, according to the Chronicle, all but $2.4 million of it going to the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy Foundation and Oprah's Angel Network. It was her fourth consecutive showing on the list.