Michael Milken
Survivor Inductee

Drew Nieporent
Humanitarian, 2005

Senator John Mc.Cain
2004 Inductee

Deirdre and Don Imus
Humanitarian Award

Geraldine Ferraro, Fran and Jack Dalessandro
2003 Inductee

Ken Langone
2003 Humanitarian Award

Patrick McMullan
2002 Inductee

Douglas McCormick
2002 Humanitarian Award

Mayor Rudolph Giuliani
2001 Inductee

Nancy Brinker
2000 Inductee

Carol M. Baldwin
1999 Inductee

Jill Eikenberry
1998 Inductee

Harry Belafonte
1998 Inductee

William R. Johnston
1998 Humanitarian Award

Linda Ellerbee
1997 Inductee

Michael Milken, Chairman FasterCures

It was in 1972, three years after Michael Milken began a legendary career on Wall Street, that his wife told him her mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer. That was when he began a search for medical solutions that has played as large a role in his life as his better-known innovations in finance. Nearly 33 years later, Fortune magazine writer Cora Daniels wrote, "No one had ever really pulled together the full picture of how - and how much - (Milken) has shaken up the medical establishment and saved lives." Daniels “pulled it together” in a November 2004 Fortune cover story, " The Man Who Changed Medicine."

Mike is now recognized for his three decades of driving medical research toward cures and improved treatments for all serious diseases. From among these, Fortune zeroed in on Milken's work in prostate cancer, noting that he " has energized the medical establishment in a quest for a cure. Now thousands of men are living longer — and leaders everywhere are taking notice ." But long before he focused on prostate cancer, Mike had become one of America’s most active philanthropists. He formalized his previous philanthropy in 1982 by co-founding the Milken Family Foundation, which has supported research on a wide range of deadly diseases.

Mike’s latest medical initiative is FasterCures, a Washington-based think tank dedicated to accelerating progress against all serious diseases. A decade earlier, in 1993, Milken founded the Prostate Cancer Foundation, whose grants to some 1,200 medical studies worldwide make it the world’s largest philanthropic funder of prostate-cancer research. An article last year in Forbes said, “Prostate cancer, once a research backwater, is suddenly sexy thanks to the work of one patient: Michael Milken.” Andrew von Eschenbach, director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), says that “few people have done more to advance the fight against serious diseases than Mike Milken.” Former NCI director Samuel Broder says that “Milken is probably the single most effective layperson advocate for cancer research … “(His) foundation had a crucial early role in numerous drugs now in late-stage trials.”

Mike also chairs the widely respected Milken Institute, a non-partisan think tank whose scholars consult for government and private organizations, publish influential reports and hold major conferences on regional and global economic issues.

As a financier, he is often said to have revolutionized modern capital markets, making them more democratic and dynamic by innovating a wide range of financing techniques previously unavailable to most companies. In a December 2004 speech, Sir Harold Evans, author of the book, “They Made America,” said, “ Michael Milken is a formidable innovator and we’ll all be in his debt for a long time.” A Washington Post column said he “helped create the conditions for America’s explosion of wealth and creativity,” a process that Business Weeksaid “shook America’s defeatist Establishment out of its gloom.” Starting in 1969 at what would become Drexel Burnham Lambert, he financed thousands of companies that created millions of jobs. The former editor of the Harvard Business Review wrote, “Much of the strength and resilience of the economy today – including its ability to rebound in times of adversity – is due to the way people using Milken’s financing vehicles remade ailing companies or put their entrepreneurial zeal to work.”

A summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, Mike received his MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. He and his wife Lori have three children and celebrated their 37 th anniversary this year.