PROVIDENCE, R.I.—Rhode Island Hospital on Tuesday announced the largest gift in its history, $15 million, to create a neuroscience institute with the goal of someday making it a national leader in brain sciences.
The gift will be used as "seed money" to launch the Norman Prince Neurosciences Institute, said Guillaume de Ramel, a member of the family that bestowed the gift on the state's largest hospital.
G. Rees Cosgrove, chief of neurosurgery at Rhode Island Hospital, which also serves as a teaching hospital for Brown University, said he expects the institute will ultimately cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
The institute will bridge research done at Brown with practice at Rhode Island Hospital in three departments, neurosurgery, neurology and psychiatry, said Edward J. Wing, dean of medicine and biology at Brown's Alpert Medical School.
Timothy Babineau, hospital president and chief executive, said the importance of the institute will be felt most by future patients suffering from Alzheimer's, ALS, Parkinson's, stroke, or other brain impairments.
Cosgrove, also chair of the medical school's department of neurosurgery, said that unlike other neuroscience institutes, the Rhode Island institute will fully integrate psychiatry. The Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University will serve as a model, he said.
"To make real progress in neuroscience, we have to integrate these elements. You really need experts in every area," Cosgrove said.
The institute also will focus on restoring functions lost gradually through chronic conditions, he said. Brown's Institute for Brain Science has been on the leading edge of research into robotic prosthetic limbs that could help such conditions.
Babineau said he got the idea for the institute shortly after being hired two years ago, when he was looking at the strengths of the hospital and Brown and also considering the next frontiers in medical science.
"The next several decades will be characterized by great breakthroughs in brain science," he said.
Cosgrove was recruited earlier this year with the establishment of the institute in mind. The hospital plans to launch national searches for new chiefs of psychiatry and neurology who see the potential for such an institute, Babineau said. It also plans to hire an institute director.
The Prince family's donation will allow the hospital to begin raising money for the project from both philanthropic and government sources, such as the National Institutes of Health, Babineau said.
"We see it as a perfect vehicle to attract future research dollars," Babineau said.
Prince, youngest son of Boston financier and railroad investor Frederick Henry Prince, was a founding member of the Lafayette Escadrille, a volunteer American air squadron working for France before the United States entered World War I. He died in the war.
"Our great-grandfather would be pleased to see his money deployed for such a worthy cause," said Elizabeth "Lisette" Prince, de Ramel's mother.
The Prince family owned Marble House, one of Newport's best-known summer "cottages," from 1932 until 1963, when it donated it to the Preservation Society of Newport County.
De Ramel unsuccessfully ran for secretary of state in 2006.
