# Herbert Irving

Source: https://onco.cc/people/herbert-irving/  
OnCo record `herbert-irving` (Person). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

Herbert and Florence Irving's gifts to Columbia began with $8.5 million in 1987, founded its cancer centre in 1995 and ended with a $700 million bequest in 2017 for cancer research; the total passed $900 million.

## Summary

Herbert Irving (1918-2016), a co-founder of the food distributor Sysco, and his wife Florence (1920-2018) were the largest donors in the history of Columbia University Irving Medical Center and NewYork-Presbyterian. The cancer centre's own account of the Irving family records a first gift of $8.5 million in 1987, the founding of the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center in 1995, and a posthumous gift of $700 million in 2017 to advance research and clinical programmes for the treatment of cancer, spanning cancer genomics, immunology, computational biology, pathology and biomedical engineering. Cumulative Irving giving exceeded $900 million over three decades. The 2017 bequest is among the largest single gifts ever directed to cancer research and funded a wave of recruitment and new laboratories.

## Fields

- Kind: Person
- Last checked: 2026-09-10
- Also known as: Herbert and Florence Irving
- Tags: hero; donor
- Role: Sysco co-founder whose family gave more than $900 million to Columbia, founding the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center
- Specialisms: Cancer centre building; Cancer genomics; Estate philanthropy

## Sources

- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Irving
- Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center: the Irving family: https://www.cancer.columbia.edu/about-us/irving-family

## Connected records

- technologies: [Comprehensive genomic profiling](https://onco.cc/technologies/cgp/)
- fronts: [Immunotherapy](https://onco.cc/fronts/immunotherapy/)
- institutions: [Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center, Columbia University](https://onco.cc/institutions/columbia-hicc/)
- bottlenecks: [Funding follows fashion, not burden](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-funding-allocation/)

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JSON: https://onco.cc/api/v1/entities/herbert-irving.json