Kitchen Vaccinations Spurred Harvard Alum’s Record Gift

When Gerald Chan was a boy in China in the 1950s, vaccinations weren’t freely available, and his mother gave them to neighbor children in the family kitchen.

A nurse, Chan’s mother was a hygiene devotee who would wipe down restaurant utensils with ethanol-soaked cotton before letting her children eat with them, said Chan, 63, who yesterday announced a $350 million gift to the Harvard School of Public Health from his family’s Morningside Foundation. To keep her syringe clean, his mother disinfected it in boiling water before each jab, he recalled in a speech at the Boston school.