World-class researchers are used to having their names in the paper, but seldom in the same sentence with “strip club.”
Stanford cardiovascular specialist Simon Stertzer weathered a flurry of publicity last fall after his holding company purchased the all-nude Palomino Club in Las Vegas, with the stated intention of raising money for medical research. When the Las Vegas Sun reported the transaction, other newspapers, including the Seattle Times and Salt Lake Tribune, picked up the story.
“I had no idea it would hit the press at all,” says Stertzer, a professor of medicine who helped pioneer coronary angioplasty in the late 1970s. “The press characterized it in a way I thought was offensive. Ninety-eight percent of my outside business activities are in medical devices, and real estate in Nevada is something that one of my holding companies has been involved with for some time.”
Financing research through private business investments is nothing new to Stertzer, but the adverse national publicity soured the deal.
“The public polemic continues to engender such an unseemly characterization of the plan,” Stertzer told the Stanford Daily on November 21, ”that my attorneys and I have elected to abandon the idea of funding research in this manner.”
According to the Daily, Stertzer sold the strip club and will try to “procure research funding in the more conventional commercial fashion” in the future.
