FINANCING A CURE Moved to act by a brother lost in childhood, financial advisor James “Jim” Beck embraces medical research philanthropy ADVISOR PROFILE J IM BECK and his twin sister were born into a family that had been marked by terrible loss, and what he learned would profoundly affect the direction of his life, even to the point of embracing medical research in his personal philanthropy. On Christmas Day 1951, six years before Jim was born, the family’s second child, Bobby, died of leukemia at age 4. Though the disease had been named by a physician in 1899, treatment was still not widely available in the 1950s, and few people survived leukemia in those days. When Jim and his twin arrived in 1957 to join two older brothers, the family had begun to work around the loss of Bobby and carve out a home life in Butler County. Jim’s parents went on to have another daughter. Each of the Beck children noted the effect Bobby’s death had on their parents, even years later, and their experience with that explains in part why Beck and each of his four siblings are involved in philanthropy. As a senior vice president at Hefren-Tillotson, and an approved third-party manager with The Pittsburgh Foundation, Beck, CFP® , CAP® , identifies himself as T H E P I T T S B U R G H F O U N D AT I O N 8 F O R U M