A New Fund Launched in Franca Sozzani’s Honor Will Support Genomic Research
In life, Franca Sozzani was known to pay it forward. Made a United Nations goodwill ambassador in 2012—and global ambassador against hunger for the United Nations World Food Programme in 2014—the late editor in chief of Italian Vogue also supported the Milan-based AIDS foundation ConVivio and chaired the European Institute of Oncology, among other organizations; parlaying an iconic fashion career into a life of charitable service.
Now, just over two years after her death from lung cancer, her son, the photographer and filmmaker Francesco Carrozzini, is following her lead. Next month, Assouline will release Franca: Chaos and Creation—Carrozzini’s alluring hardcover companion to his 2016 documentary of the same name—and its proceeds will benefit the recently established Franca Sozzani Fund for Preventive Genomics at Harvard University’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, cofounded by Carrozzini and D.A. Wallach. Carrozzini will also lead a campaign to fund the Franca Sozzani Chair in Preventive Genomics at Harvard Medical School; on February 11, a sale of items from Sozzani’s famous wardrobe—397 ready-to-wear and haute couture pieces, and 190 accessories—will be sold on Yoox in service to that campaign.
“For me, to create a book on Franca’s achievement was important; it is the tangible way to recall those glorious years of the fashion magazine, when freedom was offered to the most creative talents of those almost 30 years,” Martine Assouline says. “When Francesco told me about his idea of a foundation for Franca, then the project became obvious.”
Carrozzini was first turned onto the field of genomics—which concerns the structure, mapping, and editing of an organism’s complete set of DNA (or genome)—in the throes of his mother’s illness. Wallach connected him to Harvard Medical School’s Dr. Robert Green, who cued him in to the immense promise of precision medicine, which endeavors to tailor health care around a patient’s specific genetic information, discerned through DNA sequencing. “When my mother passed away, I found out that she had never gone for a checkup,” Carrozzini says. “Her generation does not value treatment as prevention and that’s one of the main reasons why she died. To this day, I cannot accept that many people are suffering because they don’t want, or cannot afford, to get treatment. This is the reason why I am starting this fund and why I wanted to start with genomics, which is the road map to one’s life.”
“The larger goal [of the fund] is to change the way people think about medicine,” Carrozzini contines. “To make medicine more proactive and accessible. By doing so, we can help prevent millions of deaths and diseases.” Like his visionary mother before him, Carrozzini dreams big: By 2040, his hope is that every child born will be able to get sequenced.
