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The business world knows quite well who Sheldon Adelson is -- the eighth richest American who has alternately lost and recouped tens of billions of dollars in the casino business over the last few years. A wider public came to know him when two $5 million checks signed by Adelson bolstered Newt Gingrich's faltering presidential campaign earlier this year, threatening to upend the Republican primary race. But only one was signed by Sheldon. The other: Miriam.
While she is much less well-known than her husband, Miriam Adelson is not your average billionaire's wife. Rather, she is an accomplished medical doctor, as well as her husband's partner in a range of business and philanthropic activities. As the dynamics of the race shift, what has become clear is that this driven and passionate pair is bound to have an influence on the 2012 campaign. On Monday, The Wall Street Journal reported that they were quite possibly preparing to shift their backing to Romney -- they seem prepared to support any Republican in their hope of seeing Barack Obama defeated this fall. And Gingrich is in no way the only recipient of their largesse so far -- according to the Center for Responsive Politics, the couple ranks second in individual contributions to parties, federal candidates, and PACs in the current election cycle. They also spent $30 million during the 2008 election. Indeed, in an exclusive interview with Fortune, Dr. Adelson emerges as no less accomplished — or powerful — than her larger-than-life spouse.
Israeli-born Miriam Ochshorn, 66, has been married to 78-year old Adelson since 1991, and the couple has four children together. Her parents, Menucha and Simha Farbstein, fled Poland in the run-up to the Holocaust, settling in Haifa. There her father ended up owning a handful of movie theaters, though the family didn't have a television until Miriam was 16. Her husband comes from equally modest beginnings -- the son of a Boston taxi driver, Sheldon Adelson grew up in a one-room tenement in Boston's Dorchester section.
Dr. Miriam Adelson -- known as Miri to her friends -- earned a Bachelor of Science in Microbiology and Genetics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During her two years of military service in Israel, she worked in the biological research department, and followed that by earning a medical degree from Tel Aviv University's Sackler Medical School. She went on to become the chief internist in an emergency room at the Rokach Hospital in Tel Aviv. In 1986, she served as an associate physician at Rockefeller University in New York, where she studied chemical dependency and drug addiction, with a specific focus on the spread of HIV among drug addicts. Her mentor was Mary-Jeanne Kreek, the researcher credited with discovering that methadone was a safe treatment for addicts. The two women have since collaborated on studies of methadone and addiction for the last 25 years.
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Adelson, now 66, says her heart has always remained in Israel, but she got "stuck" in America after meeting Adelson—"the love of [her] life"—on a blind date in 1991. Suddenly extremely wealthy, Dr. Adelson started putting some of that casino lucre to good use. In 1993, she founded a substance abuse center and research clinic at Tel Aviv's Sourasky Medical Center, with a mission that supported the then-controversial notion that addiction was a disease. She had the full support in Mr. Adelson in her endeavors, at least in part due the fact that a deceased son from his first marriage had a history of drug abuse. "Sheldon is everything to me," she says. "He is my best friend, as I know I am to him, and he is a 'mensch.' He claims that I'm an angel and I say he is the 'wind beneath my wings.' In any case, we are on a magnificent flight together."
In 2000, the couple opened the Dr. Miriam and Sheldon G. Adelson Research Clinic in Las Vegas. Despite the fact that the couple's fortune was last tallied at $21.5 billion, Dr. Adelson still puts on the lab coat every day, conducting research on treatment, collaborating on studies of genetic predisposition to addiction, and working directly with patients. "I went to visit her once at the clinic in Tel Aviv," says Zvi Galil, the former president of Tel Aviv University. "I had to wait 25 minutes to see her because she was personally seeing to the treatment of an addict. That's amazing, considering her position." Indeed, one half of the world's richest Jewish couple has remained at the front lines of addiction treatment, a fight she joined long before she had money enough to never work again.
"Money is not the most important thing in life," she says. "For my husband, money is only a benchmark to measure his success as an entrepreneur and visionary. I studied medicine and worked as an Internist and Emergency Room physician. I fought to save lives of young and old and had survivors, and, unfortunately, I had people die in my arms. My priorities in life are my family, to be a good mother and a loving wife. Money is down on the list of my priorities. That is why I have no problem to change my expensive suit for the white 'lab coat.' Ask me which one I prefer, and I will tell you that with no doubt, it is the white one."
She is quite proud of what the clinics have done. "My clinics have achieved far above the goals I had for them," she says. "Saving a drug addict is the equivalent of saving about 20 people. Treating one drug addict reduces his criminal activity, reduces his arrests, reduces his appearances in court, reduces his time sitting in prison, reduces his injecting drugs, reduces him being infected with HIV & Hepatitis C while sharing needles, and reduces his infecting others if he is already infected. It also improves his general medical condition, improves his behavior at home and in the environment, improves his work habits, and has a positive impact on his family by having a normal person around them. By treating one person, we can save many lives, and a mission like that is very much fulfilling."
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