About a decade ago, Mailin Burnham says he and his wife, Roberta, decided their foundation would concentrate on fewer recipients ‘with larger amounts that could do more good.’ (photo/lambertphoto.com)

Malin Burnham celebrated his 80th birthday early with a few friends filling the hangar deck of the USS Midway. But his real birthday was observed in Japan at a tea house with his wife, Roberta, Robert Horsman, Katherine Kennedy and Rod Lanthorne.

“It’s no different than turning 60,” he says. “I feel the same. My golf game is better, which doesn’t say very much. I’m still skiing and playing handball. Not at the same time.”

His admiration for UCSD is tempered by his frustration with the UC bureaucracy. “It slows down their progress. This is systemwide, not just UCSD. It just takes too long to get something done. The system is more complicated than most other places.”

He and Roberta set up the Burnham Foundation 25 years ago and started out by giving many small gifts to various organizations. About a decade ago, they decided to concentrate on fewer recipients “with larger amounts that could do more good,” he says.

“I would not feel comfortable reducing my philanthropy to one organization, but certainly my style would be five or six as opposed to 20 or 30. That’s more comforting to us. The other reason we’ve chosen that route is because instead of just writing a check and sitting on the beach, we wanted to be able to physically and mentally help the organizations we want to endow.”

He doesn’t think San Diegans’ outpouring of generosity to help people recover from October’s firestorms will harm the fundraising efforts of nonprofit entities not related to recovery.

His favorite nonprofit cause is a UCSD neighbor, the Burnham Institute for Medical Research “not because my name is over the door,” he says, “but because of the great advances in science they’ve been producing in an ever accelerating fashion. It’s very satisfying to help those people open more doors and do more research which turns into medical drug products eventually. They’re very few opportunities we have…to affect in a positive way the entire world. A medical institution is one of those. A university is another. Health care and education are the two strongest interests I have.”