The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) is an American non-profitmedical research organization based in Chevy Chase, Maryland.[3][4] It was founded in 1953 by Howard Hughes, an American business magnate, investor, record-setting pilot, engineer,[5] film director, and philanthropist, known during his lifetime as one of the most financially successful individuals in the world. It is one of the largest private funding organizations for biological and medical research in the United States. HHMI spends about $1 million per HHMI Investigator per year, which amounts to annual investment in biomedical research of about $825 million.
The institute has an endowment of $22.6 billion, making it the second-wealthiest philanthropic organization in the United States and the second-best-endowed medical research foundation in the world.[6] HHMI is the former owner of the Hughes Aircraft Company, an American aerospace firm that was divested to various firms over time.
History
Howard Hughes, businessman, investor, pilot, film director, philanthropist, and founder of the institute
The institute was formed with the goal of basic research including trying to understand, in Hughes's words, "the genesis of life itself." Despite its principles, in the early days it was generally viewed as a tax haven for Hughes's huge personal fortune. Hughes was HHMI's sole trustee and he transferred his stock of Hughes Aircraft to the institute, in effect turning the large defense contractor into a tax-exempt charity. For many years the Institute grappled with maintaining its non-profit status; the Internal Revenue Service challenged its "charitable" status which made it tax exempt. Partly in response to such claims, starting in the late 1950s it began funding 47 investigators doing research at eight different institutions; however, it remained a modest enterprise for several decades.[citation needed]
The institute was initially located in Miami, Florida, in 1953. Hughes's internist, Verne Mason, who treated Hughes after his 1946 plane crash, was chairman of the institute's medical advisory committee.[7] By 1975, Hughes was sole trustee of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which in turn owned all the stock of the Hughes Aircraft Company.[8]
In 1969, Representative Wright Patman "complained that the Hughes foundation was a tax‐evasion device," noting that the institute spent only $5.7 million for its operations between 1954 and 1961, a period during which Hughes Aircraft accumulated $76.9 million in profits. By 1975, it had also avoided certain stipulations of the 1969 reform act for charitable institutions due to legal filings by Hughes to change its operational status, with his objections going directly to the White House.[9]
In 1993, the institute moved to its headquarters in Chevy Chase, Maryland.[11]
It was not until after Hughes's death in 1976 that the institute's profile increased from an annual budget of $4 million in 1975 to $15 million in 1978 and prior to Hughes Aircraft sale the number had peaked to $200 million per year. At the time of the sale Hughes Aircraft employed 75,000 people and vast amounts of money from the approximate annual revenue of $6 billion were put into Hughes Aircraft internal research and development rather than the medical institute. Most of the money for the medical institute came from the operations at Ground System Group responsible for providing Air Defense Systems to NATO, Pacific Rim, and the USA. In this period it focused its mission on genetics, immunology, and molecular biology. Since Hughes died without a will as the sole trustee of the HHMI, the institute was involved in lengthy court proceedings to determine whether it would benefit from Hughes's fortune. In April 1984, a court appointed new trustees for the institute's holdings.[12]
In January 1985 the trustees announced they would sell Hughes Aircraft by private sale or public stock offering. On June 5, 1985 General Motors (GM) was announced as the winner of a secretive five-month, sealed-bid auction. The purchase was completed on December 20, 1985, for an estimated $5.2 billion, $2.7 billion in cash and the rest in 50 million shares of GM Class H stock. The proceeds caused the institute to grow dramatically.
HHMI completed the building of a new research campus in Ashburn, Virginia called Janelia Research Campus in October 2006. It is modeled after AT&T's Bell Labs and the Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology. With a main laboratory building nearly 1,000 feet (300m) long, it contains 760,000 square feet (71,000m2) of enclosed space, used primarily for research. The campus also features apartments for visiting researchers.
In 2007, HHMI and the publisher Elsevier announced they have established an agreement to make author manuscripts of HHMI research articles published in Elsevier and Cell Press journals publicly available six months following final publication. The agreement takes effect for articles published after September 1, 2007.
In 2008, the Trustees of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute selected Robert Tjian as the new president of HHMI.
In 2009, HHMI awarded fifty researchers, as part of the HHMI Early Career Scientist Competition.[citation needed]
In 2014, the institute created a new round of its primary award competition, for a total of $150 million in award money from 2015 to 2012.[13] The institute is expanding the Ashburn campus in 2019.[14]
In 2016, the HHMI Trustees selected Erin K. O'Shea, a previous Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer at the institute, the new president of HHMI.[15]
In 2022, HHMI began to require immediate open access to publications from its research.[16]
In 2023, HHMI was sued by Dr. Vivian Cheung for disability discrimination.[17]
Assets
As of 2017[update] the Howard Hughes Medical Institute had assets of $22,588,928,000.[1]
↑ Note: the original trustees were: Helen K. Copley, Donald S. Fredrickson, M.D., Frank William Gay, James H. Gilliam, Jr., Esq., Hanna H. Gray, Ph.D., William R. Lummis, Esq., Irving S. Shapiro, Esq., George W. Thorn, M.D.
Howard Robard Hughes Jr. was an American aerospace engineer, business magnate, film producer, investor, philanthropist, and pilot. He was best known during his lifetime as one of the richest and most influential people in the world. He first became prominent as a film producer, and then as an important figure in the aviation industry. Later in life, he became known for his eccentric behavior and reclusive lifestyle—oddities that were caused in part by his worsening obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), chronic pain from a near-fatal plane crash, and increasing deafness.
Chevy Chase is the colloquial name of an area that includes a town, several incorporated villages, and an unincorporated census-designated place in southern Montgomery County, Maryland; and one adjoining neighborhood in northwest Washington, D.C. Most of these derive from a late-19th-century effort to create a new suburb that its developer dubbed Chevy Chase after a colonial land patent.
Chevy Chase is a census-designated place (CDP) in Montgomery County, Maryland, United States. The population was 10,176 at the 2020 census.
The Hughes Aircraft Company was a major American aerospace and defense contractor founded on February 14, 1934 by Howard Hughes in Glendale, California, as a division of Hughes Tool Company. The company was known for producing, among other products, the Hughes H-4 Hercules aircraft, the atmospheric entry probe carried by the Galileo spacecraft, and the AIM-4 Falcon guided missile.
The Washington–Baltimore combined metropolitan statistical area is a statistical area including the overlapping metropolitan areas of Washington, D.C. and Baltimore. The region includes Central Maryland, Northern Virginia, three counties in the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia, and one county in south-central Pennsylvania. It is the most educated, highest-income, and third-largest combined statistical area in the United States behind New York City–Newark, NJ and Los Angeles–Long Beach.
Carlos José Bustamante is a Peruvian-American scientist. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Thomas Robert Cech is an American chemist who shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Sidney Altman, for their discovery of the catalytic properties of RNA. Cech discovered that RNA could itself cut strands of RNA, suggesting that life might have started as RNA. He found that RNA can not only transmit instructions, but also that it can speed up the necessary reactions.
The Boeing Satellite Development Center is a major business unit of Boeing Defense, Space & Security. It brought together Boeing satellite operations with that of GM Hughes Electronics' Space and Communications division in El Segundo, California.
Lilly Endowment Inc., headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana, is one of the world's largest private philanthropic foundations and among the largest endowments in the United States. It was founded in 1937 by Josiah K. Lilly Sr. and his sons, Eli Jr. and Josiah Jr. (Joe), with an initial gift of Eli Lilly and Company stock valued at $280,000 USD. As of 2020, its total assets were worth $21 billion.
United OneHeart Foundation is a non-profit research and development organisation. Its stated mission is as a non-profit organisation to help people to improve the quality of life by fostering improvements in medicine with the aim of decreasing impact of cardiovascular diseases with focus on India and South Asia.
Janelia Research Campus is a scientific research campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute that opened in October 2006. The campus is located in Loudoun County, Virginia, near the town of Ashburn. It is known for its scientific research and modern architecture. The current executive director of the laboratory is Ronald Vale, who is also a vice-president of HHMI. He succeeded Gerald M. Rubin in 2020. The campus was known as "Janelia Farm Research Campus" until 2014.
Hughes Electronics Corporation was formed in 1985 when Hughes Aircraft was sold by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to General Motors for $5.2 billion. Surviving parts of Hughes Electronics are today known as DirecTV Group, while the automotive divisions became Aptiv.
The Gruber Prize in Genetics, established in 2001, is one of three international awards worth US$500,000 made by the Gruber Foundation, a non-profit organization based at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.
Selden Island is a 408-acre island in the Potomac River, located about 32 km (20 mi) WNW of Washington, DC. It is about 4 km long and 0.4–0.5 km wide. Although it is located within Montgomery County, Maryland, the only road access is via a bridge connecting it to the Loudoun County, Virginia side of the river.
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Erin K. O'Shea is an American biologist who is president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). In 2013, she was named HHMI's vice president and chief scientific officer. Prior to that, she was a professor of molecular and cellular biology and chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University. In 2016, her appointment as future, and first woman, president of HHMI was announced. She has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator since 2000.
The National Institutes of Health Clinical Research Training Program (CRTP) was a one-year education program aimed at highly qualified, research-oriented medical and dental students wanting to learn the theory and practice of clinical and translational research that ran from 1997 to 2012. It covered among other topics clinical research design, data analysis, bioethics, and critical review of the medical literature; but most of each fellow's time was devoted to conducting supervised clinical or translational research in their area of interest.
The University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) features a variety of research centers and institutes both based on the campus and affiliated with other academic institutions. These centers and institutes listed below seek out to expand their research, educate, and promote partnerships between the university and the Baltimore-Washington Metropolitan Area and beyond.
Robert Eric Betzig is an American physicist who works as a professor of physics and professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also a senior fellow at the Janelia Farm Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia.
William Maxwell Cowan was a South African neuroscientist known for his work on developmental plasticity and neural connectivity. He is credited with helping to contribute to the growth of modern neuroanatomy through his use of novel anterograde tracing techniques which fundamentally transformed the field in the 1970s. From 1978–2002 Cowan was the founding editor of the Annual Review of Neuroscience. Cowan was vice-president and chief scientific officer of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute from 1987 until his retirement in 2000.
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