The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) is an American non-profitmedical research organization based in Chevy Chase, (Montgomery County), Maryland, northeast of the federal national capital city of Washington, D.C..[3][4] It was founded in 1953 by Howard Hughes (1905-1976), a legendary American business magnate / billionaire, investor, record-setting pilot / aviator, engineer and American film studio owner / Hollywood film producer,[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 dollars.
The Institute has an endowment of $22.6 billion dollars, making it the second-wealthiest philanthropic organization in the United States and the second-best-endowed medical research foundation in the world.[6] HHMI was the former owner of the Hughes Aircraft Company (1934-1997), an American aerospace important and influential firm that after Hughes 1976 death was eventually gradually divested to various other firms over time.
History
Howard Hughes (1905-1976), businessman magnate, billionaire, investor, pilot / aviator, aircraft designer / builder, film studio owner and producer/ director, philanthropist, and founder of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 1953. (pictured in 1938 at age 33 years old)
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 the Hughes Aircraft Company (1934-1997), to the institute, in effect turning the large American defense / military contractor into a tax-exempt charity. For many years the Institute grappled with maintaining its non-profit status; the United States 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 medical / scientific investigators doing research at eight different academic institutions; however, it remained a modest enterprise for several decades.[citation needed]
The institute was initially located its headquarters in Miami in Florida, at its founding in 1953. Hughes's internist, Dr. Verne Mason, who treated Hughes after his 1946 plane crash, was chairman of the Institute's medical advisory committee.[7] By 1975 just before his secretive death, 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, United States Representative (congressman) Wright Patman (1893-1976) of Texas, "complained that the Hughes foundation was a tax‐evasion device," noting that the institute spent only $5.7 million dollars for its operations in the seven years between 1954 and 1961, a period during which Hughes Aircraft accumulated $76.9 million dollars in profits, mostly from the United States federal government, the U.S. Defense Department and its U.S. Armed Forces. By 1975, it had also avoided certain stipulations of the 1969 reform act for charitable institutions passed by the U.S. Congress and signed by the President, due to legal filings by Hughes to change its operational status, with his objections going directly to the White House of newly-inagurated 37th President of the United States|President]] Richard M. Nixon (1913-1994, served 1969-1974).[9]
It was not until after Hughes's secret death in 1976 that the institute's profile increased from an annual budget of $4 million dollars in 1975, raised to $15 million dollars in 1978 and prior to the Hughes Aircraft sale, that the number of the amount had peaked to $200 million dollars 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 dollars were put into Hughes Aircraft Company's internal research and development budget rather than the owning medical institute in Maryland. Most of the money for the medical institute came from the operations at the Ground System Group, which was responsible for providing Air Defense Systems to NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Western Europe and North America international mutual-defense pact established 1949), and for the Pacific Rim allied nations and the United States itself. In this period it focused its medical research mission on genetics, immunology, and molecular biology. Since Hughes died without a probated last will and testament as the sole trustee of the HHMI, the Institute was involved in lengthy legal court proceedings for years to determine whether it would benefit from Hughes's immense fortune. In April 1984, a court appointed new trustees for the Institute's holdings.[12]
In January 1985 the HHMI trustees announced they would sell the Hughes Aircraft Company by private sale or public stock offering. Six months later, on June 5, 1985 the famous automobile / truck / bus manufacturer of the General Motors Company / Corporation (and its Motors Liquidation Company during bankruptcy reorganization in 2009-2011 for its predecessor longtime company since 1908) (GM / GMC) of Detroit, Michigan was announced as the winner of a secretive five-month, sealed-bid auction. The purchase was completed on December 20, 1985, for an estimated total $5.2 billion dollars, $2.7 billion dollars in cash and the rest in 50 million shares of GM's Class H stock. The proceeds caused the Institute to quickly grow dramatically.
HHMI completed the building of a new research campus in Ashburn, Virginia, south of Washington, D.C. called the 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 living / residence apartments for visiting researchers and scientists.
In 2007, HHMI and the publisher Elsevier announced they had established an agreement to make author manuscripts of various HHMI research articles, published in Elsevier and Cell Press journals publicly available six months following final publication. The agreement took effect for articles published after September 1, 2007.
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, to become the new president of HHMI.[15]
HHMI began in 2022 to require immediate open access to publications from its research.[16]
The Institute was sued in 2023, 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 aircraft 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 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 produced the Hughes H-4 Hercules aircraft, the atmospheric entry probe carried by the Galileo spacecraft, and the AIM-4 Falcon guided missile.
Howard University is a private, historically black, federally chartered research university in Washington, D.C., United States. It is classified among "R2: Doctoral Universities – High research activity" and accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education.
Sanford I. "Sandy" Weill is an American banker, financier, and philanthropist. He is a former chief executive and chairman of Citigroup. He served in those positions from 1998 until October 1, 2003, and April 18, 2006, respectively.
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 that it can act as a speed up the necessary reactions.
Summa Corporation was a holding company for the business interests of Howard Hughes after he sold the tool division of Hughes Tool Company in 1972. Its holdings included casino hotels, aviation businesses, and television channels. After Hughes's death in 1976, most of the company's assets were sold off, and it focused on developing the master-planned community of Summerlin, Nevada. Summa was renamed as The Howard Hughes Corporation in 1994. It was acquired by The Rouse Company in 1996.
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.
Sean B. Carroll is an American evolutionary developmental biologist, author, educator and executive producer. He is a distinguished university professor at the University of Maryland and professor emeritus of molecular biology and genetics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His studies focus on the evolution of cis-regulatory elements in the regulation of gene expression in the context of biological development, using Drosophila as a model system. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, of the American Philosophical Society (2007), of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for Advancement of Science. He is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.
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 Nelson Spruston, who is also a vice-president of HHMI. He succeeded Ronald Vale in 2024, who in turn succeeded the initial director 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.
Robert Tjian is a Hong Kong-born American biochemist best known for his work on eukaryotic transcription. He is currently professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of California, Berkeley and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). On April 1, 2009, Tjian became the President of HHMI. On August 4, 2015, he announced that he would step down as President at the end of 2016.
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.
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.
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.
The Ray and Stephanie Lane Computational Biology Department (CBD) is one of the seven departments within the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. Now situated in the Gates-Hillman Center, CBD was established in 2007 as the Lane Center for Computational Biology by founding department head Robert F. Murphy. The establishment was supported by funding from Raymond J. Lane and Stephanie Lane, CBD officially became a department within the School of Computer Science in 2009. In November 2023, Carnegie Mellon named the department as the Ray and Stephanie Lane Computational Biology Department, in recognition of the Lanes' significant investment in computational biology at CMU.
Purnell Whittington Choppin was an American virologist. He served on the faculty of Rockefeller University for nearly thirty years, becoming the Leon Hess Professor of Virology. He moved to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 1985, became the president of the institute in 1987, and retired in 1999, succeeded by Thomas Cech. Until his death in 2021, he was the chair of the Scientific Advisory Board at the Center for the Study of Hepatitis C, supported by a university consortium consisting of Rockefeller, Weill Cornell Medical College, and New York-Presbyterian Hospital.
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