The year the patent holder of a drill bit decided to establish Howard Hughes Aircraft Corporation, with himself as sole owner, he also established the not-for-profit Howard Hughes Medical Institute, with himself as executive director. He and some very slick corporate lawyers then transferred ownership of one hundred percent of the stock in the Aircraft Corporation to the Medical Institute. Over the decades, Hughes paid a fortune to lawyers fighting for the Tax Exempt status which his foundation eventually enjoyed.

During his life, Hughes did actually fund a few millions of dollars to the fund, to substantiate that it was legitimate for tax purposes, and also because he wanted to know how the human body worked. He was an engineer. They are the folks who make things work. He wanted to understand the human body at the most intimate level, cells were made up of smaller things. What things? What he wanted to understand was the genesis of human life. An eternal question, he was in a position to try and find out. He didn't have the language for it, but he wanted to map the human genome system. Back in the 1940's! He was a contemporary of Richard Feynmann,thinking WAY ahead.

Hughes was healthy, but developed an uncommon form of hypochondria. He lived a life in fear of germs, and it got worse with age. Hughes was quite a kook, as he got older, on the subject of germs. It became an absolute terror for him. He was seriously mentally ill, but when one is massively wealthy (that's "Feelthy riiich to the rest of us) one can buy sanity and protection from help and care.

But the Hughes Aircraft Corporate structure was self-sustaining long before Hughes retired. They always had a hand in Government pockets. The Government Contracts kept rolling in. The corporate executives understood the Hughes method; that you back every candidate for public office, and then you "support the winners." The Aircraft foundation was making airplanes, airplane parts and engines for the Korean War, during the "Cold" War, for the Vietnamese War. Right along, the corporation was accumulating money for Hughes. With Hughes out of the way, more probably got accomplished. So even at the end, while he twiddled his thumbs, his money kept on making money. Actually, with foot long fingernails, that would have been impossible, but when a multi-billionaire says not to cut his nails, who you gonna call?

After Hughes died, following court battles about "who gets the money", (and the lawyers laughed all the way to the bank,) a Court decided that the major part of Hughes' estate would go to the institute. Then things really started rolling.

Hughes' personal physician picked out twenty doctors to pull the place into serious research mode. And the money came rolling in, and there was research on a huge scale. A decade or so passes, and they figure out, if they sell off Howard Hughes Aircraft Corporation, they can fill the bank account to the top, and make All the money work for research. I think it was General Motors Corporation who finally bought Hughes Aircraft. They paid pretty big millions. Think Billions in today's market.

With all that money the Institute went into overdrive, helping support sciences starting at the University, College and High School level, funding new science labs, instituting science scholarships for bright science and medical students at hundreds of educational facilities. Which brings us pretty much up to the present, when all those years of paying for education begins to pay off. Recently someone wrote of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute:

"The fortune that once belonged to a man afraid of germs and disease is now helping to fight them. The not-for-profit Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) is one of the largest private medical research organizations in the US. Unlike most such organizations, HHMI directly employs the researchers it funds (through a multi-billion dollar endowment) and provides needed equipment and facilities. The institute concentrates primarily on such biomedical areas as cell biology, genetics, immunology, neuroscience, and structural biology. HHMI also supports science education through a grant program. "

Today, this day, the only entity that spends as much as the Hughes Institute spends on medical research and education is a little thing we like to call The United States Government.
But the Hughes Institutes' funded physicians are nice to people.

Comments:

Never knew any of this. Pretty interesting.