Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Founded	1953; 71 years ago (1953)
Founder	Howard Hughes (1905–1976)
Focus	Biological and Medical research and Science Education
Location	Chevy Chase, Maryland|Chevy Chase, (Montgomery County), Maryland, (U.S.A.)
Coordinates	38°59′55″N 77°4′47″W / 38.99861°N 77.07972°W / 38.99861; -77.07972
Method	Laboratories, Funding
Key people	Erin O'Shea (President)
Revenue	-US$2.303 billion[1] (due to losses on investments) (in 2022)
Expenses	US$853 million[1] (in 2022)
Endowment	US$24 billion dollars[1]
Employees	2,300 (2022)[2]
Website	hhmi.org

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) is an American non-profit medical 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.

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]

The Institute moved further north from Miami to Coconut Grove, Florida, in the mid-1970s and shortly afterwards then to Bethesda, Maryland, of suburban Montgomery County, northwest of the federal national capital city of Washington, D.C. in 1976.^[10]

Seventeen years later in 1993, the Institute moved to its headquarters a few miles southeast to Chevy Chase, Maryland, also still in Montgomery County, on the border line with the federal District of Columbia / Washington, D.C..^[11]

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 (300 m) long, it contains 760,000 square feet (71,000 m²) 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 2008, the Trustees of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute selected Robert Tjian (born 1949), 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, 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]

As of 2017^[update] the Howard Hughes Medical Institute had assets of $22,588,928,000.^[1]

• List of wealthiest charitable foundations
• Main category: Howard Hughes Medical Investigators

• 60 Minutes news feature "Howard Hughes: Patron Of Science?"