Who founded the Howard Hughes Medical Institute?
Howard R. Hughes, who founded HHMI, was a man of restless intellect, great energy, and diverse talents. He dabbled in movies; designed, constructed, and raced airplanes; made TWA a premier international airline; and built the Hughes Aircraft Company into one of the country’s largest and most important defense contractors. Although he retreated into a reclusive existence dominated by illness in the years before his death, his life was one of remarkable achievement. The creation of the medical institute that bears his name stands as Hughes’s most enduring accomplishment. His vision of scientific philanthropy was neither modest nor ordinary. He wanted his medical institute to be committed to basic research, to probe “the genesis of life itself.
