Madoff Investor Found Dead In Pool

Jeffry M. Picower, an education philanthropist who invested billions in Bernard L. Madoff’s $50 billion Ponzi scheme, was found dead in his swimming pool after suffering a heart attack last Sunday—less than a year after his foundation pulled the plug on millions of dollars in promised funding for diabetes research at the Harvard Medical School and its affiliated hospitals.

Some grant recipients still lack alternative sources of funding.

Last year, the Picower Foundation e-mailed the Harvard medical grant recipients days after the Madoff fraud went public and alerted them that the foundation had “ceased all grant-making, effective immediately.”

The foundation had awarded Medical School Dean Jeffrey S. Flier $1.5 million last October to be spent over three years. It had also planned to donate $1.35 million to the division of endocrinology, diabetes, and metabolism at Harvard-affiliate Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

Flier had divided the award among three or four researchers, according to Bruce M. Spiegelman, a professor of cell biology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, who lost two years of funding for research on fat cell regulation to be paid out in $300,000 yearly installments.

Spiegelman said he has not found any alternative funding to date.

“I’m looking at federal funds, non-federal funds, and looking to the Farber’s donors as well,” he said.

“The Farber development department has been working with me to see if there is anyone who will step into the breach.”

Spiegelman’s lab had just received payment for the 2009 year when the Madoff scheme was exposed and thus was able to maintain research this year using Picower funds.

“If there was one bit of good fortune, it was that we had just received the lastit was that we had just received the last year of funding when the foundation collapsed.”

One year later, the funding is about to run out.

“In the past 11 months, we did not see the effects of the lost funding until now,” he said.

“That’s a lot to lose in one blow, but that’s up to me to try and make up for that.”

Spiegelman said the Picower foundation’s donation was slotted for four or five years, and he believes he had two more years of funding left.

The foundation also gave $50 million in 2002 for brain research at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT, at that point the largest single gift MIT had received from a foundation.