Mass. General Gets $100M Gift

Massachusetts General Hospital received its largest donation in history yesterday—$100 million—to create a joint institute between Harvard, MIT, and affiliated hospitals with the stated goal of finding a vaccine for AIDS within the next decade.

The gift from Phillip “Terry” Ragon and his wife, Susan, will create the Ragon Institute—designed to overhaul norms of clinical research by drawing from acclaimed physicians, researchers, and engineers in various fields who have never directly worked in AIDS research before.

Harvard Medical School professor Bruce D. Walker, who runs an AIDS clinic in South Africa, will serve as the Institute’s first director.

“I was the one who met with Terry and engaged him in a conversation about how transforming a gift like this could be,” Walker said. “I told him about this pie in the sky idea to get a bunch of flexible funding and get really smart people together to think outside the box.”

Walker approached Ragon—who had business of his own in South Africa—a year and a half ago regarding funding for AIDS research, and two weeks later, the two were on a plane together to see Walker’s clinic.

Walker said Ragon had a transforming experience there and saw that the best means of combatting the problem was by investing in science.

“Research is where the leverage is,” Ragon said. “It’s the fulcrum you use if you want to move the world.”

Ragon soon funded Walker’s project in South Africa, and the two continued to discuss how to fund research for a vaccine on a larger, more innovative scale.

An MIT graduate who founded InterSystems Corporation—a Cambridge-based software company—Ragon said the donation was designed to combat the lack of collaboration in research.

“What’s really been lacking in biomedical research in general and HIV specifically is a lack of an interdisciplinary approach,” Ragon said. “Everything is done in small isolated labs that don’t communicate.”

Walker attacked this problem using what he called “door-to-door salesmanship” to recruit a wide range of local talent.

He sat down with engineers and scientists in other fields—ranging from basic immunology to chemical engineering—and explained that if they were willing to refocus their efforts on AIDS research, he had the funding to cover it.

“These are people that made their reputations in other fields,” Walker said. “That kind of new perspective is what we’re really counting on.”

Arup K. Chakraborty, head of the Chemical Engineering department at MIT, was another of the many local scientists tapped by Walker to join the institute, even though he had no direct experience with AIDS research.

“I thought a lot of smart people had thought about this question and I wasn’t sure if I would bring something valuable to this effort,” he said.

But after visiting Walker’s clinic in South Africa, Chakraborty became convinced that he could offer his expertise to the issue.

“Since then, after many scientific conversations, I have gotten very excited about puzzles I might be able to contribute to,” he said.

An initial area of focus for vaccine development will be a small pool of HIV-infected patients whose bodies can somehow control replication of the virus.

The announcement of the gift—which included a statement by University President Drew G. Faust—took place at a gathering of a couple hundred people yesterday at Harvard Square’s Charles Hotel.

“[The Institute] will accelerate the discovery process, and it will reduce the time it takes to get those discoveries to the people whose lives they can save,” Faust said, according to a transcript of her remarks. “Terry and Susan have shown a level of understanding—and even daring—that is too rare in the world of philanthropy.”

—Staff writer Laura G. Mirviss can be reached at lmirviss@fas.harvard.edu.