The Larry L. Hillblom Foundation has been quietly funding medical research at leading California universities and institutions since 1996, with approximately $132 million across 262 grants awarded to date, according to a tally on the foundation’s homepage. Its main research funding interests have been in diabetes and in the chronic and degenerative diseases of aging, and its grantees include a who’s-who of top California institutions — UCSF, UCLA, the Salk Institute, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Scripps Research Institute, UCSD and Caltech. There are even medical research centers named for Hillblom at the University of California San Francisco and UCLA. But it’s not hard to see why the foundation maintains a low profile. As sometimes happens in philanthropy, there’s a dark side to this story, despite the foundation’s good work.
Larry Hillblom amassed millions as a cofounder of the courier and logistics giant DHL Worldwide Express, which got off the ground in 1969. (That, by the way, was two years before Fedex was founded.) Hillblom had also been a major investor in Continental Airlines. A widely traveled aviation enthusiast, Hillblom died in 1995 at age 52, when his small plane crashed in the ocean near the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. territory in the western Pacific Ocean. Two other men died in the crash.
Hillblom had been a longtime resident of Saipan, the largest of the Northern Mariana islands, where he’d served as president of the Bank of Saipan and in roles at other businesses, including cable television and cellular telephone services. He also had investments in hotels and resorts in Vietnam and owned real estate in other locations worldwide.
At the time of his death, Hillblom’s estate was valued at $400 million to $600 million, with his will directing that the bulk of the assets should support medical research. The funding was to go primarily to institutions in California, where Hillblom was born, raised and educated — he’d attended Reedley College and Cal State Fresno, and earned a law degree from UC Berkeley.
But before Hillblom’s estate could be settled, ugly revelations emerged. Several women from the Northern Marianas islands and other Southeast Asian countries claimed that Hillblom had fathered their children, who were living in poverty. Some of the women were underage at the time that Hillblom had reportedly had sex with them. After messy legal battles, Hillblom’s estate paid a reported $360 million to four of his children.
The majority of the remainder of the estate went to establish the Larry L. Hillblom Foundation. It’s yet another instance — in a long list of them — in which charitable funding for valuable work must nonetheless bear the taint of a donor who engaged in deeply unsavory behavior.
The good part
In the years since its launch, the Hillblom Foundation has indeed supported medical research, particularly at University of California institutions such as UCSF, UCLA and UCSD. As mentioned above, the foundation has awarded more than $130 million since 1996, backing research into diabetes and age-related diseases, primarily brain and vision disorders. The foundation’s Form 990 from a recent year showed assets of approximately $150 million.
The foundation’s major financial support has helped establish the Larry L. Hillblom Islet Research Center at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine and the Larry L. Hillblom Center for the Biology of Aging at UCSF.
The foundation says it supports “basic scientific research, clinical research, and research related to patient self-care and management.” The Hillblom Foundation website provides a straightforward application process. Three types of awards are available: Network grants, Start-Up grants and Fellowship grants.
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Network grants are available to principal investigators conducting research in diabetes or aging, and affiliated with a research institution within California. Awards are up to $600,000 per year for up to four years, subject to annual foundation approval.
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Start-up grants are designed to help launch early career scientists as independent investigators, also in the areas of diabetes or diseases related to aging. The maximum grant size is $120,000 per year for up to three years, subject to annual foundation approval.
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Fellowship grants are intended to help research institutions provide post-doctoral research fellowship training to qualified applicants working in the fields of diabetes or aging research. Funding ranges up to $75,000 per year for up to three years, subject to annual approval.
The Hillblom Foundation also recognizes valuable research through its Terry C. Hillblom Research Scholar Award, the John S. Spice Award in Aging and the Lawrence A. Smookler Award in Diabetes.
The bad and the ugly
Larry Hillblom isn’t the first philanthropic donor who’s engaged in reprehensible behavior — the sort of actions that can turn a donor toxic and give prospective grantees pause. (See IP writer Mike Scutari’s recent thoughtful analysis of the dilemma of the toxic donor.) Members of the Sackler family, whose immense wealth comes from opioid drug manufacturer Purdue Pharma, saw their considerable support refused by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York — but only after public protests forced the museum’s hand. Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sexual predator who made major charitable donations to MIT, Harvard and other institutions, still looms large in the public consciousness. Some recipients of money from toxic donors give it back or donate it elsewhere; many keep it.
Those are both highly publicized, widely talked about examples of donor toxicity. In other less well-known instances, potentially toxic donations tend to fly under the radar — and it helps if the donor involved is long dead. As we’ve pointed out before, many grantseekers may not even be aware of the details of the life of the person whose money built a foundation that’s doing admirable, necessary work, like funding medical research.
In Hillblom’s case, nearly 30 years after his death, there appears to be no apparent taint to the funding flowing from his namesake foundation. Unlike the case of the Sacklers, for instance, or billionaire T. Denny Sanford, a Giving Pledger whose philanthropic record has been clouded by a federal child pornography probe (now closed sans charges), the Hillblom Foundation and its grantees haven’t attracted controversy, despite public knowledge of Hillblom’s misdeeds.
The most obvious difference is that Hillblom himself is long deceased. But should that matter? Jeffrey Epstein, after all, is also no longer among the living. In the end, it’s a matter of opinion whether or not money remains tainted by association with an unsavory original donor. But especially seeing as multiple naming gifts are in the mix here, it’s worth wondering whether more questions should be asked.
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