Tycoon’s Trust Awards $120-Million to Six Cancer-Research Centers

A trust set up by Daniel K. Ludwig, a shipping and mining magnate, is providing six research institutions $20-million apiece to establish centers for the study of cancer.

Mr. Ludwig died in 1992 at age 95, and since then the trust he created has quietly distributed $50-million to endow professorships at the six research institutions.

Though neither Mr. Ludwig nor anyone in his immediate family suffered from cancer, “he saw it as a great challenge for the world,” says Edward A. McDermott Jr., one of the six trustees of the estate and president of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, a nonprofit organization with branches around the world, which Mr. Ludwig established in 1971.

The $120-million, half of which has been distributed already, is going to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/Harvard Medical School, in Boston; the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, in Baltimore; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge; Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, in New York; Stanford University School of Medicine, in California; and the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine.

Under the terms of the new gift, each institution will receive a total of $20-million in cash, as well as stock in two Manhattan high-rise office buildings — one is one million square feet, the other two million. The combined cash and stock income will be used to create an endowment that is expected to provide $2-million annually to each cancer center in perpetuity.

The $120-million became available because the trust refinanced the mortgages on the two buildings it inherited from Mr. Ludwig. The institutions are allowed to sell the real estate after 2013 if they choose to do so, and use the profits to finance research.

The cancer centers are encouraged, but not required, to collaborate on their research projects, Mr. McDermott says.

“Rarely does all the talent reside in one laboratory,” he adds. “If we can identify some of the leaders in the field and provide a forum for them to interact, we can break down the ‘research silos.’”

Mr. Ludwig established the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research with a gift of cash, stocks, and other assets worth millions of dollars. The estate officials say it was probably the only big philanthropic donation during the life of a reserved, frugal billionaire who walked to work and whose car at the time of his death was a 1976 Buick Regal.

“It is fair to say that Mr. Ludwig was not very fond of giving away money without knowing what was going to be done with it,” says R. Palmer Baker Jr., a trustee and the executor of the estate. “I think he assumed that his trustees would feel the same way.”