Businessman Leaves $120-Million to Research Charities

The estate of Daniel K. Ludwig, a New York businessman who founded the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in the early 1970s, will announce a gift of at least $20-million each to six cancer research organizations, reports The Boston Globe.

The institute will announce the gift today, and is also giving the six institutions a 35-percent ownership share in two New York office buildings, which are expected to generate $2-million annually for each organization indefinitely, the Globe reports.

Mr. Ludwig, who died in 1992 of heart failure and who had no apparent family history of cancer, “felt cancer was one of the great unmet challenges,” the institute’s board chairman, Lloyd Old, told the newspaper.

The six recipients include: Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, in Boston; Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Boston; Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, in New York; Stanford University, in Palo Alto, Calif.; and the University of Chicago.