McNairs’ $100 Million Another Boost for Baylor
Baylor College of Medicine will announce today that Houston Texans owner Robert McNair and his wife are giving $100 million to the school, equaling its largest donation ever.
The gift, made through the Robert and Janice McNair Foundation, will fund research into breast cancer, pancreatic cancer, juvenile diabetes and the neurosciences. Baylor will name the campus on which it is building its hospital and clinic for the McNairs.
"We’re pleased to be able to do this," McNair, a Baylor trustee, said Tuesday. "I hope it has a significant impact on not just Baylor and researchers throughout the Texas Medical Center, but people in Houston and everywhere who suffer from these diseases."
Baylor officials would not comment on the gift until today’s announcement.
The donation comes about a year and a half after energy magnate Dan Duncan, also a trustee, gave Baylor $100 million for its cancer center, which was renamed the Dan L. Duncan Cancer Center. Duncan, the city’s wealthiest man, had a net worth of $6 billion at the time, according to Forbes Magazine. The two gifts are the largest ever given to facilities in the Texas Medical Center.
McNair’s net worth is $1.5 billion, according to Forbes. Although he isn’t known as one of Houston’s leading philanthropists, the McNairs are "very quiet" in their giving and favor education and the fine arts as causes, said foundation executive director Joanie Haley.
The foundation funds scholarships for students named "McNair scholars" in Houston and beyond. It also has funded programs at the University of Houston, Rice University, the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston Community College and the Houston Zoo, among others.
McNair, 70, said the research to be funded by his $100 million gift involves diseases that have touched his family. Janice McNair is a breast cancer survivor, her father died of pancreatic cancer and the McNairs’ granddaughter has juvenile diabetes.
Pancreatic cancer is the fourth-leading cause of cancer deaths, but lags well behind other cancers in research funding. Citing the lack of funding, leading pancreatic cancer doctors recently have expressed frustration about the seeming inability to make advances against the disease.
Ground broken for campus McNair said he had been thinking about the gift for several years. He joined the university’s board of trustees in 1994.
The donation adds to Baylor’s ongoing $1 billion fundraising campaign, the largest ever in Houston, which in May this year was at $492 million.
Baylor recently broke ground on the 35-acre health care campus that will bear the McNairs’ name. The Baylor Clinic and Hospital, which will keep that name, are expected to be up and running on the campus in 2010.
The McNairs have lived in Houston since 1960, when Robert McNair founded Cogen Technologies, which was sold in 1999 to Enron. He retains ownership of power plants in New York and West Virginia, and serves as CEO of The McNair Group, a financial and real estate firm headquartered here.
He formed Houston NFL Holdings in 1998 and, a year later, the National Football League chose Houston for the franchise that later became the Texans.
The largest donation to a medical school was media mogul David Geffen’s $200 million gift to the UCLA School of Medicine in 2002. The largest donation to any institution of higher education was Intel founder Gordon Moore’s $600 million gift to the California Institute of Technology in 2001.
Philanthropic giving to colleges and universities has skyrocketed. When software inventor John Moores gave UH $51.4 million in 1991, it was the largest amount ever given to a public university. Less than 15 years later, more than 30 gifts greater than $100 million have been donated to schools.
todd.ackerman@chron.com
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