Author : jignesh
Economist and investor John P. Hussman pledged a $20 million gift to fuel genetic research at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine
In exchange, UM’s main genetics center has been renamed the John P. Hussman Institute for Human Genomics.
This is the second major funding infusion for the institute, which received an $80 million funding commitment from the state in 2007.
“This gift will accelerate the growth of the institute,” UM President Donna Shalala said. “We can’t slow down scientific research because of the economic downturn.”
The institute’s new Miami headquarters opened 10 months ago. More than 200 people are employed there.
Hussman, who lives in Maryland and is president of Hussman Econometrics Advisors, became interested in genetics as he was researching autism. His son is autistic and he has been working with Margaret Pericak-Vance, director of the institute, since 2001 on crunching massive amounts of genetic data in a search for the cause of autism.
By lending his financial resources and his expertise, Hussman has co-authored several research papers on autism with Pericak-Vance. Last year, she and her colleagues at UM released a groundbreaking paper that identified genetic factors that placed people at risk for autism.
Hussman describes searching for the genetic causes of autism as a massive coin-flipping experiment. The human genome has 3.4 million base pairs of DNA and some can go one way or the other. The research he’s working on samples thousands of people and looks for patterns that occur in people with autism.
The gift will expand UM’s capability to handle such a huge amount of data.
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