Howard Hughes Medical Institute

The institute was formed in 1953 in Miami, Florida, to fund basic research, including trying to understand, in Hughes's words, "the genesis of life itself." In the early days, it was generally viewed as a tax haven for Hughes's huge personal fortune. Hughes was HHMI's sole trustee and he transferred his stock of Hughes Aircraft to the institute, in effect turning the large defense contractor into a tax-exempt charity. For many years, the institute grappled with maintaining its non-profit status; the Internal Revenue Service challenged the "charitable" status that made it tax-exempt. Partly in response to such claims, it began in the late 1950s to fund investigators doing research, initially 47 at eight institutions; it remained a modest enterprise for several decades.

Hughes's internist, Verne Mason, who treated Hughes after his 1946 plane crash, was chairman of the institute's medical advisory committee. By 1975, Hughes was sole trustee of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which in turn owned all the stock of the Hughes Aircraft Company.

In 1969, United States Representative Wright Patman "complained that the Hughes foundation was a tax‐evasion device," noting that the institute spent only $5.7 million for its operations between 1954 and 1961, during which Hughes Aircraft accumulated $76.9 million in profits. By 1975, it had also avoided certain stipulations of the 1969 reform act for charitable institutions due to legal filings by Hughes to change its operational status, with his objections going directly to the White House.

The institute moved to Coconut Grove, Florida, in the mid-1970s and then to Bethesda, Maryland, in 1976.

In 1993, the institute moved to its headquarters in Chevy Chase, Maryland.After Hughes's death in 1976, the institute's profile increased from an annual budget of $4 million in 1975 to $15 million in 1978. Before Hughes Aircraft was sold in 1985, the number had grown to $200 million per year. At the time of the sale Hughes Aircraft employed 75,000 people and vast amounts of the approximate annual revenue of $6 billion were put into Hughes Aircraft internal research and development rather than the medical institute. Most of the money for the medical institute came from the operations at Ground System Group responsible for providing Air Defense Systems to NATO, Pacific Rim, and the US. In this period it focused its mission on genetics, immunology, and molecular biology. Since Hughes died without a will as the sole trustee of the HHMI, the institute was involved in lengthy court proceedings to determine whether it would benefit from Hughes's fortune. In April 1984, a court appointed new trustees for the institute's holdings.

In January 1985 the trustees announced they would sell Hughes Aircraft by private sale or public stock offering. On June 5, 1985, General Motors (GM) was announced as the winner of a secretive five-month, sealed-bid auction. The purchase was completed on December 20, 1985, for an estimated $5.2 billion: $2.7 billion in cash plus 50 million shares of GM Class H stock. The proceeds caused the institute to grow dramatically.

HHMI completed the Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia, in October 2006. It is modeled after AT&T's Bell Labs and the Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology. With a main laboratory building nearly 1,000 feet (300 m) long, it contains 760,000 square feet (71,000 m2) of enclosed space, used primarily for research. The campus also has apartments for researchers.

In 2007, HHMI and the publisher Elsevier agreed to make author manuscripts of HHMI research articles published after September 1, 2007, in Elsevier and Cell Press journals publicly available six months after final publication.