Harold Hamm gives $150m to Oklahoma for diabetes research

Harold Hamm has given the University of Oklahoma $150 million, the largest single gift in its history, to fund healthcare training and research into diabetes, the condition he was diagnosed with in his fifties.

The university announced the donation on Monday, Sept. 29. It takes his lifetime giving to close to $250 million and makes him the largest individual donor in the institution’s history, and its health campus in Oklahoma City will be renamed the Harold Hamm Health Campus.

The money splits two ways. About $100 million goes to the campus itself, covering the training of healthcare workers and the recruitment of researchers, while $50 million goes to the Harold Hamm Diabetes Center, with $30 million for the priorities of its new director John Kirwan and $20 million for buildings and research infrastructure.

He has been funding this work for nearly twenty years. Hamm’s lead gift established the diabetes centre in 2007 and he has put more than $50 million into it since, over a period in which federal research funding tied to the centre rose from $5 million a year to $33 million. He also created an international prize for biomedical research in diabetes.

“I’ve spent my life believing that when you see an opportunity to change the future, you don’t stand on the sidelines, you act,” Hamm said.

The state he is giving to needs it. Oklahoma ranks 49th out of 50 in the United States for healthcare, with severe gaps in access, a high proportion of uninsured adults and poor outcomes, and the Oklahoma Hospital Association reports critical shortages of health workers. Its chief executive Rich Rasmussen said more than 90 hospitals in the state lose money treating patients and make it back only through supplemental Medicaid payments that Congress has cut.

More than 40 million Americans have diabetes, according to the American Diabetes Association.

The campus is not starting from nothing. It entered the top 100 American institutions for National Institutes of Health funding for the first time this year, placing it in the top 4% nationally, and it brings together six health professions colleges and a graduate college teaching more than 4,100 students.

Hamm said he hopes the gift makes Oklahoma a place where the next great medical breakthrough happens, where diseases are prevented, lives are saved, and one day conditions like diabetes are cured.

He is 80 and founded Continental Resources in 1967 at the age of 21, building it into one of the largest producers in North Dakota’s Bakken shale and a central player in the American fracking boom. He still chairs the company, which carries a market value of about $27 billion, and Bloomberg estimates his fortune at close to $18 billion.

His reach extends to Washington. Hamm merged the oil advocacy group he founded in 2008 with the larger Independent Petroleum Association of America this summer and has expressed interest in chairing it, and President Donald Trump has called him his original oil guy. He also backed the Affordable Insulin Now Act, which sought to cap what patients pay for insulin at $35 a month.