More than 40 million Americans live with diabetes, according to the American Diabetes Association. One of them is billionaire oil tycoon Harold Hamm, who just donated $150 million to the University of Oklahoma to study the disease he was diagnosed with in his 50s.
“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 in a statement.
The gift is the largest in OU’s history and makes Hamm the university’s largest individual donor, with his lifetime giving nearing $250 million. OU’s Oklahoma City health campus will be renamed the Harold Hamm Health Campus in his honor. Of the most recent gift, $100 million will fund the campus’s broader work, including training health care workers and recruiting researchers. The other $50 million will go to the Harold Hamm Diabetes Center, with $30 million for new director John Kirwan’s priorities and $20 million for capital improvements and research infrastructure.
Hamm’s 2007 lead gift established the Harold Hamm Diabetes Center, and he has given more than $50 million to it since. Over that time, NIH research funding tied to the center has grown from $5 million to $33 million, according to OU. Hamm also created the Harold Hamm International Prize for Biomedical Research in Diabetes, which recognizes and promotes lasting achievements in diabetes research.
Hamm, 80, founded Continental Resources in 1967 at age 21 and built the Oklahoma City-based company into one of the largest oil producers in North Dakota’s Bakken shale, a key front in the U.S. fracking boom. He still chairs the company, which has a $27 billion market cap. Today, Hamm’s net worth is estimated at nearly $18 billion.
Hamm’s influence also reaches Washington. This summer, he merged the oil advocacy group he founded in 2008, the Domestic Energy Producers Alliance, with the much larger Independent Petroleum Association of America, and an IPAA spokesperson told Politico he has “expressed an interest” in becoming its chair. President Donald Trump has also referred to Hamm as his “original oil guy,” according to Politico. Also related to politics, Hamm backed the Affordable Insulin Now Act, a bill that sought to cap patients’ out-of-pocket insulin costs at $35 a month.
Investing in Oklahoma when it needs it the most
Hamm’s gift is not only personal to his health, but also to the place he calls home. Oklahoma ranks No. 49 in the nation for health care due to severe gaps in access, a high rate of uninsured adults, and poor health outcomes. Meanwhile, the Oklahoma Hospital Association reports critical shortages of health care workers across the state.
“If you look at hospitals in the state of Oklahoma, we have more than 90 hospitals that lose money on providing care to patients,” Rich Rasmussen, President and CEO of the Oklahoma Hospital Association, told local station FOX 25. “The only way they make up for that loss are in the supplemental Medicaid payments. These supplemental payments are the payments that Congress has cut.”
To be sure, the state has made some progress, with the campus earning its first-ever ranking among the top 100 institutions for National Institutes of Health funding, placing it in the top 4% of NIH-funded institutions nationwide, according to OU. The Harold Hamm Health Campus also brings together six health professions colleges and the university’s graduate college—more than 4,100 students—to build a pipeline to address those issues.
Hamm hopes his gift will do more than fill gaps.
“My hope is that this gift will help make Oklahoma a place where the next great medical breakthrough happens—where diseases are prevented, lives are saved, and, one day, diseases like diabetes are cured,” he said in the statement.
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