Making the Rounds

In a plush, sunny meeting room, Sidney Kimmel, the 79-year-old philanthropist and chairman of the Jones Apparel Group, sits at a long, glossy conference table, with his wife, Caroline,

by his side, listening intently to a group of Johns Hopkins University cancer researchers talk about their lives’ work — fighting a complex disease that is the second leading cause of death in the United States.

As the group of up-and-coming scientists and prominent veteran scholars talk about experimental cancer therapies, Mr. Kimmel asks a question here and there about the progress the scientists are making and the challenges they face. Mostly, though, he listens.

After the meeting, he talks about how he gleans information from them.

“Although I’ve been involved in cancer research as a layman for quite a number of years now, it’s very difficult to jump in on a day’s notice and get involved in dialogue,” he says. “It merely distracts the researchers from what they’re doing. I can’t talk science lingo, so they pinpoint things for me. It makes it better for them and better for me as well.”

To date, Mr. Kimmel, has given at least $433-million to charity, with nearly half earmarked for cancer research and patient care, making him one of America’s most-generous supporters of efforts to fight the disease. His $150-million pledge to Johns Hopkins’s cancer center, which he made in 2001, is the culmination of more than a decade of donations that Mr. Kimmel has made to support cancer research, beginning in 1992 when he established the Sidney Kimmel Foundation for Cancer Research, in Philadelphia.

Much more of Mr. Kimmel’s fortune is likely to flow to charity in the next few years. Although he says he is taking a brief hiatus from doling out money and doesn’t want to talk about his future plans, he says he hopes to give most of his wealth away while he is still alive. Mr. Kimmel would not disclose his net worth, but Forbes magazine pegged his assets at $700-million in 2003, the last year he appeared on its list of the 400 wealthiest Americans.

Mr. Kimmel’s company has experienced the ups and downs seen across the apparel industry in the time since he last appeared on the Forbes list. Jones suffered when it lost its license to manufacture Ralph Lauren’s Polo brand of apparel, but has benefited from a move into luxury wear — evidenced by its purchase three years ago of Barneys New York, says Marie Driscoll, an analyst at Standard & Poor’s, in New York. Jones Apparel Group announced in August that it plans to sell the Barneys chain for $942.3-million in a deal that is expected to close this month.

Despite the tumult of the industry that made his fortune, Mr. Kimmel’s philanthropic focus on cancer research has remained steady.

Four major cancer centers are named for him, including this one at Johns Hopkins, which received his largest single donation to help fight the disease. But despite his support of such research, he is not overly sanguine about the possible long-term results of all his giving.

“I guess everybody will say, ‘I hope for a cure,’” he says. “You’re not going to hear that from me because I’m not sure there is a cure. What I’m hoping for is that we can control it through prevention and early diagnosis, and proper treatment, and educating people, so that people can live longer lives.”

In hopes of furthering his goal, he spent a late-spring afternoon at the research center that bears his name. Officially, he was at the Baltimore facility to receive the President’s Medal award from Hopkins’s president, William R. Brody. But his real agenda was to see how his money was being spent — and to give moral support to the people who are spending it.

‘Great Humanity’

The Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins comprises several research buildings, plus a main hospital building, the lobby of which has the kind of soaring ceiling and floral arrangements worthy of an upscale hotel. The hospital’s front desk is staffed by employees who exude more friendliness than is usually displayed by the gatekeepers at medical centers. The Kimmels spent most of the afternoon meeting with the center’s doctors and researchers, and hearing from cancer patients who had been treated there.

At a luncheon, one such patient, a gregarious 17-year-old, told the room full of Hopkins officials, the Kimmels, and cancer researchers — some of whom had been her doctors — about learning at 13 that she had a cancerous brain tumor. Told at another hospital that the tumor was inoperable, she wound up at Hopkins, where she underwent brain surgery, radiation therapy, and then one year of chemotherapy.

Amid knowing laughter from a couple of her doctors, the young woman recalled how the doctors and nurses at the hospital found creative ways to coax her — depressed, sick, and often stubborn — to take the medicines she needed.

“Radiation sucks,” she said. “There’s no way around it.”

But through her doctors’ gentle persistence, she told the crowd, “This place became my home.”

Later, Mr. Kimmel says it was evident to him in listening to the young woman’s story, and that of other cancer survivors, that their recovery came “not only from great science, but from great humanity. " He says having his name associated with a place where the doctors, researchers, and other staff members show genuine compassion toward patients makes him especially proud.

Rooting for Researchers

Mr. Kimmel says he makes these visits to Hopkins and the other cancer centers he supports because he believes that when a donor makes a large gift, he or she has some responsibility to ensure that the beneficiary uses the money wisely. What’s more, he says, donors should publicly demonstrate their commitment to the institution’s cause. It is especially important to him, he says, to hear about the doctors’ research and their work with patients.

He likes to show the researchers that he is rooting for them, he says: “Doctors are the engine that drives both the research and clinical arms, but I suspect that too frequently they receive insufficient praise and gratitude. Expressing that praise and gratitude is an integral part in enabling them to continue the hard, indeed excruciating, work they do each day, and I want to support them by showing my interest.”

On the other hand, he sometimes wonders if his visits might interrupt the researchers’ work. Martin D. Abeloff, who directs the Hopkins cancer center, says that he and Mr. Kimmel have a continuing disagreement about this. Dr. Abeloff says the researchers look forward to Mr. Kimmel’s visits: “It doesn’t end up being about Sidney. He doesn’t insert himself into things directly.”

During their visit, the Kimmels met privately with Dr. Abeloff, who updated them on the work of senior faculty members and cancer researchers. Two of them — Mary Armanios and William H. Matsui — were recently awarded grants through the Kimmel Scholars program, created in 1997 to help young cancer researchers who have not yet compiled a body of work sufficient enough to qualify for federal research grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health. Each year the Kimmel Scholars program awards 10 cancer researchers in the early stages of their careers $200,000 over two years and five additional grants to established scientists conducting translational research — the transfer of scientific findings to benefit patient care.

Philanthropic Pursuits

Mr. Kimmel grew up the older of two children in Philadelphia during the Depression, in what he only half-jokingly calls a “no-income” family. His father drove a cab, and his mother sometimes worked as a department-store saleswoman. The family once moved in the middle of the night because they couldn’t pay the rent.

As a child, Mr. Kimmel didn’t dwell on his family’s financial struggles. “You just think that’s life,” he says. “You have nothing to compare it to.”

Yet, by the time he graduated from high school, he had developed an intense desire to make money. Then World War II intervened. Mr. Kimmel was drafted into the Army — and was drafted again during the Korean War. When his tour of duty finally ended, he worked for a clothing manufacturer in Philadelphia, and in 1970 he founded the Jones Apparel Group. The bulk of his fortune came from the money he made when he took Jones public in 1991.

His focus on cancer research did not arise from personal tragedy: Neither he nor any family member has ever been diagnosed with cancer. Instead, he says, his interest in fighting the disease grew out of witnessing the cancer-related death of a close friend’s 25-year-old daughter, and Mr. Kimmel’s resulting belief that cancer was one area where his money could do the most good.

“I felt I wanted to focus on one disease rather than just give it to a hospital where I leave it up to them to spread it around,” he says. “I’d rather put my money where every penny goes right to the heart of the matter, so that’s what I do.”

He visits other institutions to which he has made significant gifts, and conducts background research on those that he is contemplating supporting. He particularly disdains those charities that rack up high administrative costs: “When you give a dollar and you find out later on that only 76 cents went into the cause and the other 24 cents went into some group of people having lunches and drinking wine, that doesn’t appeal to me.”

Mr. Kimmel’s history of donating large sums to cancer-research institutions began in 1995, when he gave $10-million to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital’s cancer center, in Philadelphia. (He later pledged to give the institution an additional $25-million, but rescinded that offer when the university failed to raise additional money.)

The next year, he gave $9-million to the San Diego Regional Cancer Center, a small organization that conducts research on cancer vaccines. It was one of the places where Mr. Kimmel’s friend had sought help for his daughter before she died. Impressed by the researchers there, Mr. Kimmel offered his support and has given the San Diego institution, now called the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center, $27-million.

In June 2001, he donated $25-million for a prostate- and urological-cancer research and treatment facility at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, in New York, and by that time, Mr. Kimmel says, he was considering possible recipients of his next gift to the cause.

That summer, Hopkins officials began making presentations to him about their cancer center, and by that November, Mr. Kimmel had pledged to give the center $150-million for research and patient care.

The center received the first $50-million of the pledge right away and put that amount toward research. The center will receive the rest of the money as a bequest upon Mr. Kimmel’s death.

Because the stock holdings he earmarked for the gift grew between the time he pledged the gift to Hopkins and the time the university sold the stock, the total amount of the gift actually came to $154-million; Mr. Kimmel asked that the additional $4-million be used to help build a 40-suite building where patients and their families can stay during treatment.

The center has also been able to hire more than 120 new researchers and more than 500 additional employees since 2001.

Underwriting Research

Mr. Kimmel’s donation to Hopkins — which amounts to more than three-fourths of the approximately $200-million the center has raised from other sources since 2001 — came with no stipulations, and the first payment has been put to use in many of the center’s research programs, particularly in molecular genetics, cancer stem cells, cancer-genome sequencing, and figuring out how to apply research findings to help patients.

“There is absolutely no question that without a gift of that magnitude, we would not be where we are today in terms of our research and its impact on people with cancer,” says Dr. Abeloff. “It’s sort of like looking back and wondering what we did before computers.”

One crucial aspect of Mr. Kimmel’s donation that might not be as immediately apparent to an outsider is the ways in which it has freed up the researchers’ time: They no longer have to rely as much on government grants in the early stages of their research, so they are spending less time writing grant proposals and more time at the laboratory bench.

Although the federal government plays an important role in supporting scientific research, Dr. Abeloff says, the money comes with strings that determine how it can be used. Mr. Kimmel’s gift has not only helped the center recruit top researchers, says Dr. Abeloff, but it has also helped it retain some of the younger ones, who are more likely to become discouraged by both the necessity of seeking federal aid and its bureaucratic realities.

Most cancer-research grants doled out by the federal National Institutes of Health require that a major portion of a researcher’s work be completed before a grant is made, and the agency usually does not favor unconventional research ideas.

With Mr. Kimmel’s gift, says Dr. Abeloff, researchers at Hopkins are now able to develop their ideas to the point where they end up with a deep body of research data that allows them to then be in a stronger position to compete for federal grants.

‘Gut Instinct’

Albert Deisseroth, head of the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center, says the money Mr. Kimmel has given his institution over the years has helped the center accelerate its work on cancer vaccines.

It has spun off a number of biopharmaceutical companies — including Favrille, Halozyme, and NovaRx — that develop drugs and other treatments for cancer patients.

Mr. Kimmel, says Dr. Deisseroth, doesn’t realize that “his contributions have helped change the course of medical history.”

The donor may not agree with that characterization, but he clearly enjoys talking about cancer research and derives much joy from supporting it.

He acknowledges, however, that he doesn’t have any special formula for deciding where to give.

“It’s gut instinct, it’s what appeals to you, whether the program sounds legitimate, whether the people that are involved appeal to you,” he says. “Whether the cause is a noble one.”