In 1994, the Stowers Institute for Medical Research was founded by Jim and Virginia Stowers with a $500 million donation. Over the next decade, the couple endowed the institute, based in Kansas City, MO, with gifts totaling almost $2 billion.

Stowers’ father and grandfather were both doctors, and he trained as a physician before founding the multi-billion-dollar American Century Companies in 1958. Virginia Stowers was a nurse-anesthetist. Both were cancer survivors.

Together, they dedicated their personal fortune to benefiting humankind through basic research on genes and proteins.