CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — More than a thousand miles from the labor tumult in Wisconsin — where his name shows up on the signs of protesters and a liberal blogger impersonating him got through to the governor on the phone and said “gotta crush that union!” — the real David H. Koch was greeted rather more warmly here Friday when he officially opened a new cancer research institute bearing his name.
Mr. Koch, a billionaire who is perhaps best known for his family’s contributions to conservative causes, got a standing ovation from scientists, Nobel laureates and politicians of various political stripes as he opened the new David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which he gave $100 million to help build. And in a brief, and rare, interview, Mr. Koch, 70, spoke of his hopes for the new center, his prostate cancer and the prank call heard around the world.
“It’s a case of identity theft,” Mr. Koch said of the call in which the liberal blogger got through to Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, drew him out about his plans to weaken unions and posted a recording of the call on the Internet, making news and embarrassing the governor. Mr. Koch, whose company, Koch Industries, had given major campaign support to Governor Walker, among other conservative candidates and causes, added, “I didn’t even know his name before this brouhaha erupted.”
Mr. Koch joked that the call could cause him problems. “I was thinking to myself, ‘My God, if I called up a senator or a congressman to discuss something with them, and they heard ‘David Koch is on the line,’ they’d immediately say, ‘That’s that fraud again — tell him to get lost!’ ” he said with a laugh
Mr. Koch said that only a relatively small portion of his giving goes to politics and public policy — most, he said, goes to cancer research, followed by cultural and educational institutions.
But he said that he felt he had been vilified for his support of conservative causes, which have ranged from opposition to the health care bill and pushing for small government and low taxes, to questioning whether climate change is caused by humans. He and his brother Charles are known, on the left, as the billionaires who bankrolled the public policy and citizen action groups that helped cultivate the Tea Party.
“I read stuff about me and I say, ‘God, I’m a terrible guy,’ ” he said. “And then I come here and everybody treats me like I’m a wonderful fellow, and I say, ‘Well, maybe I’m not so bad after all.’ ”
The new institute here is taking an innovative approach by uniting cancer scientists and engineers under one roof — an approach that the institute’s director, Tyler Jacks, who is also the David H. Koch Professor of Biology, said should yield results.
“Engineers are more problem-solvers; cancer scientists tend to be more discoverers,” Dr. Jacks said in an interview. “And the combination is actually extremely powerful.”
“So we have engineers who are interested in nanotechnology, for delivering cancer drugs more effectively and more specifically to cancer cells — that’s an engineering problem,” he said. “We have other engineers who are interested in building new devices that can monitor the state of an individual’s health more sensitively and more continuously — imagine implantable sensors that would allow you to know whether your disease is in remission or undergoing relapse. Again, that’s an engineering problem.”
In his speech at the opening ceremony, Mr. Koch warned that government spending cuts could impede cancer research. And he urged donors to fill the gap.
“The National Institutes of Health, and the National Cancer Institute in particular, are facing serious cutbacks in their funding due to the massive deficits the federal government is incurring,” he said in his speech, in a tent outside the seven-story building. “If the cutbacks happen, it will significantly diminish the level of research that can be carried on at the Koch Institute. I earnestly ask you to do all you can to help maintain the superb research at the Koch Institute at its maximum level.”
Mr. Koch is tied with his brother Charles as the fifth wealthiest American in Forbes magazine’s most recent ranking, and came in 45th in the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s list of donors who gave the most in 2010. Stacy Palmer, the editor of the Chronicle, said that Mr. Koch was unusual in the wide range of his philanthropy, which supports cancer research, the arts and the public policy sphere.
His roles do not always fit neatly together.
His gift here means that one of the biggest donors to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, home to some of the top climate scientists in the nation, is an owner of a company that Greenpeace called “a kingpin of climate change denial.”
Koch Industries — which owns oil refineries, pipelines and consumer brands like Dixie cups and Lycra — responded that “it is Greenpeace that is the denier here — denier of any rational and honest dialogue on the underlying scientific debate regarding climate change.”
And while he has become a major financier of cancer research around the country, one of his companies, Georgia-Pacific, which produces formaldehyde, has been trying to convince the government not to list formaldehyde as a human carcinogen. Koch Industries said it would respect and comply with any new governmental regulation.
Mr. Koch said that he and his brother had not decided how much money to spend to influence the 2012 elections.
“Our main interest is not participating in campaigns, the presidential campaign or the Congressional or senatorial campaigns in 2012,” he said. “Our main interest is in policy — in particular, seeing the federal government spending reduced, hopefully in a sustained way, so that our country does not go bankrupt.”
Mr. Koch said that he did not know the details of what is happening in Wisconsin. “But I can say in general that I believe, as a businessman, I think that state budgets, municipal budgets and the federal budget should be balanced. They shouldn’t run massive deficits endlessly — that’s eventually going to bankrupt the municipalities, states or, God forbid, the federal government.”
Mr. Koch said that he became passionate about cancer research after he learned in 1992 that he had prostate cancer. He said he was originally told he would not live long. Since then, he said, he has treated it with radiation, surgery, hormones and, for the last year, an experimental drug called Abiraterone that he said worked like a miracle.
He has given or pledged more than $200 million to fight cancer, here and at other cancer centers including Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Mr. Koch explained that he was following the same strategy he once used when he placed a bet on the winner of the Kentucky Derby. “I bought a ticket on every horse in the race,” he said.
The new building here adds to what is fast becoming one of the nation’s premier biomedical research corridors. It is right across Main Street from the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and the Broad Institute. “There’s a lot of brainpower there and a lot — a lot — of potential,” Dr. Jacks said.
Dr. Jacks said that Mr. Koch’s political activities had not caused much of a ripple on campus.
“I think there’s an awareness of David’s interests, but frankly there’s tremendous gratitude for David’s generosity and an appreciation that cancer is an apolitical problem,” he said. “It affects Republicans, it affects Democrats, is affects conservatives, it affects liberals. And so we focus on that problem, and we’re grateful to have the resources that he’s provided us to allow us to find new solutions to that problem.”
