Family offices can serve as investment vehicles, financial managers, and charitable advisers. When family offices get involved in medical research, they can have a huge impact. It is not only the money that makes the impact but also the leverage to get other people to commit money to the same cause. For medical ethicists, on the other hand, wealthy people who fund research to benefit their relatives is a complicated proposition, bringing concerns that these wealthy family offices may not follow protocol in their haste to help a family member. In addition, wealthy people’s funding can create public policy implications, as they often prefer to support certain diseases over those that plague the public. However, the true focus is on the greater mission of bringing some new revelation to our world.
See Paul Sullivan, Bringing Family Wealth to Bear Against a Relentless Illness, N.Y. Times, April 28, 2017.
Special thanks to Jim Hillhouse (Professional Legal Marketing (PLM, Inc.)) for bringing this article to my attention.
