Former Hamilton Spectator paperboy delivers $32-million gift to McMaster to foster medical entrepreneurship
Long ago, the philanthropist had a paper route with The Spectator, and while he has lived far away the last 40 years, he's now delivering big-time to McMaster University.
Marnix Heersink, an eye surgeon and entrepreneur, has donated $25 million (U.S.) - about $32 million (Canadian) - to McMaster to create a new centre that will educate students on turning medical discoveries into commercial initiatives.
The gift is one of the largest the university has ever received.
It might seem an unusual development, since Heersink lives 1,800 kilometres away in southern Alabama, two hours north of the Gulf Coast, and never attended Mac - but not when considering his personal link to the school, and the pandemic-inspired urgency for getting medical innovations into the marketplace.
Heersink was born in the Netherlands but grew up in Burlington. He attended medical school at Western, where he was an all-Canadian centre in basketball.
There his friendship deepened with student John Kelton, who he had met years earlier at a summer camp. Kelton went on to a long and award-winning career in health sciences at McMaster.
In medical school, Marnix bought a ramshackle house, repaired it, rented it out, and later sold it for a profit; he was becoming an entrepreneur," said Kelton.
Heersink, who credits the paper route with teaching the fundamentals of business, made his fortune primarily in real estate. At 74, he continues to practice medicine.
He said Kelton helped inspire him to be proactive with his philanthropy. Over the last few years, the pair had many discussions about how students could better learn to spinoff health sciences ideas in the business world.
Kelton laments that over the course of his career at McMaster - typically when he made medical discoveries - he gave the ideas away.
Marnix said to me: What would it cost to create this (learning centre at McMaster)?'" recalled Kelton. And I said you could build it and have it running for between $20 million to $30 million. It was as uncomplicated as that ... It's a pretty remarkable act of charity."
Kelton will be executive director of the Marnix E. Heersink School of Biomedical Innovation and Entrepreneurship. It will be located at the business school and later move to a space built on campus at Canada's Global Nexus for Pandemics and Biological Threats.
Meanwhile, the University of Alabama - whose medical school is named after Heersink - is creating a parallel program by the same name, and the two universities will share program content.
The COVID-19 pandemic illustrated how critical it is for McMaster to be more active in commercializing its health innovations, suggested Paul O'Byrne, the dean of Mac's health sciences faculty.
He noted how McMaster researchers discovered technology most recently used to develop COVID vaccines years ago, but lacked the entrepreneurial knowledge to take those breakthroughs to the public.
This gift will help us with our culture ... to have more of a direct impact with the discoveries we develop here at McMaster, on patient care and health-care delivery systems," he said. The timing of the gift is perfect, given that many of us feel - or hope - the pandemic is at least on the wane. Now is the time to put these investments in place."
Kelton believes the initiative will help create wealth in Hamilton, by fostering homegrown, health-based startup businesses. He likens it to the impact Stanford University has on Silicon Valley.
People talk a lot about the monster companies, Apple and Google, but what matters are the small ones, and we have been steering a little activity like that at McMaster, but this will help to fast track it."
Jon Wells is a feature writer at The Spectator. jwells@thespec.com