U.S. billionaire Herbert Wertheim lets 74 Nobel winners choose where his money goes

American billionaire Herbert Wertheim, the Florida optometrist and inventor whose name is on medical, engineering and business schools across the state, is letting 74 Nobel Prize winners decide which charities receive millions of dollars of his money.

The Wertheim Laureate Prize, run by his Dr. Herbert Wertheim Trust for Humanity, invites Nobel laureates from the last five years in all six prize categories to direct his donations to qualified charities of their choosing. Each laureate is also asked to lecture and visit students and researchers at institutions that carry Wertheim's name.

"The Nobel Prize honors what these scientists have already given humanity," Wertheim said. "The Wertheim Laureate Prize asks what they will give next."

Wertheim, 87, built his fortune from Brain Power Inc., the eyeglass lens tint and coating company he founded in 1970, and from decades of investing in the stock market. He is in the Florida Inventors Hall of Fame for his work on lenses that block ultraviolet and blue light.

How the prize works

The Trust launched the program in Miami on Oct. 6, the day after the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel for discovering light-gated ion channels, the basis of optogenetics. Each of the three was invited to direct $1 million over five years, for a total of $3 million.

Ten earlier medicine laureates, from 2021 to 2025, were invited to direct $250,000 each, or $2.5 million in all. They include David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian, who won in 2021; Svante Pääbo, who won in 2022; Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, whose work led to the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines; and the 2025 winners Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi.

The Trust had said it would later extend the program to chemistry, physics and economics. It has since widened the prize to cover every Nobel category, bringing the number of laureates to 74. Scripps Research, the biomedical institute in La Jolla, California, said on Oct. 22 that two of its scientists, Patapoutian and K. Barry Sharpless, a two-time chemistry winner, will each direct $250,000. The Trust has not given a total for the expanded prize.

"Investment in science matters more than ever right now, especially the kind that requires taking risks," said Patapoutian, who shared the 2021 medicine prize for discovering the receptors that let the body sense temperature and touch.

The Trust says the prize is its own initiative and is not linked to or endorsed by the Nobel Foundation or any body that awards the Nobel prizes. The first lectures and campus visits are expected in 2027, at sites that include Florida International University's Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine, Baptist Health South Florida and Jackson Health System in Miami.

A giver to Florida schools

Wertheim joined the board of Scripps Research in 2021. He said the idea for the prize came from time spent with Patapoutian and Sharpless there. "Spending time with Ardem and Barry at Scripps showed me what happens when a great scientist walks into a room of young researchers," he said.

He has given more than $300 million to higher education in Florida and has signed the Giving Pledge, the promise by wealthy people to give away most of their fortunes. Florida International University's medical school, music school and performing arts center carry his name, as do the engineering college at the University of Florida, the business college at Florida State University, the Herbert Wertheim UF Scripps Institute for Biomedical Innovation & Technology and the school of public health at the University of California, San Diego. His name is also on the optometry school at the University of California, Berkeley, and on the cancer institute at Baptist Health South Florida, which received $100 million from him this year, the largest single gift in its history.

In August, Wertheim paid $40 million at an RM Sotheby's charity auction for the first Ferrari Luce, the carmaker's first electric model, with the money going to education programs run by the Ferrari Foundation.