Institution Asks Court to Allow Renaming of Sackler Funding

The National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NAS), a nongovernmental institution that serves as an independent adviser to the nation on science and medicine, wants to repurpose roughly $30 million it received in donations from the Sackler family, the owners of Purdue Pharma, which made the drug OxyContin, notorious for fueling the opioid epidemic.

“The notoriety of the Sackler name has made it impossible for the Academy to carry out the purposes for which it originally accepted the funds,” Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences, said in a statement released Thursday.

The petition asks the court to modify restrictions in the gift instruments that established the four funds so that the NAS may best utilize them for the academy’s charitable, scientific mission by combining the funds, removing the Sackler name, and repurposing them as a single “National Academy of Sciences Fund for Science and the Public Good.”