WHAT LEGACY REALLY MEANS IN CANCER RESEARCH

Margarita Kilpatrick
Jul 8
3 min read

We throw the word legacy around a lot.

People use it to mean all kinds of things: a name on a building, a career full of accolades, a foundation that writes checks in your honor. But in my experience, real legacy isn’t about how things look. It’s about whether what you built keeps working when you’re no longer in the picture. In cancer research, that’s especially important. If your funding, your connections, or your ideas are holding everything together, then you’re not building a legacy. You’re building a bottleneck.

At the JKTG Foundation, our focus has always been on creating something that outlasts any single person, including me. Because progress that depends on one individual is fragile. And cancer doesn’t wait for anyone.

THE LEGACY TEST: WHAT STILL MOVES WITHOUT YOU?

A lot of well-meaning donors and organizations fund important work. But many of them still treat research like a transaction:

Fund a project
Hope it works
Move on to the next thing

That’s not how we operate. From the beginning, the Foundation’s approach has been to ask bigger questions:

How do we accelerate science, not just fund it?
How do we create collisions between disciplines that don’t normally interact?
How do we build infrastructure that supports progress long after a single grant cycle ends?

We’re not trying to hand out trophies. We’re trying to change the conditions that slow science down and create systems that make it easier for smart people to do great work. That’s what legacy in scientific research looks like to me.

CANCER DOESN’T CARE ABOUT GRANT CYCLES

Let’s be honest: the traditional research system isn’t built for speed. It’s built for consensus, caution, and committees. That’s not a criticism. It’s just reality.

But cancer doesn’t care about process. It doesn’t care about institutional calendars, approval chains, or slow-moving bureaucracy. So if we’re going to make real progress, we need to be faster. And that means funding in ways that reduce friction, connect people earlier, and support ideas that don’t fit neatly into traditional boxes.

We’ve done that by focusing on translational science: research that takes discoveries from the lab and pushes them toward real-world application. That kind of work isn’t always flashy. It’s often messy. And it rarely gets funded through conventional channels.

But it’s necessary.

LEGACY MEANS MAKING THE HARD CALLS

Real legacy isn’t feel-good. It’s not “supporting everything” or saying yes to every proposal that comes through the door.

It means having a clear point of view about where the world is going, and being willing to make hard choices about where your time and money go.

I don’t believe in funding science that’s already well-funded. I don’t believe in doing things just because everyone else is doing them. We focus on high-risk, high-reward research because that’s where the opportunity is greatest. If it fails, we learn. If it works, it can change everything.

Either way, that’s the kind of decision-making that builds lasting impact, not just headlines.

BUILDING BEYOND YOURSELF

I started the Foundation in memory of my late wife, Jayne. That’s where the name came from: Jayne Koskinas Ted Giovanis Foundation.

But the goal was never to create something about us. It was to build something that mattered—to patients, to researchers, to future generations. Jayne didn’t want attention. She wanted action. She wanted her experience to mean something more than just a personal story.

So we built a Foundation designed to operate like she lived: no fluff, no waste, just focus. That meant assembling the right advisors. It meant creating a model that supports, not replaces, scientific leadership. And it meant letting the mission, not the ego, steer the ship.

WHERE WE’RE SEEING MOMENTUM

We’ve seen what this model can do. We’ve helped launch interdisciplinary collaborations that wouldn’t have existed without our intervention. We’ve backed researchers like Dr. Andrew Ewald, whose work on cancer metastasis is reshaping what’s possible in treatment. And we’ve created a new platform, our Driving Research podcast, to share these conversations more publicly, so others can see what’s possible when philanthropy stops playing it safe. These are just pieces. But they’re pieces of a system we’re building to last.