[3] The foundation was created by Standard Oil magnate John D. Rockefeller ("Senior") and son "Junior", and their primary business advisor, Frederick Taylor Gates, on May 14, 1913, when its charter was granted by New York.

[4] It is the second-oldest major philanthropic institution in America (after the Carnegie Corporation) and ranks as the 30th largest foundation globally by endowment, with assets of over $6.3 billion in 2022.

In 1906, Rockefeller's business and philanthropic advisor, Frederick Taylor Gates, encouraged him toward "permanent corporate philanthropies for the good of Mankind" so that his heirs should not "dissipate their inheritances or become intoxicated with power.

[citation needed] However, because of the ongoing (1911) antitrust suit against Standard Oil at the time, along with deep suspicion in some quarters of undue Rockefeller influence on the spending of the endowment, the result was that Senior and Gates withdrew the bill from Congress in order to seek a state charter from New York.

[citation needed] It was initially located within the family office at Standard Oil's headquarters at 26 Broadway, later (in 1933) shifting to the GE Building (then RCA), along with the newly named family office, Room 5600, at Rockefeller Center; later it moved to the Time-Life Building in the center, before shifting to its current Fifth Avenue address.

He became a close and key advisor to Junior through the Ludlow Massacre, turning around his attitude to unions; however the foundation's involvement in IR was criticized for advancing the family's business interests.

[citation needed] C. Douglas Dillon, the United States Secretary of the Treasury under both Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, served as chairman of the foundation.

CNN writer Matt Egan noted, "This divestment is especially symbolic because the Rockefeller Foundation was founded by oil money.

A number of notable physicians and field scientists worked on the international campaigns, including Lewis Hackett, Hideyo Noguchi, Juan Guiteras, George C. Payne, Livingston Farrand, Cornelius P. Rhoads, and William Bosworth Castle.

In 1936, The Rockefeller Foundation received one of the first awarded Walter Reed Medals from The American Society of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene to recognize its study and control of Yellow Fever.

While the Rockefeller doctors working in tropical locales such as Mexico emphasized scientific neutrality, they had political and economic aims to promote the value of public health to improve American relations with the host country.

[33][34] Rhoads later became a significant cancer researcher and director of Memorial Sloan-Kettering, though his eponymous award for oncological excellence was renamed after the scandal reemerged.

[40] In the interwar years, the foundation funded public health, nursing, and social work in Eastern and Central Europe.

[41][42] In 1950, the foundation expanded their international program of virus research, establishing field laboratories in Poona, India, Trinidad, Belém, Brazil, Johannesburg, South Africa, Cairo, Egypt, Ibadan, Nigeria, and Cali, Colombia, among others.

[44] Bristol-Myers Squibb, Johns Hopkins University and the Rockefeller Foundation are currently the subject of a $1 billion lawsuit from Guatemala for "roles in a 1940s U.S. government experiment that infected hundreds of Guatemalans with syphilis".

[54][55] The foundation also provided grants to Margaret Sanger and Alexis Carrel, who supported birth control, compulsory sterilization and eugenics.

[57] By 1926, Rockefeller had donated over $400,000, which would be almost $4 million adjusted for inflation in 2003, to hundreds of German researchers,[58] including Ernst Rüdin[59] and Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, through funding the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics,[60] (also known as the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research[61]) which conducted eugenics experiments in Nazi Germany and influenced the development of Nazi racial scientific ideology.

Rockefeller spent almost $3 million between 1925 and 1935, and also funded other German eugenicists, Herman Poll, Alfred Grotjahn, Eugen Fischer, and Hans Nachsteim, continuing even after Hitler's ascent to power in 1933; Rüdin's work influenced compulsory sterilisation in Nazi Germany.

[58] The Rockefeller Foundation continued funding German eugenics research even after it was clear that it was being used to rationalize discrimination against Jewish people and other groups, after the Nuremberg laws in 1935.

[63] The Rockefeller Foundation did not alert the world about the racist implications of Nazi ideology, but furthered and funded eugenic research through the 1930s.

[67][68][69] Some of the notable figures relocated or saved, among a total of 303 scholars, were Thomas Mann, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Leó Szilárd.

They focused on restoring democracy, especially regarding education and scientific research, with the long-term goal of reintegrating Germany into the Western world.

[73] In 2021, Rajiv J. Shah, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, released a statement condemning eugenics and supporting the anti-eugenics movement.

[83] Rusk was involved with funding the humanities and the social sciences during the Cold War period, including study of the Soviet Union.

In 1941, the foundation gave a small grant to Mexico for maize research, in collaboration with the then new president, Manuel Ávila Camacho.

[88] Costing around $600 million, over 50 years, the revolution brought new farming technology, increased productivity, expanded crop yields and mass fertilization to many countries throughout the world.

[citation needed] Later it funded over $100 million of plant biotechnology research and trained over four hundred scientists from Asia, Africa and Latin America.