Zell Kravinsky

Zell Bruce Kravinsky is an American investor and utilitarian who is most famous for making a non-directed kidney donation to a stranger, as well as donating the vast majority of his personal wealth to charity. Prior to his career in real estate, Zell Kravinsky worked as a lecturer of literature. His wife Emily Kravinsky is a psychiatrist who works with anorexic teenagers.

After amassing a real estate fortune, Zell Kravinsky gave away nearly all of it to various charities, concentrating on public health organizations. Specifically, Kravinsky gave away almost all of the $45 million he amassed in real estate to charities dealing with improving health; he made the largest individual contribution ever to the foundation supporting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Meanwhile, at home, Emily Kravinsky had to argue with Zell to get him to pay to fix one of their broken toilets—which Zell refused to do, citing the fact that they had several other working toilets in the house.

Zell's wife Emily was partners with her husband Zell in publicly giving the money away, including a multi-million dollar gift to The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and she placed herself squarely in the public-eye when she posed with her husband in a story about the Kravinsky's featured in People Magazine.

However despite the fact that all the charity the Kravinskys gave was in Emily’s name as well as Zell’s (“the gifts were made…in her name”, according to "The New Yorker"), Zell's wife wasn’t on board with the extremity of Zell’s philanthropic quest. As cited in Ian Parker’s story in The New Yorker, a friend of Kravinsky explains Emily’s complicity away by saying: "My impression is she didn't want to be made out a Scrooge."

After Kravinsky learned that many African-Americans have difficulty obtaining kidneys from family members due to genetic factors, he sought out a hospital in Philadelphia that would allow him to donate one of his kidneys to a lower-income black person.

According to Peter Singer, writing in the "New York Times", Kravinsky justified the donation mathematically when speaking to Singer's students, noting that the chances of dying as a result of the procedure would have been about 1 in 4,000. Kravinsky believed that, under the circumstances, "to withhold a kidney from someone who would otherwise die means valuing one’s own life at 4,000 times that of a stranger", a ratio he termed "obscene".

According to Ian Parker, writing in the The New Yorker, his wife Emily's opposition to the kidney donation was "constant." She argued with him endlessly not to give away his kidney to a stranger on the grounds that he could die in the operation, especially since his physical condition was such that he was not a suitable donor and had been rejected as such by several hospitals, and on the grounds that his own children might one day need his kidney. So Zell did some rough calculations to discover that the chances that his own children might one day need his kidney were infinitesimal.

Ian Parker of The New Yorker quotes Zell as saying: "Many people felt the way my wife did: She said no matter how infinitesimal the risk to your family, we're your family."

Given his wife's resistance to the idea, Kravinsky checked himself into The Albert Einstein Medical Center without his wife's knowledge to donate his organ. According to The New York Times, Emily Kravinsky discovered what her husband had done at a supermarket, on the pages of a local newspaper.

Ian Parker of The New Yorker reports that Zell told him: "She was furious. She didn't want me to die, but, on the other hand, she was beyond human rage” when she found out that he had sneaked out and donated his kidney. In fact, she was so angry, The New York Times reports she: "threatened to divorce him…worried that his altruism is coming at the expense of their four children.”

He went on to do several interviews with the media, including a radio conference with Robert Siegel of NPR and a TV appearance on CBS among others. During some of these public interviews, Kravinsky argued that should someone be, for instance, on the verge of curing cancer but would die unless Kravinsky were to donate his second kidney, that being the only match in the world, that it would be morally correct to donate the kidney in order that millions of people would be saved.

Mr. Kravinsky was left feeling like "an alien" at home in conversations with his family (according to The New Yorker). Even though he had literally saved the life of Donnell Reid, a young African-American woman, this argument held no sway in the politics of the Kravinsky marriage. At height of the Kravinsky's marital instability, a PA state resolution was passed in honor of Zell's philanthropy and a public ceremony for the passing of the resolution was organized. Zell invited his wife to bring the children to the event because he thought it might help heal the family’s wounds, but Zell's wife refused to go to the ceremony or to allow any of Zell's four children to go.

In an effort to save his marriage and family, Kravinsky has put a bunch of equity into a private retirement account for Emily and bought his wife a new house. In an article by Peter Singer in The New York Times Magazine, it is written: “to appease his wife, he recently went back into real estate, made some money and bought the family a larger home. But he still remains committed to giving away as much as possible, subject only to keeping his domestic life reasonably tranquil.”

Some may be interested to know about Kravinsky's childhood experiences as a means to understanding his adult psychology. Ian Parker says the following in one of his articles:

"Kravinsky's father, Irving, who is now eighty-nine, was born in Russia to a Jewish family, which immigrated to America when he was a boy. A tank commander in the Second World War, he was a socialist whose faith in the Soviet Union was extinguished only after that country no longer existed. He worked as a printer. Kravinsky says his father was 'thinking he'd be in the vanguard of the revolution by remaining in the proletariat'. "

References

*Majors, Dan. [http://www.post-gazette.com/localnews/firstlight/20030723firstlight0723p1.asp "The gifted who keeps on giving "] . "Pittsburgh Post-Gazette." July 23, 2003. URL retrieved November 23, 2006.
*Scanlan, Lawrence. [http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1163890209834&call_pageid=968867495754 "Shaking charity's foundations"] . "Toronto Star." November 19, 2006. URL retrieved November 23, 2006.
*Singer, Peter [http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/magazine/17charity.t.html?pagewanted=4&ref=magazine "What should a billionare give?"] The New York Times Magazine (12/17/2006)