You're probably right, the article used as a source for that claim on Wikipedia even goes on to say that claim makes no sense.
>Johnson’s claims about the origins of Terramycin were inaccurate. Ehrlich’s employer didn’t develop Terramycin; a different company, Pfizer, applied for the patent in 1949, after Terramycin was isolated from a soil sample from Terre Haute, Indiana. Ehrlich wasn’t involved. Additionally, companies were racing to find new antibiotics; if Terramycin had in fact been discovered in 1944, there was no reason a company would wait five years to patent it.
I don't know anything about this case in particular, but here's the probable answer.
Legally speaking, he's made the donation "out of the goodness of his heart" expecting nothing in return and they'vr has chosen of their own free will to name the building after him. They aren't technically "obligated" to do so because there's no legally binding agreement. If they changed the name tomorrow, he'd have no recourse to sue or expect his money back. Obviously he gave the money with the understanding that the university agreed to name the building after him, but since they aren't "forced" to do so it still counts as a donation.
Source: I work for a prominent university that handles these sorts of things all the time.
Longjumping_Owl5740 t1_je7dknw wrote
Reply to comment by Gee-Oh1 in TIL that Mattiedna Johnson, born to Mississippi sharecroppers in 1918, used techniques she’d used to make things like butter, jam and soap on her childhood farm to develop techniques to capture and preserve molds for research that eventually helped in the development of drugs to fight scarlet fever. by RedditPrat
You're probably right, the article used as a source for that claim on Wikipedia even goes on to say that claim makes no sense.
>Johnson’s claims about the origins of Terramycin were inaccurate. Ehrlich’s employer didn’t develop Terramycin; a different company, Pfizer, applied for the patent in 1949, after Terramycin was isolated from a soil sample from Terre Haute, Indiana. Ehrlich wasn’t involved. Additionally, companies were racing to find new antibiotics; if Terramycin had in fact been discovered in 1944, there was no reason a company would wait five years to patent it.