I saw the movie Seabiscuit last night and went off on a number of tangents based on my own experiences and prejudices. Mr. Charles Howard, the owner of Seabiscuit was associated with the Buick corporation and of course later with General Motors. The Sloan-Kettering Institute for cancer research OVERVIEW is named for Mr. Charles Kettering the inventor of the self starter for automobiles, short bio HERE and Mr. Alfred P. Sloan-the management legend and long time head of General Motors.BIO HERE While I couldn’t find a direct association with Mr. Charles Howard and cancer research of any kind, his boundless optimism and belief in the future were certainly consistent with the mindset of Sloan,Kettering and the other founders. At the time of its’ inception in 1946, cancer was still often spoken of in hushed terms and a diagnosis was considered a certain death sentence. The field was not a showpiece of fashionable philanthropy as it is today. There was no National Cancer Institute. Solzhenitzen’s The Cancer Ward was still a generation in the future. The relationship between smoking and lung cancer would be recognized shortly but the surgeon general’s report was almost 20 years in the future.
In looking for an association between Mr. Charles Howard and Sloan Kettering(I was clearly confusing him with Frank Howard of Standard Oil) an early director of SKI, and president from 1950 to 1960 ,whose family is still active in affairs of the center) I came across the most remarkable document in a resource site for tobacco litigation.
Read it and get a feel for leaders of science and business grappling with what was just being recognized as the major public health issue of the second half of the twentieth century.
It was a 1954 report on smoking to the board of directors of Sloan Kettering Institute.
1954 the year of Brown vs. the Board of Ed., of Dienbienphu, Patti Page, McCarthy vs. the Army, the launch of the Nautilus.The year of the conquest of Polio and the publication of Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking,Ike introduced “under god"into the pledge of allegiance, and from my first grade memories the popularity of inspirational pop tunes such as Little Things Mean a Lot /Kitty Kallen,Stranger In Paradise/Tony Martin and the Theme from the High and the Mighty by Les Baxter.
Segregation was still legal, the Wasp Elite in the last years of its ascendancy. It was not a time when the boat was rocked. Post war and post depression normalcy was something my parents generation hoped would go on forever.
The board of directors read like something out of an E. Digby Baltzell book HERE. They were not a bunch of goo-goos and didn’t even contain the obligatory Episcopal clergyman or outside university president-they were hard headed men of science and business. They included
ALFRED P. SLOAN, JR.
Chairman of the Board
FRANK A. HOWARD
President
EDWARD C. DELAFIELD
Secretary
OFFICERS
ELLMORE C. PATTERSON
Treasurer
HARRISON V. SMITH
Assistant Treasurer
H. LAWRENCE HESS
Assistant Secretary
BOARD OF TRUSTEES
ALBERT BRADLEY
Executive Vice President,
General Motors Corporation
DETLEV W. BRONK, Ph.D.
President, Rockefeller Institute
For Medical Research
REGINALD G. COOMBE Vice President,
The Hanover Bank
EDWARD C. DELAFIELD
Senior Partner,
Delafield and Delafield
.JOSEPH C. HINSEY, Ph.D.
Director, The New York Hospital-
Cornell Medical Center
FRANK A. HOWARD
Research Consultant,
Standard Oil Company (N.J.)
CHARLES F. KETTERING
Research Consultant,
General Motors Corporation
EUGENE W. KETTERING
Assistant Chief Engineer,
Electro-Motive Division,
General Motors Corporation
DEANE W. MALOTT President,
Cornell University
W. ALBERT NOYES, JR., Ph.D.
Chairman,
Department of Chemistry,
University of Rochester
ELLMORE C. PATTERSON Vice President,
J. P. Morgan & Company, Inc.
JOHN L. PRATT
Engineer and Philanthropist
LAURANCE S. ROCKEFELLER
Rockefeller Brothers, Inc.
ALFRED P. SLOAN, JR.
Chairman of the Board,
General Motors Corporation
RAYMOND P. SLOAN
Vice President and Editorial
Director, The Modern
Hospital Publishing Co.
Lewis L. STRAUSS
Chairman, U. S. Atomic
Energy Commission
GEORGE WHITNEY Chairman o[ the Board,
J. P. Morgan & Company, Inc.
I cannot document it ,but I will bet that the JP Morgan bank had a major tobacco company or two as clients-and that the investment portfolio of some of these members portfolios included tobacco companies.Yet they didn’t refrain from addressing the issue of tobacco and lung cancer. When the business imperative was in potential conflict with the humanitarian goals of the non-profit institute the moral center of that world held. The profits from General Motors financed the Sloan Kettering Institute.
For those of you who still don’t get it-it's not about Oil .
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