# Alfred P. Sloan Jr.

Source: https://onco.cc/people/alfred-sloan/  
OnCo record `alfred-sloan` (Person). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

In the 1940s the General Motors chairman joined engineer Charles Kettering to establish the Sloan Kettering Institute, dedicated in 1948, which gave Memorial Hospital a research arm and its modern name.

## Summary

Alfred P. Sloan Jr. (1875-1966) ran General Motors for decades and, through the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, became one of the largest funders of American science. Memorial Sloan Kettering's history records that in the 1940s two General Motors executives, Alfred P. Sloan and Charles F. Kettering, joined forces to establish the Sloan Kettering Institute, which was formally dedicated in 1948. The idea was to apply the organised research methods of industry to cancer: a laboratory institute beside a hospital, so that findings could move to patients and patients' problems back to the bench. The Institute became the basic-science arm of what is now Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the largest private cancer centre in the world, and the model of hospital plus research institute was copied widely.

## Fields

- Kind: Person
- Last checked: 2026-09-10
- Tags: hero; donor
- Role: General Motors chairman who, with Charles Kettering, established the Sloan Kettering Institute
- Specialisms: Cancer research institute founding; Industrial philanthropy

## Sources

- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_P._Sloan
- MSK: history and milestones: https://www.mskcc.org/about/history-milestones

## Connected records

- institutions: [Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center](https://onco.cc/institutions/mskcc/)
- people: [Charles F. Kettering](https://onco.cc/people/charles-kettering/), [John D. Rockefeller Jr.](https://onco.cc/people/john-d-rockefeller-jr/), [John Jacob Astor III](https://onco.cc/people/john-jacob-astor-iii/)
- bottlenecks: [Funding follows fashion, not burden](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-funding-allocation/), [The valley of death between lab and product](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-translational-valley/)

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JSON: https://onco.cc/api/v1/entities/alfred-sloan.json