# Charles F. Kettering

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

## TL;DR

The inventor of the electric car starter and head of General Motors research joined Alfred Sloan in the 1940s to establish the Sloan Kettering Institute for cancer research.

## Summary

Charles F. Kettering (1876-1958) held more than a hundred patents, including the electric starter and leaded petrol, and ran General Motors' research laboratories for 27 years. Memorial Sloan Kettering's history records that in the 1940s he and Alfred P. Sloan joined forces to establish the Sloan Kettering Institute, dedicated in 1948 next to Memorial Hospital in New York. Kettering brought the conviction that cancer, like an engineering problem, would yield to organised, well-funded research; Sloan brought the money and the corporate model. The Institute they founded is now the research arm of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, whose scientists' work includes the biology behind checkpoint immunotherapy and CD19 CAR-T cells.

## Fields

- Kind: Person
- Last checked: 2026-09-10
- Tags: hero; donor
- Role: Inventor and General Motors research chief who co-founded the Sloan Kettering Institute
- Specialisms: Cancer research institute founding; Industrial research methods

## Sources

- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_F._Kettering
- 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: [Alfred P. Sloan Jr.](https://onco.cc/people/alfred-sloan/), [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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