Hill Heat

In the wake of Superstorm Sandy, New York City’s flagship public television station, WNET, has dropped the richest man in New York, carbon pollution billionaire David Koch, from its board of trustees. Days before the monthly board meeting on May 16, Koch’s name was removed from the WNET website. Koch had been a board member since 2006. Koch has been funding WNET since 1986.

The severance of Koch’s longstanding relationship with WNET — which not only serves the New York City area but also produces national programs such as Charlie Rose, Nature, and Great Performances — comes at a time of increasing tension between Koch’s anti-regulatory, climate-polluting industrial empire and the educational mission of public television.

The inherent conflict between Koch’s conspiratorial, anti-science ideology and the public interest with has come under attention in recent months. After Superstorm Sandy struck, WNET’s Charlie Rose and Bill Moyers ran shows on the tragic consequences and threat of greenhouse pollution for the New York region. More recently, reports of Koch Industries’ interest in the newspaper holdings of the Tribune Company have spurred nationwide protests.

Koch also was featured in the November 2012 PBS documentary Park Avenue, which contrasted the extreme wealth of Koch’s residence at 740 Park Avenue with the stark poverty less than a mile north in East Harlem. In the documentary, a former doorman noted that Koch, with a net worth of about $45 billion, gives only $50 holiday tips.

Just after Koch left the WNET board, the station ran a major live town hall on Superstorm Sandy. Broadcasting from New Jersey and New York City, the NY/NJ/Long Island affiliates under WNET management broadcast a two-hour show that talked repeatedly about the major threat posed by climate change in rising sea levels and more frequent storms of increased intensity—threats which Koch’s Cato Institute denies.

An exploration of the conflicts raised by building an academic cancer research center with the money and active participation of a petrochemical billionaire.

As caviar-topped sweet potato cubes and gulab jamon skewers circulated, with gold-encrusted living statues posing in the corner, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology community feted last Friday the generous philanthropy of David H. Koch, whose $100 million gift helped build the new cancer research institute that bears his name.

The richest man in New York City stood tall above the crowd, as his wife Julia, brother Charles, and other members of the Koch family shared the glorious moment, captured by fast-snapping photographers. His bodyguards, thick-necked and glowering in ill-fitting suits that bore a small gold Koch Industries pin on the lapel, stood by as cancer researchers, MIT officials, and biotechnology executives enjoyed the open bar and discussed the future of the battle against cancer. The lab technicians who have already been working for weeks in the building were easy to identify by their scruffy haircuts, informal wear, and relative youth, faintly bemused by the mostly middle-aged hobnobbers.

Koch’s name was emblazoned on the nametags worn by the scientists and practically every surface of the new building with a logo that strongly resembles that of his petrochemical conglomerate.

This reception took place in the lobby of the David H. Koch Integrative Cancer Institute after the formal dedication of the building in a party tent wedged in back, where Koch was effusively thanked by politicians and scientists for his generosity and commitment to tackling the disease that kills one in four Americans, about 560,000 a year. Koch Institute scientists described the innovative technologies and research they are bringing to bear to treat cancer, from nanoparticles to deep sequencing. They discussed new breakthroughs in understanding the unique genetic nature of the various diseases that cause cancers to spread in the human body, promising new pathways of treatment for patients.

Strangely, however, during the entire two-hour program, not a single participant mentioned environmental carcinogens or any other external factors in causing cancer. Dr. Alice T. Shaw, a practicing oncologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, professor at Harvard Medical School, and clinical investigator at the Koch Institute gave an extended discussion of her specialty, lung cancer, about underlying genetic abnormalities, targeted mutations, and smart drugs. Not once did she mention the overwhelming role of cigarette smoking in making the once-rare disease one of the top killers in the world.

Dr. Tyler Jacks, the David H. Koch Professor of Biology and director of the institute, Dr. Jacqueline Lees, the institute’s associate director, and institute professors Dr. Phillip Sharp and Dr. Robert Langer also failed to address environmental causes of cancer during their allotted moments in the program. A lavishly produced video, which tied the launch of the Koch Institute to the celebration of MIT’s sesquicentennial, showed graduate students sitting in a classroom beneath a portrait of David Koch. The film exclusively discussed work to treat cancer, but not the causes.

Why this unusual omission?