MIT conflict of interest in Molten Metal promotion

Well, that did not deter him. He patented it, came to MIT, got together with the head of our Technology Licensing Office, a guy named John Preston, and they started marketing this as the solution to the world's pollution problems — we could throw everything into a bath of molten steel. They called it Molten Metal Technologies. They raised 130 million overnight. These two guys were worth 25 million apiece. When Vice President Gore was talking at MIT at Kresge Auditorium, John Preston, head of the Technology Licensing Office, was in charge of putting together the program with panelists about new technologies. Who did he put on as one of the four panelists, other than Chris — the guy who came up with the patent? Don Sadoway and I said, "Hey, wait a second, seems like a little conflict of interest here. You're using your position at MIT to..." We actually called up the Vice President for Research and said, hey, little conflict of interest here. And MIT in their great wisdom and high integrity said, "Oh, MIT's got a piece of this action, so we don't think there's a problem." It's a true story.

the institutional dimension of the Molten Metal case. John Preston's TLO position; MIT faculty paid $1,000 each on the scientific advisory board not to publicly contradict the technology; VPR declined the conflict-of-interest complaint. Tom explicitly draws the parallel to the contemporaneous Joi Ito / Epstein scandal at MIT.

The guy was an idiot and they were happy when he quit, and he was happy when he left. Sadoway and I were just sitting there. And so what happens? Al Gore, vice president of the United States, running for president in the 1990s — he was going to come use the technology, right? He invented the internet, or at least he signed the bill. He came, and he was going to come to MIT as part of his campaign and go over to Kresge. They were going to have a technology roundtable. Who's in charge of putting the technology roundtable together? John Preston, head of MIT's Technology Licensing Office. Would you consider that a conflict, when one of the four companies that he puts on there is Molten Metal something, that he owns 30% of? I thought it was a conflict. We wrote to the vice president of research at MIT, said we think this is a conflict. He said don't worry about it. Oh, I won't worry about it.