[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 16 (Wednesday, February 23, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[Congressional Record: February 23, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]
TRIBUTE TO MARY LASKER--A GREAT AND BELOVED LEADER IN MEDICAL RESEARCH
Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, the death of Mary Lasker last Monday is a
great loss to the Nation. She dedicated her life and career to fighting
disease and promoting medical research and better health care for the
American people, and what an extraordinary job she did.
Through her remarkable commitment, she became one of the most
important, influential, and beloved private citizens in medical
research in the Nation's history. Millions of persons in this country
and around the world have benefited from her crusade to conquer disease
and enhance the quality of health care for all people in all nations.
When I first came to the Senate, I remember very clearly the advice
that President Kennedy gave me. ``Have lunch with medical school
professors, have dinner with Nobel Prize winners, but if you really
want to know about what needs to be done in medical research in
America, have a talk with Mary Lasker.''
Her accomplishments in advancing medical research are legendary. For
half a century, the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation has honored and
funded many of the world's greatest medical researcher scientists. The
Albert Lasker Medical Research Awards are known throughout the world,
and rank very close to the Nobel Prize in international prestige.
In return for her tireless dedication, Mary Lasker received numerous
well-deserved awards and honors herself, including the Presidential
Medal of Freedom, the Nation's highest honor for a private citizen.
In 1984, she was honored by the establishment of the Mary Woodward
Lasker Center for Health Education and Research at the National
Institutes of Health. Indeed, the NIH would not be the world-renowned
research institute it is today without the brilliant leadership of Mary
Lasker.
She never lost sight of her goals or the true importance of her work.
As she said at the time of the dedication of the Center, in justifying
the cost of medical research, ``If you think research is expensive, try
disease.'' And then she said, at the end of her address, ``Thank you
all for coming to this dedication--now, we must all go and continue our
work.''
The advances and discoveries generated by Mary Lasker's genius and
dedication will continue to improve the lives of generations to come.
She was an inspiration to all of us who knew her and who had the
privilege of working with her. She was a symbol of hope to people
everywhere, and we are saddened by her loss.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the obituary from this
morning's Boston Globe and a series of other articles on Mary Lasker
may be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From the Boston Globe, Feb. 23, 1994]
Mary W. Lasker, 93; Cofounded Lasker Medical Research Award
(By Tom Long)
Mary (Woodard) Lasker, a philanthropist once described by
polio researcher Jonas Salk as ``a match maker between
science and society,'' died of heart failure Monday in her
home in Greenwich, Conn. She was 93.
Mrs. Lasker, along with her husband, the late Albert D.
Lasker, founded the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation and
established the Albert Lasker Medical Research Awards.
The Lasker Awards are given to honor medical, biological or
clinical work that leads to significant lessening of a major
cause of disability or death. Since the Lasker Awards were
established in 1944, they have become one of the most
prestigious in the medical profession and more than 40 Lasker
winners have gone on to win the Nobel Prize.
The daughter of a well-to-do banker, Mrs. Lasker was born
in Watertown, Wis. She attended the University of Wisconsin
and graduated from Radcliffe College where she majored in art
history.
Upon graduation, she moved to New York City, where she sold
paintings for gallery owner Paul Reinhardt, whom she married
in 1926. The couple divorced in 1934.
In 1940, she married millionaire Chicago advertising man
Albert D. Lasker.
In a 1965 interview in Time Magazine, Mrs. Lasker recalled
that, early in their courtship, when Mr. Lasker asked her
what she most wanted to do in life, she responded, ``I want
to push the idea of health insurance. Most people can't
afford adequate medical care. And I want to help promote
research in cancer, tuberculosis and other major diseases.
Mrs. Lasker persuaded her husband to devote his promotional
skill and some of his fortune to public health.
In the late 1940s, the couple initiated the research
program at the American Cancer Society and later turned their
attention to increasing financial support of the National
Institutes of Health.
Mr. Lasker died of cancer in 1952 and willed half his
estate, estimated in excess of $11 million, to the foundation
that bears his name.
After his death, Mrs. Lasker continued her fight against
what she called, ``the major cripplers and killers: heart
disease, cancer and stroke.''
She was a driving force behind the creation of the National
Cancer Institute and several other health organizations.
In a 1974 interview with the New York Times, the soft-
spoken philanthropist said her campaign for public health was
fueled by frustration. ``I'm very good on what we don't know
in medicine,'' she said. ``It's not the will of God, it's the
dumbness of man, and the lack of enterprise and money that's
the problem.
In 1984, the National Institutes of Health named the Mary
Woodard Lasker Center for Health Research and Education in
her honor.
Mrs. Lasker also had a passion for flowers. As early as
1943 she began brightening up New York City parks and streets
with flowers. In 1956, she instituted the seasonal planting
of tulips and daffodils along Park Avenue.
She was also active in Lady Bird Johnson's efforts to
beautify America. In 1965, Mrs. Lasker donated 10,300 azalea
bushes and 150 dogwood trees to help brighten Washington,
D.C. She also donated 40,000 daffodill plants and several
hundred cherry trees to beautify the United Nations in New
York City.
In the interview with Time Magazine, she said. ``I am
mainly interested in medical research. The flowers are just a
little thing to keep me from being depressed until a cure is
found for diseases like cancer and arteriosclerosis.''
Mrs. Lasker was the recipient of more than 60 awards and
medals. In 1969, President Lyndon B. Johnson presented her
with the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest honor for a
private citizen. In 1987, Congress authorized the striking of
a special gold medal in her honor ``in recognition of her
humanitarian contributions in the areas of medical research
and education, urban beautification and the fine arts.'' In
1992, she was awarded the Albert Schweitzer Gold Medal for
Humanitarianism in Philantrophy from Johns Hopkins
University.
Mrs. Lasker remained vigorous throughout her life. Her last
public appearance was in October at the 1993 Albert Lasker
Awards luncheon in New York City keynoted by First Lady
Hillary Rodham Clinton.
She leaves two stepsons Francis Brody and Edward Lasker,
both of Los Angeles.
Funeral arrangements are private. A memorial service will
be held in the spring.
____
[From the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation]
Mary Woodard Lasker, Health Crusader and Philanthropist, is Dead at Age
93
New York, NY, February 22, 1994.--Mary Woodard Lasker, the
indomitable philanthropist who for more than fifty years was
a leading national force in promoting biomedical research and
better health for Americans died yesterday, February 21, at
her home in Greenwich, Connecticut. She was 93.
Mrs. Lasker died of heart failure, her nephew, James
Woodard Fordyce, said.
Mrs. Lasker created with her husband, the late Albert D.
Lasker, the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation and established
the Albert Lasker Medical Research Awards as one of science's
most prestigious awards. These awards, given for significant
achievement in basic and clinical medical research, have long
been considered second only in prestige to the Nobel Prizes.
Mary Lasker believed that ``money could buy ideas'' and
that leadership was needed to encourage those who have the
stuff of genius to focus their energies on medical research.
She sought to encourage and honor discoverers who might
otherwise have gone all but unrecognized, and to bring
dignity to their work.
Mrs. Lasker remained vigorous and active throughout her
life. Her last public appearance was at the 1993 Albert
Lasker Awards luncheon, keynoted by First Lady Hillary
Clinton, last October in New York City.
The Lasker Foundation and its awards program was founded in
1944 by the Laskers to draw attention to the major advances
in both medical and clinical medical research and to
stimulate Federal support for the medical sciences.
Mrs. Lasker was one of the country's most remarkable women
and outstanding citizens. She was a key architect in this
nation's cancer initiatives. With a talent for persuasion,
she was enormously effective in changing the course of modern
science through her catalytic role in obtaining public
financial support for medical research.
Together with her husband in the late 1940s, she initiated
the research program of the American Cancer Society and later
turned her attention to increasing financial support for the
National Institutes of Health, whose budget today exceeds $10
billion.
Dr. Jonas Salk said, ``When I think of Mary Lasker, I think
of a matchmaker between science and society.'' Business Week
called her the ``fairy Godmother of medical research''. She
waged an effective behind the scenes attack on what she
called the ``major cripplers and killers''--heart disease,
cancer, and stroke in the United States. She was widely
regarded as a driving force behind the creation of the
National Cancer Institute and of several other of the
National Institutes of Health. Her work urging legislation to
expand federal cancer research culminated in a 1971 bill that
made the conquest of cancer a national goal.
In 1984, Mrs. Lasker was honored by the naming of a Center
at the National Institutes of Health, the Mary Woodard Lasker
Center for Health Research and Education. Her life was a
demonstration of how one unelected, unappointed, but highly
intelligent and deeply committed private citizen could work
with government officials for the benefit of all Americans.
Medicine was not the only area in which Mary Lasker worked
to transform life around her. She had a passion for
environmental beautification. As early as 1943 she began
brightening New York City's bleak parks and streets with
flowers. in 1956 she initiated the seasonal plantings down
the center of Park Avenue in New York City and funded the
planting of 20 blocks of tulips and daffodils. With her good
friend, Lady Bird Johnson, she worked to stimulate interest
in the beautification of cities and parks around the country.
She generously gave azalea bushes, daffodil bulbs, dogwood
trees, and cherry trees both in New York City and in
Washington, D.C. to brighten those cityscapes. But she said,
``I am mainly interested in medical research.''
In 1969, President Lyndon B. Johnson presented her with the
Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest honor for a private
citizen. In 1987, the U.S. Senate and the House of
Representatives authorized President Bush to strike a special
Gold Medal in her honor ``in recognition of her humanitarian
contributions in the areas of medical research and education,
urban beautification, and the fine arts.'' She used this
occasion to urge President Bush to throw his support behind
augmenting the national research effort.
She was the recipient of numerous honors and recognition
including the Radcliffe Achievement Award, that college's
highest honor. In 1987 she received a Doctor of Humanities
Degree from Harvard University and in 1989 the Harvard
School of Public Health established the Mary Woodard
Lasker Professorship of Health Sciences to perpetuate her
life crusade for the discovery of knowledge to promote
human health.
She was the recipient of more than 60 awards and medals,
most recently the Albert Schweitzer Gold Medal for
Humanitarianism in Philanthropy from The Johns Hopkins
University in 1992. She also served in numerous board and
trustee positions for health, cultural and educational
organizations.
Mrs. Lasker, who was born in Watertown, Wisconsin, was the
daughter of Frank Elwin and Sara Johnson Woodard. She
attended the University of Wisconsin and Radcliffe College
where she studied art history and graduated with honors. She
also studied at Wadham College, Oxford.
Her first marriage in 1926 to art gallery owner Paul
Reinhardt ended in divorce. In 1940, she married Albert Davis
Lasker, the creative and legendary genius of modern
advertising. When he retired from his business, Lord &
Thomas, the predecessor firm to Foote, Cone, & Belding, Mrs.
Lasker persuaded him to divert his promotional genius and
some of his fortune to public health and she carried on this
passionate work until her death.
In their life together Mrs. Lasker and her husband amassed
an important collection of art which included Renoirs and the
works of Matisse, Picasso, Dufy, Chagall and others. Many of
these were sold in later years with the proceeds contributed
to Mrs. Lasker's philanthropic projects.
Mrs. Lasker had no children. She is survived by her nephew,
James W. Fordyce of Greenwich, and by her step children
Francis Brody and Edward Lasker, both of Los Angeles, five
step grandchildren, two step great-grandchildren and three
great-nephews.
Funeral rites and burial will be private. A memorial
service will be held in the spring. In lieu of flowers,
contributions can be sent to the Albert Lasker Medical
Research Awards.
____
[From Architectural Digest, Oct. 1985]
Profiles: Mary Lasker
(By Valentine Lawford)
Though human beings who fight for causes may eventually
achieve heroic stature in the eyes of posterity, they tend by
and large to make their contemporaries feel uncomfortable.
Mary Lasker of New York is a shining exception to the rule.
Part of the reason lies in the nature of the causes she
champions. Today, medical research and urban beautification
are recognizable as two facets of the same unmistakably good
cause: the enhancement of human life. But another reason is
Mrs. Lasker herself--her combination of forcefulness and
warmth of heart, efficiency and charm, public spirit and
personal devotion to friends, and her ability to persuade
while giving credit where it is due. She is a philanthropist
in the most complete sense of the word. Unlike many would-be
reformers who start with an impersonal blueprint and end by
trying to impose it dogmatically on others, she reasons from
the personal to the universal. In short, she is someone with
whom it is impossible not to identify and empathize.
Of her passionate interest in medical research, Mary Lasker
says simply: ``I cannot bear to see people suffering from
uninvestigated disease. When I was a very young child in
Wisconsin, I suffered from all the childhood illnesses. One
day I overheard a friend of the family say to my mother,
`Sara, I don't think you will ever raise her,' and that made
me mad! My grandfather was crippled by arthritis, and both of
my parents, who suffered from high blood pressure, eventually
died of heart disease. I decided that such things just should
not be, and that I would do something myself about it and get
others to do something, too.''
After her marriage in 1940 to advertising pioneer Albert D.
Lasker, she began to put her ideas into practice--winning the
sympathy and support of influential members of Congress,
enlisting the aid of eminent doctors and surgeons and
generous private citizens, and stimulating public interest
in the fight against disease. In 1942, she and her husband
established the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation--backed
solely by their own funds--for the promotion of medical
research, public health and education, and human welfare.
For nearly a half-century, the Lasker Foundation has
achieved national and international renown. It has given
annual awards since 1944 for outstanding work in medical
research and public health administration, and for
superior reporting on these subjects. Of the recipients of
Lasker Awards in the course of four decades, no less than
forty have subsequently received Nobel Prizes.
In May 1984, Congress passed legislation honoring Mrs.
Lasker by naming a new research center at the National
Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland after her.
Speaking at the dedication ceremony, she said: ``Medical
research saves lives and eliminates suffering; it also saves
over $13 million in our economy for every dollar invested. If
you think research is expensive, try disease.''
Like her battle against disease, Mrs. Lasker's fight
against urban ugliness was inspired by childhood experience.
Her mother was instrumental in the establishment of two
public parks in Watertown, Wisconsin, where the family lived.
It was in memory of her mother that Mary Lasker made her
first contribution, in 1942, to the beautification of New
York City--a gift of millions of hardy chrysanthemum seeds
for massive plantings in five park areas. After Albert
Lasker's death in 1952, his widow and her stepchildren gave
300 Japanese cherry trees and 40,000 white daffodils in his
memory to the gardens of the United Nations. Four years
later, Mrs. Lasker donated thousands of daffodils and tulips
to be planted along twenty blocks of Park Avenue--partly to
demonstrate that they could thrive there, in spite of air
pollution. And she has personally contributed 10,000 azalea
bushes, 900 cherry trees, 2,500 dogwoods and over a million
daffodils to the beautification of Washington, D.C.
Since 1981, Mary Lasker's horticultural benefactions to New
York City have centered on the Park Avenue Malls Planting
Project, a community effort to enhance nearly fifty blocks of
the avenue with tulip bulbs, annuals and shrubs, Christmas
trees, fields of wildflowers, and annually seeded and
fertilized lawns. The project's yearly order of 82,000 tulip
bulbs from Holland is one of the largest private orders from
Dutch bulb growers, second only to the queen of England's.
Each spring the tulips burst into bright yellow bloom, and
are followed in summer by carpets of begonias--a gardening
miracle, given the smoke and heat from the train that runs
directly beneath the avenue and the meager two feet of soil
in which they are planted.
It is scarcely surprising that Mary Lasker should have
received so many awards and honors, including ten academic
degrees, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the cross of
Officier de la Legion d'Honneur from the president of the
French Republic. She is also a board member of the John F.
Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.,
of the Norton Simon Museum in Los Angeles and of the Leeds
Castle Foundation in Great Britain.
Despite a hectic schedule--she continues as president of
the Lasker Foundation and serves as a trustee of several
other public-spirited organizations as well--Mary Lasker
remains genial and easily approachable. She enjoys parties
and has given many notable ones herself. Important French
Impressionist works of art were a feature of her former house
on Beekman Place, and today she displays a collection of
contemporary American paintings in her United Nations Plaza
apartment and office. Weekends are spent at her country house
in Greenwich, Connecticut, where she can indulge her passion
for roses. She delights in the company of her family,
especially of her three great-nephews, the grandsons of
her sister and close collaborator, Alice Fordyce. She has
taped a series of messages to them, for delivery when they
reach a suitable age. An excerpt: ``Go to good colleges
and universities. Spend a year or two abroad, at Oxford or
in Paris, for example. Become really proficient in at
least one foreign language. And to cope with the politics
of the twenty-first century, it may be useful to have some
familiarity with psychiatry and psychoanalysis.''
Mrs. Lasker's emphasis on education extends naturally to
research, her most effective tool and weapon. Discussing the
areas of research she's especially interested in now, she
says: ``We need to find a vaccine against cancer, and we have
to discover more cancer viruses in order to produce a good
vaccine. We must promote more research into diseases of the
heart and all neurological diseases in order to prolong human
life. We can do almost anything today, work untold wonders as
far as mechanical things are concerned, but we do little or
nothing to improve human beings. We are just not using our
brains!''
Mary Lasker drives a hard bargain, and the Lasker legend of
accomplishment, in all its facets, is widespread. Not long
ago, a New York cab driver, taking a European visitor
downtown to catch a train, proudly gestured toward the
flowers, shrubs and trees along Park Avenue. ``You know who's
responsible for all this?'' he asked his fare. ``A lady
called Mrs. Mary Lasker. We could do with a lot more of her
kind.''
____
[From the Journal of the American Medical Association, Oct. 2, 1991]
The Lasker Awards--Honoring the Spirit of Medical Science
(By Dennis L. Breo)
Beauty is truth,
Truth beauty.
That is all ye know on earth,
And all ye need to know.
--John Keats
Keats died in 1821 at the age of 25, a victim of
``consumption'' in the years before medicine fully understood
``contagion'' and knew how to cure tuberculosis. This has
next to nothing to do with the subject of this article, the
Albert Lasker Medical Research Awards, which were presented
in New York on September 27 and which are the focus of two
papers in this issue of JAMA.
Nothing except to note that Mary Lasker, who created the
awards and named them in honor of her late husband, has a
rare passion for beauty and a rare rage against disease. A
mover of mountains to motivate medical research in America,
Lasker forced upon others the saving truth that the beauty of
science can often cure the ugliness of disease. A woman of
both poetry and power, she sold the dream.
When the history of 20th-century science is written, it may
well show that two of the very most important players are a
pair of remarkable sisters from tiny Watertown, Wis.--Mary
Woodard Lasker, now 90, and her indispensable ally and
sibling, Alice Woodard Fordyce, 84. Neither has ever looked
into a microscope nor would they recognize what they saw, but
their persuasiveness, persistence, and perspicacity have
helped cause billions of dollars to be allocated for
thousands of researchers to benefit millions of patients.
Sam Broder, MD, the director of the National Cancer
Institute, says, ``The story of Mary Lasker is well known,
she has been recognized by essentially everybody, and she has
meant essentially everything not only to the National Cancer
Institute but to the entire National Institutes of Health.
She is a genius who forced the realization that the federal
government must commit itself to medical research to benefit
all Americans.''
Broder's predecessor, Vincent T. DeVita, presented Lasker
with the NCI's ``Year 2000 Award'' in 1987 and noted, ``Mary
Lasker is unique. She is this country's First Lady of science
and medicine. In truth, without her efforts, there would be
no National Cancer Act, no capacity to approach the cancer
problem in any organized way, no capacity to set our goals
for the year 2000 . . . no mandate to think of a world
without cancer. Like those few people with vision, Mary's
eyes have always been able to look farther than they can
see.''
a seller of dreams
Mary Woodard was a successful businesswoman in New York in
1940 when she met and married Albert Lasker, the father of
modern advertising. Himself a genius and the owner of a great
fortune, Lasker, like his wife, believed that education and
knowledge could change the world. Within 2 years of their
marriage, he divested his agency, Lord & Thomas, and joined
his wife in a crusade to breathe life--and dollars--into the
moribund American Society for the Control of Cancer, as the
MD-dominated agency was known in those days, and the National
Institutes of Health. Their remarkable success is a tribute
to the can do American spirit.
From the beginning, the awards program, which is
administered by the Lasker Foundation, was meant to motivate
basic and clinical research against this nation's major
cripplers and killers--heart disease, cancer, mental
illnesses, respiratory diseases, arthritis, and neurological
diseases. Ironically, Lasker himself died of colon cancer in
1952.
The first Albert Lasker Medical Research Award was
presented in 1944 to Col. William C. Menninger for his
``outstanding contribution to the advancement of mental
health in the field of war psychiatry.'' Subsequent winners
have been honored for breakthroughs in everything from making
penicillin available to understanding retroviruses.
Since these awards were established, 49 Lasker Award
winners have later won Nobel Prizes. Lewis Thomas, MD,
observed in remarks upon the 40th anniversary of the program,
``the average lag [between a researcher winning a Lasker and
then a Nobel], if it can respectfully be called that, has
been 5 years. The Lasker juries have been prescient.''
The lion's share of the credit for the awards and what they
have meant quite properly goes to Mary Lasker, but Alice
Fordyce, the lady who has directed the program and who has
handed out the inscribed ``Winged Victory of Samothrace''
statuettes (symbolizing victory against premature death and
disability), has also been a driving force, though she
insists upon staying in the background.
Indeed, the two sisters deserve their own Nobel Prize and,
perhaps, even a Lasker Award. In 1942, the United States was
spending virtually nothing on cancer research--certainly far
less than was being spent by Albert Lasker's clients to
launch advertising campaigns for toothpaste! Today, the NCI
has an annual budget exceeding $1 billion.
Fordyce agreed to an interview with this reporter to
discuss the accomplishments of her sister, but clearly, she
too is deserving. Dr. Thomas, himself a Lasker winner as
``the poet laureate of 20th-century medical science,'' once
observed of Fordyce: ``Both myself and many other scientists,
more stubborn, busier, and with all their own prior
engagements, have found it impossible to escape being
organized by this lady . . . she is an absolutely
irresistible force.''
Fordyce lives and works in an airy, strikingly appointed
and designed apartment in Manhattan's United Nations Plaza.
The apartment, which was designed by her late architect
husband Allmon Fordyce, commands a panoramic view of the
East River and is only a few floors below the dramatic
town apartment kept by Mary Lasker, who on this day, does
not feel up to an interview.
The Woodard sisters have come a long way from Watertown,
but Fordyce summarizes: ``In those days, a young woman went
East to college and then got a job in Manhattan. Things just
naturally happened.'' Pointing out the window, Fordyce
observes, ``Mary planted those chrysanthemums and flowering
cherry trees you see below in honor of our mother, who was a
great lover of flowers and beauty.
The Lasker success story is simple, though profound. The
mother imbued her two daughters with a passion for beauty.
Mary Lasker, who often says, ``I am opposed to heart attacks
and cancer and strokes the way I am opposed to sin,'' has
always believed that ``the ugliness of disease is not the
will of God,'' (Lasker herself had a major stroke in 1981 but
has made a remarkable recovery.) She resolved to persuade
others to find the causes of disease, not just treat the
symptoms.
Sara Johnson Woodard, the mother of Mary Lasker and Alice
Fordyce, grew up amid the pastoral beauty of Northern Ireland
as the 11th of 17 children. She came to the United States in
1880 and was appalled by the grime and grit of Chicago.
Alice Fordyce says, ``Mother rode into Chicago one day on
the Rock Island Railroad and burst into tears, exclaiming,
`It's just so ugly.''' Later, after she had married prominent
banker Frank Woodard and moved to Watertown, Wis., to raise
her two daughters, Sara Woodard saw to it that two parks and
a public library were established and that many flowers were
planted. ``She taught us a love of beauty,'' Fordyce recalls,
``and she also taught us to cause other people to bloom.''
This would become the great gift of Mary Lasker--to
recognize and encourage possibilities in others, especially
medical policymakers and researchers. Famed as the ``Great
Persuader,'' she became a national resource, like iron and
timber. Gifted with a smile that could warm a room and a
computer-like ability to track multiple projects, she once
moved a scientist to remark that her presence ``caused us all
to perk up, as if the sun had just come out.''
She often said, ``It's a personal world and ideas come from
minds in collision. Continents have been discovered, laws
passed, buildings built, books written because the right two
people met at a party or on a ship.'' The meeting of Mary and
Albert Lasker was one such collision, and its shock waves
affected Congressmen, Presidents, and the American people.
Medical research was the idea she chose to promote. Her
determination was deeply rooted in personal experiences.
Frail and often ill as a child, Mary Lasker suffered from
recurrent ear infections and was furious that doctors could
not help her. At age 4, she and her mother visited their
cleaning woman, who had just had both breasts removed because
of cancer. The memory is unforgettable--``that poor woman
lying in bed, suffering so terribly, and nothing could be
done.''
Both her parents suffered from hypertension, and the only
advice given to them was ``to avoid excitement and stress.''
Later, as an exceedingly popular coed at the University of
Wisconsin in Madison, the pretty and talented Mary Woodard
and many of her classmates were stricken by the flu epidemic
of 1918, an epidemic for which medicine had little to offer.
Halfway through her sophomore year, Mary was taken out of
school by her mother, who stayed with her in a Midwestern spa
until she had regained her health. Once recovered, she
switched to Radcliffe, where she graduated cum laude with a
degree in art appreciation and history.
Many years later, in 1943, the Laskers' cook was stricken
with cancer and consigned to a ``home for incurables,'' where
she eventually died. The doctor would not tell Mary what the
problem was, since in those days demons like ``cancer'' and
``mental illness'' were spoken of in whispers. She was told
that nothing could be done. Mary Lasker thought to herself,
``Well, that's a fine kettle of fish . . . all we can do is
treat the symptoms and send her away. We need to find the
cause and to cure it.''
Taking cancer out of the closet
The rest, of course, is richly known history. Dr. Howard
Rusk, the former director of the New York University Medical
Center's rehabilitation clinic, once said, ``Mary Lasker has
done more to promote medical research than any other living
person.''
Mary and Albert Lasker are the ones who, in the 1940s,
convinced David Sarnoff, then the powerful head of the Radio
Corporation of America, that it was OK to mention the word
``cancer'' on the airwaves. Later, she persuaded the Reader's
Digest to run a series of articles on cancers and to include
at the end a chance for readers to contribute money for
research. This helped launch the fund-raising efforts of the
American Cancer Society, and she insisted that 25% of all
funds be earmarked for research. Disgruntled doctors at
first threatened to resign at this sign of lay influence
and at her insistence that the society's board include
nonphysicians, but the resistance soon capitulated in the
wake of her successful fund-raising. In 1949, she created
the Albert Lasker Medical Journalism Awards and helped put
medical stories on the front page of the nation's
newspapers.
President John F. Kennedy reportedly once told his brother
Edward, then newly elected to the US Senate: ``Have lunch
with medical school professors, have dinner with Nobel Prize
winners, but if you really want to know about what needs to
be done in medical research in America, have a talk with Mary
Lasker.''
Throughout it all, Mary Lasker has walked with Presidents,
lived like royalty in elegant country and town homes that
showcase art masterpieces and spectacular gardens, and acted
as ``Mary Appleseed,'' even persuading the politicians of New
York to lay a carpet of daffodils and tulips down the mall in
the middle of Park Avenue.
At 90, she remains excited about the possibility of a
vaccine against cancer, a safeguard against the pernicious
killer whose 200-plus different forms attack 35 major sites
in the body. As usual, she is leaving nothing to chance. She
told Cancer News, a publication of the American Cancer
Society, ``We're so smart about weapons. We spend billions
and billions for weapons to kill people. Why not spend to
keep people alive? That's what the American Cancer Society is
all about.''
Alice Fordyce says, ``When I think of Mary, I think of her
great charm and intelligence and perseverance and persistence
and her great taste. She can thank our Irish mother for much
of this. It's true that she was extraordinarily persuasive--a
seller of dreams, really--but she also had very good ideas.
And they were not selfish ideas. They were ideas to help
others.''
A grateful nation has heaped honors upon Mary Lasker. In
1984, Congress named a new center, the Mary Woodard Lasker
Center for Health Research and Education at NIH, in her
honor. Her countless awards include the Medal of Freedom in
1969 from President Lyndon Johnson, a personal friend, and a
special Congressional Gold Medal in 1989. She used the latter
occasion to prod President George Bush to spend more for
health research.
``We're Democrats of course,'' Alice Fordyce says, ``and in
Democratic administrations, Mary often visited the White
House. The Republicans, I sometimes think, are allergic to
spending for medical research, and we're fast losing our
international leadership in science. It's shocking, and it
makes me very cross. The federal budget process is beyond
me, but I know that we can do more.''
Fordyce has served as the executive vice president of the
Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation, the director of the Lasker
Medical Journalism Awards (discontinued in 1970), and the
director of the Lasker Medical Research Awards. Dr. Thomas
calls her a ``phenomenon . . . a skilled and artistic
arranger of flowers and people.'' Indeed, she developed many
of these skills during her early career as a public affairs
executive for the Rockefeller Center. Among her many bright
ideas, she counts suggestions to build the Rainbow Room at
the top of the building and the skating pond at the bottom.
awards still valuable
Still, she frets that this article ``must not put me front
and center, because I'm not a front-and-center person. Make
sure you mention Mike DeBakey, who's been chairman of our
jury for 20 years or so and who does a marvelous job. The
Lasker Awards are valuable because they're awarded by the
researchers' peers. What has always dazzled me is that when
the chips are down the jurors vote for scientific merit and
not for their favorites.''
Herself blessed with robust good health, Alice Fordyce
still enjoys travel, especially to China, and has recently
taken up a new interest--organizing outings to listen to
barge chamber music. Hers, too, is a richly lived life.
She notes that the Lasker Awards were not presented in
1990, a development that caused great consternation in the
scientific community. ``Well,'' Fordyce says, ``I'm a very
unconsulted consultant and I don't know what was going
through Mary's mind, but she simply decided that, maybe, we
had done enough, that there was no longer a need for the
awards.''
Wrong. ``The outcry from the scientific community was very
gratifying,'' Fordyce says. ``Spontaneously, without
prompting, many leading scientists called to say, `Mary, you
can't do this . . . it's like closing down the Metropolitan
Museum of Art' and other comments of this nature. Well, Mary
was persuaded, and the awards were resumed.''
She concludes, ``We're not going to be around forever, of
course. I would certainly hope that somebody will keep the
awards going in Mary's memory.''
____
Address of Mary Lasker at the Dedication of the Mary Woodard Lasker
Center for Medical Research and Health Education, National Institutes
of Health, September 19, 1984
I am deeply honored that this land for research and
training is named in my honor, but the real honor goes to the
scientists who are dedicating their lives for the benefit of
mankind. We will see to it that there are many buildings on
this site in the future.
The reason I am so dedicated to medical research and have
lobbied so many Congressman and Senators in this room is that
when I was very young, I was sick a great deal and had severe
infections of the ears, causing the most agonizing pain. In
those days polio was still rampant and there were no
antibiotics and no polio vaccines. These discoveries obviated
the terrible pain and saved tens of thousands of lives.
When I was about ten years old I resolved that I would try
to do something when I grew up for medical research, and this
center named for me symbolizes this early resolve.
I hope this property and facility and others like it will
inspire young people and old to dedicate their lives to the
furthering of medical knowledge that will alleviate suffering
of people with cancer and other dread diseases.
Yet our mission and purpose in life unlike any other that I
know of has remained non-partisan, due to a large measure by
the actions of those here today--and by many who preceeded
them in the White House and Congress.
The press pays little heed to what goes on here, it is
slow, grudging but vital work.
The fruits of all our labors throughout the years will:
Alleviate pain where there is suffering;
Provide the freedom to live in health so that we can
fulfill our promise and quest in the pursuit of happiness;
and
To provide hope where none existed before.
This is our mission--we have already begun.
It is a terrible thing to envision the lives lost, the
crippling and the pain occurring while all of us are here.
Our duty is more urgent today than ever before.
Economically, our leaders must soon realize that funding
for medical research saves lives, and eliminates suffering.
It also saves over $13 in our economy for every $1 invested!
We must all come to the immediate conclusion that if you
think research is expensive--try disease.
In his own wisdom, Senator Magnuson said ``health is the
first wealth of a nation''. Without it we have nothing.
I would add that: with it we have hope and at least the
ability to look forward and work toward a better life.
It is the duty of everyone who receives funding from the
NIH to work for and fulfill the goal of medical treatment,
cure and prevention and to give this country and the world
the benefit of every penny spent.
It is the obligation of everyone to support this effort and
our public leaders so that we can fulfill our mission.
Do you realize that at least 1,000 people a day die of
cancer? With persistent research and substantial financial
support, we should be able to further lower the death rate
dramatically for all diseases!
Thank you for your own contributions to this coming victory
and for coming to this dedication--now, we must all go and
continue our work.
____________________