FRIDAY, JULY 17, 2020 MEDICAL RESEARCH AND PHILANTHROPY
FRIDAY, JULY 17, 2020
The
107th Edition
From Our Archives
MARY LASKER
FROM THE NATIONAL LIBRARY OF MEDICINE
OF THE
NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF HEALTH
Mary Lasker and the Growth of the National Institutes of Health
In the twenty-five years after World War II, the United States built the largest medical research enterprise in the world, with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as its centerpiece. Notwithstanding a dominant political creed that questioned the role of the state in society, the country went further than any other nation in erecting a centralized, government-financed institutional framework for biomedical research. Mary Lasker was a key part of this enterprise: she developed a compelling political rationale for federal sponsorship of medical research, built a powerful lobby that won large research appropriations, and pushed NIH into new scientific directions, at times in opposition to the scientific establishment. Until World War II, medical research in the United States was modest in scale.
It was conducted at universities, non-profit institutes, or private companies, with only a few federal grants-in-aid. Scientists opposed federal financing of research as government infringement on the freedom of science and a violation of the principle that not money, but the individual ability of the investigator counted most in achieving scientific progress. Poor health was considered by many Depression-era Americans to be a matter of fate, and access to health care not a right, but a privilege.
The war changed such attitudes. The draft highlighted the poor health of the American people: one-third of prospective recruits were rejected for medical reasons. Furthermore, the atomic bomb program dramatized that government research could yield scientific breakthroughs. Mary Lasker concluded from these wartime experiences that public health had to be improved and that medical research could ensure such improvement, but only after it was reorganized and given a large infusion of federal funds. “Without money, nothing gets done,” she asserted. Postwar prosperity, rising public expectations of good health and longevity, and a new faith in the potential of science provided economic and cultural impetus for Lasker’s efforts to reshape the medical research enterprise.
She found a close ally in Florence Mahoney, whose husband was an heir to the Cox newspaper chain, the country’s largest, and who shared Mary’s early interest in birth control and mental health. After her divorce in 1950, Mahoney moved to Washington, where she became unofficial hostess to the health lobby, bringing together legislators, policymakers, and scientists at her Georgetown home.
After first pushing for research institutes independent of the National Institute of Health (then still singular), Lasker and Mahoney shifted their position in 1946 in favor of expanding its research capabilities. With their lobbying support, the NIH budget grew 150-fold, to $460 million, between 1945 and 1961, and reached $1 billion by the late 1960s. Several new research institutes were established by 1950, including the National Heart Institute, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Blindness, each with the ability to award research grants to investigators throughout the country and the world, their main function. The modern, plural National Institutes of Health was born.
Mahoney and Mike Gorman, a journalist hired by Lasker to head her lobbying organization in Washington, the National Mental Health Committee, helped Lasker form enduring political relationships with key members of Congress. Of particular importance to Lasker were two Democrats with jurisdiction over medical research policy from the late 1940s to the late 1960s: Representative John Fogarty of Rhode Island, chairman of the House subcommittee on health appropriations, and Senator Lister Hill of Alabama, chairman of the Senate committee on labor and public welfare and the appropriations subcommittee for health. Lasker supplied their committees with figures on death, disability, and loss of income (and thus of taxes) from disease.
In a choreographed ritual that was repeated at annual budget hearings for many years, Fogarty started out by castigating administration officials for “cutting back” the NIH budget request. He then called on expert witnesses, recruited by Lasker, to describe the true financial needs of medical research institutions. These “citizen” witnesses included heart surgeon Michael DeBakey, cancer researcher Sidney Farber, and psychiatrist Karl Menninger, all winners of Lasker awards. Witnesses of lesser renown were coached by Gorman to use plain language in displaying their expertise while showing passion for their subject. “Doctors aren’t used to selling anything,” Lasker stated flatly; they had to be taught that Congress expected them to ask for large increases in research funds each year, lest they be seen as timid in the face of scientific challenges.
After hearing these witnesses, Fogarty, assisted by Gorman and NIH director James Shannon, wrote a report calling for a substantial increase in NIH funds beyond the administration’s budget, an increase of as much as $155 million (for fiscal year 1962). Meanwhile, Lasker and Mahoney secured editorial endorsements of a funding increase in the Cox newspapers. Lister Hill then followed with a similar performance in the Senate, raising NIH appropriations still further.
Lasker’s clout in Congress grew because she had access to Presidents, especially Democrats, supplying them with a steady flow of memos and drafts of speeches. As an aide to President Lyndon Johnson stated, Lasker and her associates “set a new fashion for lobbyists. The moving and shaking done by such womenfolk affects everybody including the most obdurate politician.”
Lasker’s lobbying success drew criticism as well as praise. NIH scientists, although buoyed by the unprecedented resources and prestige they enjoyed in the postwar years, were wary of research funding by disease category through separate NIH institutes. They preferred allocations by scientific disciplines based on the process of peer review of research proposals initiated by investigators, not appropriations to individual NIH institutes for research on specific diseases selected by Congress, which some of them derisively called “disease-of-the-month-club” legislation. Other critics argued that Lasker’s lobbying on behalf of research for cancer and heart disease elevated efforts to extend life for the elderly over initiatives that would save more lives, such as preventive medicine, smoking cessation, and research on trauma and accidents. Advocates of Great Society and civil rights programs who sought to promote access to quality health care questioned whether citizens really benefited from medical research dollars. Such criticism notwithstanding, Lasker’s efforts to drive up funding for research on “dread diseases” that alarmed the public remained politically popular.
One of Lasker’s lobbying achievements was a statutory requirement that NIH establish advisory councils to oversee grant making and overall direction of research–councils that included laypeople as well as physicians and scientists. Beginning in 1950, Lasker served for twenty years, with only brief interruptions, on the National Heart Advisory Council and the National Cancer Advisory Council. Mahoney served equally long on several councils, as did Mary’s sister, Alice Fordyce. For most of these years they were the only women on their councils, which added to the challenge of facing the initial prejudice towards laypersons displayed by the medical professionals on the councils. But Lasker and Mahoney soon learned to use their position on the councils to push NIH to support new scientific fields, such as cancer chemotherapy and research on aging. John Fogarty died of a heart attack in January 1967; Lister Hill and James Shannon retired in 1968. The following year, without Fogarty and Hill’s skillful intercession on behalf of NIH, Congress reduced its budget by $20 million, then the largest cut in the agency’s history. “[T]he inexorable workings of tide and time have combined to diminish the [medical research] lobby’s political power,” wrote one of Lasker’s critics, Joseph D. Cooper, in the Medical Tribune. “Laskerism flourished because the right people were in place at the right time.”
In the absence of national health insurance, medical research was to be the main safeguard of the health of the American people. Yet Lasker’s faith in the power of science to stamp out disease surpassed the ability of researchers to develop new treatments. Nevertheless, predictions of the research lobby’s demise proved premature. Lasker’s political argument that support of biomedical research would in the long run pay large dividends in longevity and productivity for all Americans remained compelling even during the economic and political troubles of the 1970s, and gained new currency with the decoding of the human genome in the 1990s.
Mary Lasker was one of the great philanthropists in New York City. The cherry trees on Roosevelt Island were a small part of her efforts. This NY Times article from 1974 describes her efforts at beautifying the city.
By Enid Nemy • April 28, 1974
Mary Lasker: Still Determined To Beautify the City and Nation
Mary Lasker, a soft‐spoken philanthropist who thinks in grand terms, over the years has contributed hundreds of thousands of daffodils, azaleas, tulips, chrysanthemums, flowering shrubs and trees to the city. She has also watched a good portion of them wilt and disappear, through indifference, neglect and inadequate supervision.
She is she said, a “frustrated” citizen. Frustrated she may be, but the woman who has been called “Primavera in an asphalt desert” hasn’t given up the battle to beautify the city and the nation. It isn’t her only concern—her front‐line effort is reserved for medical research (“You have to be alive to enjoy flowers”) — but Mrs. Lasker’s reserves are formidable. “What I’ve done has really been an act of despair on my part,” she said, sitting in a tree‐framed, flowerfilled room of her East Side townhouse. “It’s not adequate or sufficient.” It never will be adequate or sufficient unless governments — city, state, and Federal — find a dynamic person to act as a catalyst and step in with “big” plans, she added, leafing through one of her many fat leatherbound albums illustrating plantings throughout the country.
Mrs. Lasker, the widow of the Chicago advertising magnate, Albert D. Lasker, and a top‐notch button‐holer and lobbyist for a dazzling number of causes, has put herself out of the running for that particular job. “Im too busy doing something about the matter of surviving,” she said. “… I’m yery good on what we don’t know in medicine… it’s not the will of God, it’s the dumbness of man, and the lack of enterprise and money that’s the problem.” A small part of the problem is being helped by the Albert and Mary. Lasker Foundation, which she and her husband established in 1942.
Half of Mr. Lasker’s residual estate, estimated in excess of $11‐million, was willed to the foundation after, his death of cancer in 1952. The foundation supports medical research, presents annual awards in basic research and clinical studies, and gives awards for outstanding medical reporting.
Mrs. Lasker’s priorities have remained constant since her marriage to her late husband in 1940 (an earlier marriage, to Paul Reinhardt, an art dealer, ended in 1934). During their courtship, Mr. Lasker asked her what she wanted to do most in life. “I want to push the idea of health insurance, and promote research in cancer, tuberculosis and other major diseases,” she said.
Friends are still apt to relate a story about the early days of the marriage when Mrs. Lasker was asked by her husband what would make her happy. “Just fill the house with fresh flowers every day,” she said, He did. A veteran of countless boards and committees‐ involved in medical, charitable and beautification work, Mrs. Lasker is on none of the committees for the country’s bicentennial. “I don’t want to be,” she said emphatically, but as Agatha Christie would put it, her “little gray cells” have been at work.
Mrs. Lasker, herself, probably wouldn’t admit to gray cells; she disapproves of depressing colors. Her 7½story house, facing the East River, is a landscape of impressionist paintings, crystal, silver, inscribed photographs, all of it set in a snowstorm of white, white and more white — walls, carpets, furniture. The cells, no matter the color, have come up with a practical idea for a national anniversary tribute. Practical, in Mrs. Lasker’s vocabulary, means permanent and beautiful “I’m not against learned tracts and giving parties… banquets, tableaux, charades and parades,” she said, looking at once doubtful but amenable to accepting another point of view,
“But I “Politicians don’t understand that people are lonely, depressed and deprived for lack of oxygen and pleasure in green leaves and flowers in big cities.” think we should do something to permanently improve our country.” The bright blue eyes shadowed a little, but nothing could dim the pink and white complexion, as she continued: “It’s hard to get through to politicians.” “Politicians,” she elaborated, “don’t understand that people are lonely, depressed and deprived for lack of oxygen and pleasure in green leaves and flowers in big cities.”
Some of her current suggestions include planting. the highway entrances to New York, including the Major Deegan Parkway, the West Side Highway and the Harlem River Drive, planting daffodils, azaleas and flowering cherries and pears in the parks, and planting trees “all over.” “It’s a simple thought to celebrate—and people feel so resentful by the coldness, the steeliness of cities.”
Mrs. Lasker’s simple thoughts are rarely inexpensive but, she suggested, taken in the context of city and industrial budgets, the cost would not be prohibitive. “It would take about $12‐million to plant all of Manhattan with trees . .. we’d need about 90,000 to 100,000,” she estimated. “That’s nothing for a city with a budget of $10‐ to $12‐billion … and maybe the corporations would give big gifts to see the city planted. It makes sense financially, it would help real estate values.” She hoped, too, that public‐spirited, wealthy individuals would contribute but, she said, with a voice of experience, she would not do the asking. “My husband always said don’t try to raise money from other people — get it from government — and give what you can yourself. If you get private funds, you are constantly in the position of exchanging money with friends — you know, ‘I supported your interest, now you support mine.’”
However, she added, hastily, there was no reason why individuals couldn’t plant ivy around trees, or telephone the Parks Commissioner with indications of interest, or offers of help, no matter how small. About six years ago, Mrs. Lasker gave Central Park 300,000 daffodils and planted 10,000 daffodils and 350 cherry trees along the West Side Highway. Some of the flowers were cut too quickly and many of the trees were left unpruned and untended. “The Wagner Administration was receptive to the plantings we did,” she reflected. “The Lindsay Administration was unwilling to continue… they thought I should not only give the flowers but help with the maintenance.”
The tribulations—and Mrs. Lasker still looks a little forlorn and peeved about them — didn’t pemanently damage her esprit. The 73‐year‐old woman who left Watertown, Wis., more than half a century ago for Radcliffe, Oxford and New York, can still remember the trees, flowers and fresh air of her hometown. Her own childhood, with a mother who loved and founded parks, enables her now to make excuses for less fortunate children. “They shouldn’t do that,” she will say as she comes across a photograph of youngsters walking over the daffodils in Central Park. “But it is lovely to walk in flowers.”
Mrs. Lasker said that she had already asked Mayor Beame to plant the city streets. “He said he didn’t have the money… he can’t do everything he’d like to do.” But she has contributed 20,000 tulips to Park Avenue this year, in honor of Mrs. Enid Haupt, a well‐known amateur horticulturist (who herself planted 150 cherry trees on Park Avenue and around various churches and hospitals). And she joined her stepchildren in giving hundreds of azaleas, 10,000 daffodils and 300 cherry trees to United Nations Park, in memory of her husband.
Despite her love of flowers, Mrs. Lasker admits that her own skill at gardening leaves something to be desired. “I’m a planner,” she said. Was she not also a power — one of the most powerful women in the country? “Powerful? I don’t know.” She thought for a moment. “No, if I were really powerful, I’d have gotten more done.”
FRIDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
SEND YOUR ENTRY TO
ROOSEVELTISLANDHISTORY@GMAIL.COM
THURSDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
CONFERENCE ROOM AT TATA INNOVATION CENTER, CORNELL TECH
EDITORIAL
I have see the the plaque about the cherry trees on the island many times. Looking into the NIH website, I discovered the history of Mary Lasker at the NIH. It is fascinating how individuals can work for the better good. There is a continuation of the story and this is the link for more reading:
https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/spotlight/tl/feature/bench
JUDITH BERDY
Text by Judith Berdy
Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS
Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website
Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c)
Roosevelt Island Historical Society
unless otherwise indicated
FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS
CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD
Copyright © 2020 Roosevelt Island Historical Society, All rights reserved.Our mailing address is:
rooseveltislandhistory@gmail.com
Leave a comment