Lasker, Mary (1900–1994)

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Lasker, Mary (1900–1994)

American philanthropist and champion of biomedical research whose greatest achievement was the National Cancer Act of 1971, a result of her prodding the Nixon administration into a "war on cancer." Name variations: Mary Reinhardt; Mrs. Albert D. Lasker. Born Mary Woodard in Watertown, Wisconsin, on November 30, 1900; died in Greenwich, Connecticut, on February 21, 1994; daughter of Frank Elwin Woodard (a banker and investor) and Sara (Johnson) Woodard; had a sister Alice Woodard; attended the University of Wisconsin; Radcliffe College, A.B. cum laude, 1923; postgraduate work at Oxford University; married Paul Reinhardt, in 1926 (divorced 1933); married Albert Davis Lasker (an advertising executive), on June 21, 1940 (died 1952); children: (stepchildren) Francis Brody; Edward Lasker.

Established the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation (1942); founded the prestigious Albert Lasker Medical Research Awards given annually (1944); played a crucial role in convincing Americans it was socially acceptable to discuss the issue of cancer in public; received the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1969).

Born in 1900 into a prominent family in Watertown, Wisconsin (her father was a banker and investor), Mary Woodard grew up in a family that valued independent thinking. Mary's mother Sara Johnson Woodard was a civic leader who founded two public parks in Watertown. Sara Woodard kept current with the arts and sciences and was particularly interested in such areas as psychology and psychiatry. Mary was also drawn to such subjects; by age 12, she was reading such arcane texts as Hudson's Law of Psychic Phenomena. Although sheltered, her childhood was not always idyllic. Throughout much of it, Mary suffered from painful, recurrent ear infections, and she was severely ill with influenza during the pandemic of 1918–19 which killed more than 20 million worldwide. Although she made a full recovery from these illnesses and would live to age 93, she was always aware of her own, and others', mortality. This was underlined when both of her parents died suddenly of strokes while she was still young.

Mary Woodard first attended the University of Wisconsin and then earned a degree in art history and appreciation at Radcliffe College, graduating in 1923. After doing postgraduate work at Oxford University, she returned to the United States in 1924 and in 1926 married Paul Reinhardt, a New York City art dealer. Working at her husband's gallery, Mary became a savvy art dealer, selling paintings to museums and wealthy collectors, arranging exhibitions of Old Masters as well as contemporary art, and handling publicity for artists. After divorcing Reinhardt in 1933, Mary left the art market, having become "tired of being in a business where numerically few things were sold," she said. "I wanted to sell masses of things to masses of people. I found out that the things which people still bought in a depression were paper patterns."

Her new business, which she called Hollywood Patterns, produced inexpensive dress patterns which were marketed in packages adorned by photographs of the reigning Hollywood movie stars. Manufactured and sold by Vogue Patterns, the new brand was distributed to department-store chains which sold the patterns for an affordable 15 cents each. Mary earned one-third of a cent on each sale, which quickly turned into a substantial sum given the fact that many millions of women sewed their own dresses during the Depression era. Soon, she had become financially independent. Although she knew the value of money and developed a knack for making substantial amounts of it, Mary the banker's daughter also had a taste for luxury and enjoyed being surrounded by creature comforts and beautiful objects, particularly museum-class paintings.

On June 21, 1940, Mary Woodard entered into a world where cost was no object when she became the third wife of a legendary figure in the advertising world, Albert D. Lasker. President and sole owner of the immensely successful Lord & Thomas advertising agency, Albert had long been an influential personality by the time he first met Mary in the spring of 1939 at Manhattan's famed 21 restaurant. More than anyone else, Albert was able to persuade women to start smoking, convincing them that they could remain slim if they reached "for a Lucky instead of a Sweet." (This was in an age when there were no surgeon general's warnings about the health hazards from smoking.) He went on to make even more money organizing brilliantly effective advertising campaigns to increase sales of facial tissues, orange juice, and sanitary napkins. Even before he met Mary, Albert had been philanthropically generous, donating $1 million and his $3 million Lake Forest, Illinois, estate to the University of Chicago. Over the years, he also contributed millions in support of cancer research projects.

Soon after they first met, Albert asked Mary what she wanted most out of life. Her reply was simple. "To promote research in cancer, tuberculosis and the major diseases." By 1942, Mary Lasker had persuaded her husband to sell his agency and retire. That year, they founded the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation to assist and encourage medical research and public health administration. Starting in 1944, the foundation began to give Albert Lasker Medical Research Awards on an annual basis (with occasional exceptions), to honor and reward outstanding contributions to clinical and basic medical research. As the years went by, the Lasker Award came to be recognized in the medical research community as the American equivalent of a Nobel Prize; in fact by 1994, 51 Lasker Award honorees had won the coveted Nobel. Along with a cash award, the Lasker Award includes a reproduction of one of the great art works of antiquity, the Winged Victory of Samothrace.

In 1943, Mary watched helplessly while a beloved family cook died slowly from uterine cancer, then universally accepted as an incurable disease. Lasker was shocked to learn that current medical knowledge could offer no treatment to halt the progress of the malignancy. Determined

to do something, she was able to persuade a number of prominent individuals to donate funds for the American Cancer Society to establish its own research program. She also convinced a Reader's Digest editor to write several articles on cancer, hitherto an almost taboo topic in the media. The articles, which appeared with appeals to support the work of the American Cancer Society, raised the then handsome sum of $120,000, which enabled the organization to purchase support materials for its first large-scale fund-raising drive in 1945. Determined to see this campaign succeed, Mary Lasker paid the salaries of professional fund raisers who helped organize and execute the campaign. She gave the funding on the condition that 25% of the money raised be earmarked for cancer research programs. The 1945 campaign was a considerable success, raising $4.2 million.

Although her involvement in the American Cancer Society's 1945 fund-raising campaign had gone well, Lasker now turned her attention to Washington, D.C., firmly convinced that only the resources of the federal government could be relied on over the long run to support the kind of medical research that could eliminate cancer. In 1946, she and her husband achieved one of their first victories when they played a key role in setting up a research center authorized by the National Mental Health Act. In 1947, both Mary and Albert Lasker gave their support to the Wagner-Murray-Dingell bill for creating a national health insurance system for all Americans, but this never made it out of committee as a result of the vehement opposition mounted by the American Medical Association. Undismayed, over the next few years Mary Lasker mastered the art of lobbying and public relations, often getting ideas and advice from her husband, a past master of persuasion. After Albert Lasker died of cancer in 1952, Mary was even more determined to eradicate the disease. Inheriting both her husband's great wealth ($80 million) and the network of friendships and connections they had created over the years, she spent more time than ever on Capitol Hill to lobby for expanded medical research budgets.

On several occasions, she made major personal contributions to medical research by selling paintings from her superb collection, which included works by Matisse, Miro, Picasso, and Renoir. When a health appropriations bill was in danger of being vetoed by President Dwight Eisenhower, Lasker talked one of the president's golfing buddies into arranging a meeting between Eisenhower and Harvard cancer researcher Sidney Farber. The bill escaped the veto. Lasker gained access to the new Kennedy administration by presenting Jacqueline Kennedy with a $10,000 check for redecorating the White House. One Washington insider claimed that Lasker's charm and tenacity had turned "dozens of Congress members and Presidents into mush."

Soon after her husband's death, Mary Lasker established the National Health Education Committee, which published a number of books designed to inform the general public about major deadly and crippling diseases. Over the next decades, she would be involved in numerous organizations which she founded or energized, including the American Cancer Society (chair and honorary president), the United Cerebral Palsy Research and Education Foundation (vice-chair), the Research to Prevent Blindness Committee (trustee), the National Committee for Mental Hygiene (director), the American Heart Association (member of the advisory council), and a half-dozen others. Never a merely decorative board member, Mary Lasker received high praise from her friend Eleanor Roosevelt , who noted, "Not only can she grasp an idea quickly when it is presented to her, but she sees where you can go with it."

Starting in the late 1960s, Lasker lobbied ceaselessly to expand federal support of cancer research. In December 1969, The New York Times printed a full-page advertisement paid for by the "Citizens Committee for the Conquest of Cancer" which asserted in large type: "President Nixon, You Can Cure Cancer. We lack only the will and the kind of money and comprehensive planning that went into putting a man on the moon. Why don't we try to conquer cancer by America's 200th birthday?" The Citizens Committee was a committee of one: Mary Lasker. Though she spent only $22,000 on the ad, the White House found itself swamped with at least 7,000 letters from the public demanding action on cancer research. In Washington in March 1970, Lasker began her campaign by persuading a receptive Senator Ralph Yarborough of Texas to create a panel of consultants to decide how best to approach the conquest of cancer. She was convinced that because the National Cancer Institute (NCI) was a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which had a philosophy of emphasizing basic biomedical research rather than investigation of promising therapies, the entire thrust of cancer research in the United States had remained overly theoretical while every day lives were being lost.

Because Lasker and Yarborough had chosen the panelists, their central recommendation was preordained. The panel's report, completed in December 1970, proposed that an independent cancer agency be created along the lines of the "we'll land men on the moon within the decade" pattern NASA had adopted in the early 1960s. In effect, NCI was to be separated from NIH. The report argued that only an independent agency free of bureaucratic red tape could efficiently shape and direct such an effort, as well as command the visibility necessary to retain ongoing public and political support.

The panel's recommendations were embodied in legislation introduced in Congress in January 1971. The scientific community, however, was strongly opposed to the dismemberment of NIH. When the bill became trapped in a political morass in the Senate, Lasker enlisted the help of Ann Landers , who, in her first ever "Dear Reader" column, urged the public to write lawmakers to support the bill. A sea of mail inundated Congress, and Senate staffers put up a sign reading: "Impeach Ann Landers." Senator Alan Cranston alone received 60,000 letters within five weeks. Although Mary Lasker and her "Little Lambs," a supportive circle of socialites, physicians, and congressional representatives, made a number of compromises, on balance the "Laskerites" won a substantial victory when the final legislative document was signed into law in December 1971, as the National Cancer Act. Although on paper NCI remained a division within NIH, in reality it became the first among equals, emerging much stronger in budgetary terms (it received an additional $800 million over the next five years). NCI would now be watched over by a special committee reporting directly to the president, and its budget would be submitted directly to his office. Even after the law went into effect, some in the medical community continued to criticize Lasker's fundamental philosophy of medical research, arguing that many of her goals, such as developing a vaccine against cancer, were based largely on wishful thinking and were simply scientifically unrealistic. Others disagreed with her ultra-optimistic point of view, based on her belief that "you can solve any problem if you have money, people, and equipment." Lasker responded vigorously to these and similar criticisms, arguing, "Nobody knows the full picture about many of these diseases, so how does anyone know what's an unrealistic demand and what isn't?"

Although a series of strokes in the early 1980s slowed her down, Lasker continued her struggle to find cures for the major killer diseases. In 1986, when the White House and many members of Congress were still largely in a state of denial regarding the AIDS epidemic, she focused national attention on the need for greater research into that emerging plague by persuading Elizabeth Taylor to appear at a Congressional hearing. Always aware of the power of publicity, over the decades Lasker recruited effective lobbying allies and such media-savvy personalities as heart surgeon Michael E. DeBakey, actress Irene Dunne , Hollywood mogul Louis B. Mayer, and actress Jennifer Jones and her industrialist husband Norton W. Simon. By the end of her life, Lasker had earned three dozen honorary awards and degrees, including the highest award the United States can confer on a civilian, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In the 1980s, Lasker also worked to increase research budgets to seek cures for diabetes, growth disorders, and osteoporosis.

Friends and strangers alike often commented on Mary Woodard Lasker's striking beauty, with her dark hair and violet-blue eyes. She had perfected the role of the society grande dame. At her Manhattan townhouse, which accommodated the stunning Lasker collection of French impressionist and modern art, she enjoyed being the provider of "a calm but interesting setting for people." And in the immaculate, all-white interior (which included her white cat Marshmallow) of her home in Greenwich, Connecticut, she took for granted the privileges known but to a select few.

In addition to her fight against deadly diseases, she supported urban beautification and was generous in providing funds for flowers planted in various locations in New York City. Lasker donated 300 Japanese cherry trees to the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan. In 1953, an article in The New York Times affectionately referred to her as "Annie Appleseed."

After spending much of her long life fighting to make the lives of all people healthier and less marked by pain and suffering, Mary Lasker died of pneumonia at her Greenwich home on February 21, 1994. For Lasker, it had been simply a matter of her being "infuriated when I hear that anyone's ill, especially when it's from a disease that virtually nothing is known about." One way to gauge the success of her efforts can be seen in the expansion of the budget of the National Institutes of Health, which grew from $2.4 million in 1945 to $11 billion in 1993. The National Cancer Institute's budget jumped from $18.9 million in 1950 to $1 billion in 1990. "I am opposed to heart attacks, cancer and stroke the way I am opposed to sin," she said.

sources:

Altman, Lawrence K. "Why Many Trailblazing Scientists Must Wait Many Years for Awards," in The New York Times. September 26, 1995, p. B6.

Cohen, Gary. "A Tobacco Fortune for a Cancer Cure," in U.S. News & World Report. Vol. 116, no. 9. March 7, 1994, p. 21.

—— and Shannon Brownlee. "Mary and the 'Little Lambs' Launch a War," in U.S. News & World Report. Vol. 120, no. 5. February 5, 1996, pp. 76–77.

Culliton, Barbara J. "Recollections on the War on Cancer," in Science. Vol. 237. August 21, 1987, p. 843.

Gunther, John. Taken at the Flood: The Story of Albert D. Lasker. NY: Harper, 1960.

Lawford, Valentine. "Profiles: Mary Lasker," in Architectural Digest. Vol. 42. October 1985, pp. 188–195.

Mahaney, Francis X., Jr. "Mary Woodard Lasker: An Appreciation," in Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Vol. 86, no. 6. March 16, 1994, p. 406.

"Mary W. Lasker, Philanthropist For Medical Research, Dies at 93," in The New York Times Biographical Service. February 1994, pp. 304–305.

Rettig, Richard A. Cancer Crusade: The Story of the National Cancer Act of 1971. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977.

Siwolop, Sana. "The Fairy Godmother of Medical Research," in Business Week. No. 2955. July 14, 1986, p. 67.

Wetterau, Bruce. The Presidential Medal of Freedom: Winners and Their Achievements. Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1996.