Mary Lasker

Mary Lasker

Mary Woodard Lasker (November 30, 1900 - February 21, 1994) was an American health activist and philanthropist. She worked to raise funds for medical research and founded the Lasker Foundation.

Quotes

• If you think research is expensive, try disease.
  • The Lasker Legacy

Quotes about Mary Lasker

• If you were to compile a list of the most dynamic philanthropists of the twentieth century, Mary Woodard Lasker (1900-1994) would have to be included. Lasker’s single-minded mission, for which she used the resources of the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation for more than forty years, was to dramatically increase taxpayer funding for federal government medical research on heart disease, cancer, and stroke.
  Lasker was brilliantly successful in her efforts. Her relentless lobbying, climaxing in the Nixon Administration’s “War on Cancer,” resulted in the National Institutes of Health being transformed from a tiny agency with a budget of $5 million in 1949 to a vast operation with a multibillion dollar budget in the 1970s. But her effort was based on a spectacularly faulty premise: that if the federal government spent enough money, “a cure for cancer” would somehow be found. She consistently held this view throughout her long career. In 1986, forty years after she began her one-woman lobbying effort, a reporter from Business Week asked Lasker whether the notion that a cure for cancer could be found if government funding were increased was unrealistic. She said, “Nobody knows the full picture about any of these diseases, so how does anyone know what’s an unrealistic expectation and what’s not?”
  • Martin Morse Wooster, (2012) . "review of The Man Who Sold America: The Amazing (But True!) Story of Albert D. Lasker and the Creation of the Advertising Century (2010) by Jeffrey L. Cruikshank and Arthur W. Schultz". Conversations on Philanthropy (conversationsonphilanthropy.org) IX: 164–167.