Medicine: Fanning the Fire

The five-year-old Lasker Awards are among the world’s top medical honors. As prizes go, their value is small: the biggest single prize, given with a gold reproduction of Winged Victory,’is $2,500. Lasker Awards impress scientists because they are “working prizes.” They usually skip the obvious, heavily laureled choices and reward men or groups who have done jobs that the public doesn’t know much about.

Last week the award committees were polishing up the citations for next month’s announcement of the 1948 winners. Nobody was telling, yet, who had won—and medical men were busily speculating. One who knows for sure who the winners will be is Mrs. Mary Lasker, vice president and dynamo behind the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation. Mrs. Lasker puts up the cash, but the winners are picked by three organizations: the American Public Health Association, the National Committee for Mental Hygiene, the Planned Parenthood Federation.

Mrs. Lasker, a chic 48, got interested many years ago in the things that kill and disable people. An old friend once asked for a $500 loan to send her mother to a hospital for treatment of cancer. Mrs. Lasker gave her the money, but it was too late. When the money had to be used for the mother’s funeral, “that did it.”

Mary Lasker has long been used to handling money; she started a dress pattern business (Hollywood Patterns) which boomed for 17 years. She was also a successful art dealer (she divorced her first husband, Art Dealer Paul Reinhardt, in 1934). In 1940 she married Albert D. Lasker; two years later he liquidated his rich advertising firm, Lord & Thomas, to busy himself with good works in science and medicine. Both the Laskers are interested in “finding out what is wrong, then helping people who try to clean up the mess.”

The Lasker Foundation, formed in 1942, reflects the varied Lasker interests: fellowships for graduate students working with Sir Howard Florey, co-discoverer of penicillin (he picks the students); money for cancer research directed by the University of Chicago’s Dr. Charles B. Huggins (his projects); research in hardening of the arteries, headed by Dr. Forrest Kendall at Manhattan’s Goldwater Hospital.

Mrs. Lasker’s house on Manhattan’s stylish Beekman Place is decorated with paintings (by Dali, Picasso, Matisse) from her art-dealer days. But her real interest now is the foundation and the awards. Says she: “One human being on fire can do so much and nobody was paying much attention to the fire that came from these men.” The awards, she thinks, may fan the fire a bit.