Lasker, Mary
(Health philanthropist and political activist.)Biographical Information:
Mary R. Woodard was born in Watertown, Wisconsin, on November 30, 1900, the elder of two daughters of Frank Elwin Woodard, a banker, and the former Sara Johnson, a housewife who had founded two local parks. She studied at Donner Seminary in Milwaukee and the University of Wisconsin before graduating cum laude from Radcliffe College with a major in art history in 1923. After studying briefly at Oxford, she settled in New York City, where she began working at the Reinhardt Galleries. After she married the owner of the gallery, Paul Reinhardt, in 1926, she began amassing a notable art collection of her own. The marriage, however, ended in divorce after eight years.
On June 22, 1940, she married Albert Davis Lasker, who was twenty years her senior and was the president of the Lord & Thomas advertising agency. Lasker was one of the best known public relations men of the era, devising popular campaigns for such clients as Kleenex, Quaker Oats and Frigidaire. None of his campaigns, however, was as successful as the advertisements he created for Lucky Strike, which linked the brand to slimness and health and helped it become the nation’s best-selling cigarette. It is not without irony, considering his and Mary Lasker's later commitment to supporting heart and cancer research, that the success of this campaign undoubtedly caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of women from heart disease and cancer.
As a child, Mary Woodard Lasker had suffered from recurrent ear infections and had vowed to do something to advance medical research when she grew up. This dream was deferred but never forgotten, and her marriage to Lasker finally gave her the resources to pursue it.
In 1942, Albert Lasker sold his advertising agency and the couple started the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation. The Foundation aimed to encourage biomedical research in the United States by offering the initial seed money to promising research projects. Once the research was far along too have demonstrated results, they then helped arrange ongoing federal financial support. In 1945 the Lasker Foundation began sponsoring the Lasker Medical Research Awards, which were designed to recognize major new advances with the potential to eradicate human disease. The awards proved a great encouragement to up-and-coming researchers, prompting heart surgeon Michael DeBakey to declare, “Mary Lasker is an institution unto herself. Asking what her importance has been is like asking what Harvard has meant to this country.”
Cancer became the particular focus of Mary Lasker’s attention after her housemaid was diagnosed with the disease in 1943. She became dissatisfied with the outdated approach of the American Society for the Control of Cancer (ASCC) and put forward a plan for reorganizing and modernizing it so that it could begin funding research. The Lasker's soon became the driving forces behind the organization that became known as the American Cancer Society, and the 1949 ouster of ACS chairman Clarence Cook Little was attributed to her intervention.
When Albert Lasker died of abdominal cancer in 1952, Mary Lasker redoubled her efforts and persuaded her sister, Alice Fordyce (1906-1992), to join her in administering the Lasker Foundation. Mary Lasker also continued to do everything in her power to increase government funding of medical research. She has been credited with a significant role in lobbying for such developments as increased funding of the National Institutes of Health, which made possible the National Cancer Institute and other research centers focusing on specific diseases. She also played a key role in the 1971 National Cancer Act.
Along the way, she developed extensive governmental connections, and Lyndon Johnson tried to convince her to become U. S. Ambassador to Finland in 1964. But she remained focused on finding ways to fund medical research and even sold off much of her art collection so that she could give more money away. In addition, she carried on one of her mother’s legacies by making extensive contributions to funding the beautification of urban spaces in both New York and Washington.
Mary Lasker’s commitment to philanthropy earned her many honors, including a Congressional Gold Medal and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Perhaps the most fitting one came in 1984 when Congress named the National Institute of Health’s Mary Woodard Lasker Center for Health Research and Education in her honor. She died at her home in Greenwich, Connecticut, on February 21, 1994, at the age of 93.
Papers:
Mary Lasker’s papers and two extensive oral-history interviews are archived at Columbia University.
Sources:
Michael R. Beschloss, Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963-1964
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998).
Allan M. Brandt, The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America (New York: Basic Books, 2007).
Nadine Brozan, “Woman in the News: Mary Lasker; Lobbyist on a National Scale,” New York Times, November 21, 1985.
“Columbia University Libraries Oral History Research Office: Notable New Yorkers,” http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/digital/collections/nny/laskerm/profile.html.
Richard Kluger, Ashes to Ashes: America’s Hundred-Year Cigarette War and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris (New York: Vintage Books, 1996).
Eric Pace, “Mary W. Lasker, Philanthropist for Medical Research, Dies at 93,”
New York Times, February 23, 1994.
“Profiles in Science: National Library of Medicine,” http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/TL/Views/Exhibit/narrative/biography.html.