Jed Manocherian wants your attention—but not for himself.
The real estate developer who founded a group called ACT for NIH nearly a decade ago wants you to give some thought to Mary Lasker, a philanthropist and political operator who is credited with engineering America’s structures for conducting biomedical research.
This includes spearheading the development of the National Cancer Act and shepherding it through Congress and to President Nixon’s desk in 1971. Lasker died in 1994 at age 93.
Soon after Manocherian started ACT for NIH, former NIH directors Francis Collins and Elias Zerhouni told him about Mary Lasker’s campaigns that forced the U.S. government to broaden its World War II research programs and begin to fund—and drive—biomedical research.
It’s not difficult to see why Manocherian would become captivated with the character of Mary Lasker, a woman born in 1900 whose obsessions included tulips, cherry trees, paintings, mental health, heart disease, viral oncology, and cancer immunology. Yet, when he tried to find a book about her, there was nothing.
The story of Mary Lasker’s long life was largely untold.
Mary flashes by in memoirs and history books, a lady with big hair and a penchant for colorful getups and more colorful aphorisms who knows how to solicit advice, how to listen, how to think, how to write checks, and how to make things happen in Washington.
There was a chapter about Mary in a book published in 1960, about her husband, Albert D. Lasker, the creator of modern public relations industry. Another—excellent—book about Albert has come out since.
Kicking off the process of erasing gender imbalance in Lasker bibliography, last month Manocherian’s ACT for NIH published the first-ever book-length biography of Mary Lasker.
This is not a commercial project. The purpose is public education, changing minds, challenging people, including people who hold the power of the purse, to think big about the promise of biomedical research.
The book, “Angel in Mink: The Story of Mary Lasker’s Crusade for Medical Research and the National Institutes of Health,” is based largely on detailed oral histories that Lasker left behind and includes a collection of haunting photographs that cover her life.
The book is available on the Cancer History Project.
ACT for NIH is sending thousands of printed copies to academics, advocates, and members of Congress.
“At the top of the list (after President Lincoln) of people that are not alive that I wish I could meet is Mary Lasker,” Manocherian said to The Cancer Letter.
“Mary’s most famous quote ‘if you think research is expensive, try disease,’ is more relevant today than ever. With an increasing and aging population, healthcare costs are skyrocketing, and on an accelerating trajectory to bankrupt our federal government,” Manocherian said.
“I’m certain Mary would tell everyone that we are still delaying and discarding the majority of highly merited research, and I hope she would be a driving force to double the NIH budget. As NCI success rates are 15.4%, I think Mary would be supportive of $1 billion annual increases to the NCI budget until NCI success rates are back to 2003 levels at around 30%.
“I think Mary would be impressed with Director Bertagnolli who has been deft in her efforts to ‘end cancer as we know it.’”
A conversation with Manocherian appears here.
The story of Mary Lasker is a story of vision, persuasion—and gender.
“So, although I never met her, I have to believe that she was so intelligent and therefore understood that for a woman to make a difference, for a woman to move around the corridors of the nation’s capital and talk to presidents and get the National Cancer Act passed, and get budgets raised for the NIH, that she understood that as a woman, she had to do it differently than a man could,” said Claire Pomeroy, president and CEO of the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation.
“I’m sure she had insight into that. So, I think this is a story of how over the decades, one woman found ways that were effective, given the societal norms of the time, that were effective in driving change that very few people have ever been able to do.”
A conversation with Pomeroy appears here.
Shirley Haley, the book’s author, said she sees Mary Lasker as an unsung hero—nearly forgotten because she was a woman.
“There’s a genre now of unsung women who have done so much to contribute to society the way we know it today,” Haley said. “Hundreds of book groups all over the country are seizing on that literature and reading all these books about women, and Mary outshines them all.
“She was so multifaceted. We didn’t even get a chance to put in the stuff about her investing in Broadway plays or a lot of her work beautifying cities. So, there’s much more to be written about Mary, but in the meantime, it’s just gratifying to know that we have her story out there.”
Portraits of Mary
“Mary Lasker’s influential advocacy career captures the core tension of health policy in the second half of the 20th century: should we understand disease as a biological problem or a political problem?” said historian Robin Wolfe Scheffler, an associate professor within the Program in the Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of “A Contagious Cause: The American Hunt for Cancer Viruses and the Rise of Molecular Medicine.”
“As an avid New Dealer, Lasker made the ingenious and novel decision to place government research at the center of her anticancer fight. Fatefully, this ushered in the expansion of the NIH into a world-leading biomedical research institution and profoundly deepened our biological understanding of cancer,” Scheffler said. “However, it left the question of how to ensure access to these medical advances—the broader dream of national health coverage—unanswered.”
Here I must disclose that my obsession with Lasker began 29 years ago, when I was writing her obituary for The Cancer Letter (March 4, 1994).
Source: Lasker Foundation
At that time, I could pick up the phone and call former Rep. Paul Rogers, a Florida Democrat who helped craft the National Cancer Act. I could also call Helene Brown, an American Cancer Society activist who referred to Mary as “a good friend,” and Kristin White, a reporter who worked closely with Mary.
On her Washington jaunts, Lasker could stay at the White House, then pop in to the Capitol, where she might attend a closed markup session and drop in to see key lawmakers and chat about their health.
“Mary and her entourage came down the halls,” Terry Lierman, former Senate staff member, recalled Lasker’s 1974 visit to Warren Magnuson (D-WA), chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. “Everybody was standing at attention and the senator was getting ready and prepped for it. I had never seen anything like it before. You would have thought the Queen of England was coming.”
Lierman, who later became Lasker’s Washington lobbyist, was one of the people I spoke with when I wrote the obit. Nathaniel Polster, a journalist turned lobbyist for the American Cancer Society, who was hired by Lasker, recalled following his boss on a sweep of the Capitol.
“She walked into Tip O’Neill’s office and said, ‘Are you taking your pills?’” Polster recalled. “And O’Neill said, ‘Damn right I am,’ and pulled the pills out of his desk.”
At the time, O’Neill (D-MA) was the House majority leader.
She understood the theatrics of politics.
“She would come to markups, and she would either get the first seat in the front row or she would stand up so nobody could miss her,” Lierman told me.
Mary and her entourage came down the halls. Everybody was standing at attention and the senator was getting ready and prepped for it. I had never seen anything like it before. You would have thought the Queen of England was coming.
Terry Lierman
She wasn’t just the only woman in the room. She was a grand dame with a bouffant hairdo, wearing a sable coat, deliberately sticking out in the all-male, out-of-sight Capitol Hill sausage-making session closed to the public. If you are going to engage in theatrics, costumes can only help.
This took audacity, but greater audacity would have been required to have her removed.
While Lasker kept up with medical literature and followed politics religiously, she understood that people have little appetite for complexity. “If you can’t get it on a three-by-five-inch filing card, you’ve lost the message,” she said often.
“Mary used to say, ‘You can get more money out of the government in one day than you can get by going door-to-door for 10 years,’” Helene Brown told me. Some Laskerisms had theological overtones: “I am opposed to heart attacks and cancer and strokes the way I am opposed to sin.”
Campaign contributions were only one part of Lasker’s Capitol Hill strategy. Her own contributions were relatively small, usually between $500 and $1,000, which she gave to Democrats and, as she put it, “even Republicans.” (“There are a few good ones,” she used to say.)
However, if a politician was useful to her, Lasker was known to make introductions to other donors, whose contributions added up to a far greater sum, associates said.
Soon after Vincent DeVita became director of the NCI Division of Cancer Treatment, Lasker made an appointment to see him.
Source: LBJ Library, photo by Yoichi Okamoto
“I was a brash young man then, and no philanthropist, no matter how well thought of, was going to tell me what to do. But she came into my office, and I saw immediately that she was a person who made sense,” DeVita recalled in 1994. “I was a convert within minutes.”
The following year, Lasker requested $200 million above the president’s budget proposal for NCI.
“Mrs. Lasker, $200 million is a lot of money,” DeVita while accompanying her on Capitol Hill.
Not to worry, she replied. “You are going to get half of what you are asking for.” Indeed, that year, NCI received $100 million over the president’s budget.
Lasker’s chief obsession was finding a vaccine that would eliminate cancer much like a vaccine has eliminated polio.
Of course, Lasker couldn’t have known how today’s science would develop, but she did know that it was important to keep viral oncology funded. In today’s dollars, the cost of research in viral oncology at NCI would have amounted to billions.
Yet, there was no way to predict that this research would result in today’s immunotherapy, MIT’s Scheffler said in a recent podcast on the Cancer History Project.
Said Scheffler:
Many people liken the virus cancer program to a Moonshot. In that case, it’s a Moonshot that was building a rocket for a planet people couldn’t agree was even out there.
This is really, really big science. It’s bigger than the Human Genome Project.
They eventually set up a series of programs, the Special Leukemia Virus Program, the Special Virus Cancer Program, and then just the Virus Cancer Program, which are using these managerial methods, taken from the defense department in NASA, to oversee the discovery of a human cancer virus and the development of the vaccine.
I went back, reading the medical literature, reading the scientific literature, reading annual reports of the American Cancer Society, reading congressional testimony, trying to find why people had agreed that this really controversial idea suddenly merited the investment of what in today’s terms would be billions of dollars in medical research.
And I couldn’t find it.
Yet, Mary believed, and when Mary believed, she proselytized.
In 1981, Kristin White, a reporter, sent Lasker an advance copy of a news story on the discovery of the HTLV-1 virus at the NCI laboratory directed by Robert Gallo.
“You realize, of course, what this means,” Lasker said in a telephone call to White. “It means there will be a cancer vaccine.”
To accelerate development of a vaccine, Lasker organized a seminar of leading scientists to discuss the implications of the discovery, then scheduled a lobbying trip to Washington.
Source: JFK Presidential Library and Museum, photo by Robert Knudsen
“I am going to speak to Mrs. Reagan, and I am going to take her to NIH and meet with Dr. Gallo,” Mrs. Lasker said to White.
Weeks passed and White heard nothing of Lasker’s meeting with the First Lady. Finally, White picked up the phone.
“Mrs. Reagan is not interested in science,” Lasker said. “Her father was a surgeon.” Following this condemnation of the First Lady and surgeons, Lasker apparently felt obligated to add something nice:
“But Mrs. Reagan is a wonderful housekeeper. I have never seen the White House look so pretty,” Lasker said.
Lasker’s own housekeeping strategies were something of an amusement to White. “Whenever I would go to Mary’s for lunch, we would have a souffle and a dainty salad—a ladies’ lunch,” White said to The Cancer Letter. “But whenever men were present, there would be a magnificent mixed grill.
“Mary was a little sexist and thought men needed meat. In many ways she was a woman of the 19th century.”
White was one of 40 passengers aboard Flight 93, which crashed into a field in rural Pennsylvania on Sept. 11, 2001. Heroic actions of these passengers thwarted an attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Lasker and her friends, nicknamed “Mary’s little lambs” and the “Laskerities,” were prone to making big promises, which included finding the cure for cancer by the U.S. bicentennial.
This promise was a part of the runup to enactment of the National Cancer Act. Did these shrewd individuals deliberately overpromise in the halls of Congress and in a “Mr. Nixon: you can cure cancer” newspaper ads that ran across the country?
Richard Rettig, the author of “Cancer Crusade: The Story of the National Cancer Act of 1971,” the authoritative history of enactment of this landmark law and the beginning of the National Cancer Program didn’t get a chance to speak with Lasker and didn’t have an opportunity to ask her directly.
In 2015, I did get a chance to ask former NCI Director DeVita whether he believes Mary knew that there was no way to get cancer cured in four years (The Cancer Letter, Nov. 6, 2015)
DeVita’s answer:
She was a very smart woman. I never said to her, “Mary, we’ll do our best, but you know it can’t be done.”
That would have been foolhardy, because Mary didn’t like people who were negative. So, we didn’t approach it that way. My feeling is she did know. But she never said she knew. She always felt that the end justified the means. That’s how she operated.
We all kind of operated on the assumption and didn’t have to explain it, because everyone knew it couldn’t possibly be done. We couldn’t get money going to the labs until 1974, two years before the bicentennial. I mean it was an impossible feat. But some people in the press and some people in Congress did really believe it.
And they never let us forget it.
“An Angel in Mink”
Would Mary have approved of an effort to use her biography for political purposes?
Based on everything known about her, she would have been delighted. Anything that brings in more Laskerites and more federal money would be a worthwhile effort.
Manocherian took a gradual path to advocacy for cancer research. First, he joined the Board of Visitors of MD Anderson Cancer Center. There, MD Anderson’s then president, Ron DePinho convinced him that funding for biomedical research was scarce—and there was an opportunity to advance progress (The Cancer Letter, Sept. 26, 2014).
I never said to her, ‘Mary, we’ll do our best, but you know it can’t be done.’ That would have been foolhardy, because Mary didn’t like people who were negative.
Vincent T. DeVita
ACT for NIH has a primary mission: increasing federal appropriations for biomedical research.
“While other very effective actors in the community have NIH as one of their priorities, they also often have other objectives. Our only concern is NIH funding,” said Pat White, who left the position of NIH associate director for legislative policy and analysis at NIH to become the group’s president.
“What I realized is that no matter how hard Francis [Collins] worked, no matter how hard we at NIH worked, we were not going to be able to influence the policy and funding discussion—in a way that my leaving government and taking up this effort would allow me to do,” White said at the time (The Cancer Letter, Sept. 26, 2014).
In the past eight years, NIH funding has gone up by $17.2 billion, or 57%. Manocherian says that even with these historic increases, we are still delaying and discarding the vast majority of highly merited research. We must restore NIH grant success rates from 21% today to 2003 levels around 30% (a 50% increase), Manocherian says, advocating for a doubling (The Cancer Letter, Feb. 15, 2019).
As Manocherian grew increasingly interested in Lasker, he came across an essay written by a high school student named Langley Grace Wallace. Wallace at the time was a student at Sidwell Friends School in Washington. Now, according to her social media, Wallace is a medical student at Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California.
“It is a very well researched and written paper which I have shared with many members of Congress,” Manocherian said to The Cancer Letter.
Lasker came up repeatedly in Manocherian’s conversations with Michael Stephens, former staff director of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, HHS and Related Agencies. Stephens agreed to help Manocherian set up the organization. He remains on its advisory committee.
Source: LBJ Library, photo by Yoichi Okamoto
“Jed is a person who doesn’t seem to sleep very much at night, and he’ll do his own research about things. So, he would keep looking for things about Mary, and he would occasionally ask me, because he couldn’t find a real biography of her,” Stephens said.
“He did stumble on this lovely piece, which I think you may have run before of this high school student who wrote this biography, which was actually available on Amazon, and I think he went out and bought 200 copies of it and gave it to everybody who knew. It’s about a 50-page wonderfully done high school paper on her.
“Jed continued to talk about this, and I kept thinking in the back of my mind when we would have these conversations over a glass of wine,” Stephens said. “I had this recollection of somebody whom I’d heard wanted to write a biography of Mary, and I just couldn’t put it together, and then we moved on to do things, and then six months later, it would come up again, and then one of these conversations.”
[Mary] must have had an incredible mind and memory, and she was always thinking about whom to put together in a room, and then let them interact, and good things would happen.
Shirley Haley
Finally, Stephens’s memory clicked. He did know of someone who was working on a book about Mary. It was Bradie Metheny, a journalist who for years published Washington FAX, a daily publication focused on biomedical research and appropriations.
Stephens hadn’t talked with Metheny for a long time, but it would not have been difficult to reach out to find out how the Lasker project is going.
“So, when I talked to Jed, he said, ‘Reach out to him and ask him if we can be helpful to get this done,’” Stephens said.
Metheny brought in his long-time collaborator, Shirley Haley.
Metheny started to send chapters to Stephens. Alas, after producing three chapters, Metheny, who had been ill for years, died of cancer. This left Haley with the task of completing the manuscript, which she decided to do as a tribute to Metheny.
The writing was hampered by the pandemic, which made it impossible to travel to the archives at Columbia University. The Mary Lasker collection there consists of 795 boxes and 7 flat boxes, which amount to 353 linear feet of documents.
Haley relied on a series of interviews Lasker conducted over two decades, between 1962 and 1982.
Clearly, a person who collects so much documentation wants her story told.
“She was a little pushy, a little demanding, but I admire the fact that she’s a very good manager of situations and people, and she must have had an incredible mind and memory, and she was always thinking about whom to put together in a room, and then let them interact, and good things would happen,” Haley said.
“If you look through her history, through her life, I’m not sure what caused that and she must have just been born with a really great attitude, because there was no huge crisis or anything that brought that out in her that I could see.
“She was just that way. She found a way to do anything she wanted to do.”
“The Angel in Mink” is the first Mary Lasker biography, but not the last. Another biography, by Judy Pearson, will be published by Mayo Clinic Press in September.
