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Mrs. Lasker, last time we were talking about the early stages of the fight to secure adequate appropriations to implement the legislation already on the books for medical research. I believe you want to resume that account today.
Yes, I'd like to go through with the fight and bring it up to date, because even though we got four institutes established--the Heart Institute, the National Mental Health Institute, the Institute for Arthritis and Metabolic Diseases, the Institute for Neurological Diseases and Blindness--and we organized support for more appropriations for the Cancer Institute, we constantly had to fight to get adequate appropriations, As you remember, we started our fight when the Public Health Service had only about two million 600 thousand dollars in 1944 for research against every known type of disease that afflicted the people of the United States.
So, let us take up the fight that Mrs. Mahoney and I made, and Mrs. Mahoney was a very important factor in this because she, by this time, was living in Washington and she made friends with many Democrats. She made friends with Leslie Biffle, the Secretary of the Senate; she was friendly with many people in the White House who worked for President Truman, and later she
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