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Mrs. Lasker, when you broke off last time you were in the very midst of your story of the struggle to obtain appropriations to supplement the legislation establishing the various Institutes of Health. You'd reach the point, I think, in the early '50s, and I wonder if you'd continue your story.
Yes. We had discussed the effort to get funds in the House for fiscal '54, and next came the troubles with the Senate.
On May 19th of '53 Anna Rosenberg came to Washington and joined me and we went to visit Senator Thye, the then Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Appropriations. She had done a number of good turns for the Senator while she was in the Defense Department and Thye was extremely cordial and polite. We told him that we felt the needs of the research institutes deserved far more funds than they were getting and that we recommended a total of 126 million dollars for the operation of the five Institutes we were interested in: the Cancer Institute, the Heart Institute, the Mental Health Institute, the Arthritis and Metabolic Diseases Institute, and the Institute for Neurological Diseases and Blindness.
At this point had the appropriation already passed the House?
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