Home
Search transcripts:    Advanced Search
Notable New     Yorkers
Select     Notable New Yorker

Mary LaskerMary Lasker
Photo Gallery
Transcript

Part:         Session:         Page of 1143

is a friend of his, and tried to interest him in the economy of giving more money for medical research. He replied it didn't cost money to discover penicillin. This ignorance irritated me so I asked Paul Stark to take Sir Howard Florey, who was in the country a little bit later and was the co-discoverer of penicillin, the clinical usefulness of penicillin, and who made enough of it to show that it could be clinically useful after Fleming showed that it worked on an agar plate, to see Cannon. I took Sir Howard Florey to see Cannon when Florey arrived in Washington once. Florey told Cannon that it had taken over eight million dollars of U.S. Federal money and additional funds from pharmaceutical firms to get penicillin into production and available to our people, that far from costing nothing, it had cost at least eight million dollars of Federal funds during the War, to say nothing of the pharmaceutical money.

Cannon seemed impressed, but in the July conference with the Senate he was of no help.

The same day that we went to see Cannon, Lister Hill gave a luncheon at our suggestion for Florey in the Vandenberg Room in the Senate, to which he invited the full subcommittees of the House and Senate. Among those who showed up were Carl hayden, Senator Mundt, Senator Dworshak, Senator Thye, Stennis, Fogarty, Lanham and Fernandex. Sir Howard, after being magnificently introduced by Senator Hill, who has a great feeling for medicine because of his father and as he himself is a namesake of Lord Lister--his father was a doctor and had been a pupil of





© 2006 Columbia University Libraries | Oral History Research Office | Rights and Permissions | Help