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Mary LaskerMary Lasker
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Part:         Session:         Page of 1143

they all got a little something.

Notwithstanding that, early in 1958, for fiscal '59 we decided after many consultations that the citizens' budgets should be a total of 301 million. This was up from 221 million the year before. And these figures were testified to. By now, two years had passed since our big increase and with Fogarty's profound determination and stubbornness, he was deeply interested in research and in the training buggets, and he was making speeches all over the country for various voluntary health groups on health. Senator Hill understood their crucial importance ever since Florence had persuaded him to head the Appropriations subcommittee and I'd sold him on the prime importance of medical research. I told him, “It's no use how many medical schools you build or how many hospitals beds you build, the people will still be sick in them unless we have new ways of treating and curing them. And the things that had happened in tuberculosis and in polio and in the antibiotics were self-evident.” He knew enough about medicine and was interested enough to really profoundly understand this. This was the biggest sale either of us had ever made, our sale of this idea to Hill, because it hadn't really occurred to him, although he was a doctor's son and very, very intelligent, that the crucial importance of research and the pay-offs that you got from it hadn't really been brought sufficiently and violently to his attention for him to consider and realize that this was crucial to the prime of life, average length of life,





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