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

Mary LaskerMary Lasker
Photo Gallery
Transcript

Part:         Session:         Page of 1143

blow to us because we wanted to go ahead with the hearings.

Q:

And you people more or less constituted an unofficial advisory group?

Lasker:

Why, certainly. We were the grassroots rising!

However, Senator Pepper got in touch with MacIntyre and he finally persuaded him that his hearings would do the Bush report no harm. It was the first time, consequently, that the Senate ever heard anything about the need for medical research in the United States. It started on the next day, December 13, 1944.

In addition to the people I named as those who testified there were: Dr. Cowdrie of St. Louis, and Dr. Dyer, who was then the head of the National Institutes of Health of the Public Health Service. Dr. Dyer testified proudly that he and the Public Health Service had never asked Congress for any money that had not been granted, and that the total amount they had ever asked for was two million dollars for research for all forms of sickness and disability of the people in the United States.

Senator Pepper was aghast. He questioned Dr. Dyer closely on this and expressed his astonishment that the Public Health Service had asked for so incredibly small a sum with which to attack and find new treatment and cures for the sick and disabled





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