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Mary LaskerMary Lasker
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since his death. It was really his scale on which he thought and operated that influenced me. I thought that if a toothpaste, which he owned or had an interest in, deserved advertising at the rate of two or three or four million dollars a year that research against disease maiming and crippling people in the United States and in the rest of the world deserved hundreds of millions of dollars. It seemed perfectly simple and natural to me.

Doctors, on the whole, had never heard of these sums and, on the whole, doctors are not administrators of large amounts of money. They're usually really small businessmen if they're general practitioners or specialists; they're small professional men, who, even though they may earn from 10 to a few hundred thousands a year--it's still a relatively small amount of money considering what the total needs and the total wealth of the people of the United States is. And yet, the people of the United States were not only dying tragically but losing taxes and losing their economic advantage by dying of uninvestigated diseases.

Q:

Then, Mrs. Lasker, it seems most fortunate that a person like you, with your background, was the one who should spearhead this federal effort. Perhaps it was only a person like you who could have done that.

Lasker:

Well, I don't know that it was fortunate because I





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