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Mary LaskerMary Lasker
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more money for research out of my anxiety and first-hand knowledge of medical ignorance in this field.

Well, on November 9th or 10th of '50, I went to Washington with Albert and a group of doctors, including T. Duckett Jones, Irving Wright, Hudson Hoagland, Dan Gordon, C. P. Rhoads, and a layman, Ben May of Alabama, to meet with Frank Laughton, the then Director of the Bureau of the Budget in an effort to explain to him why we needed more money for medical research, across the boards, from the Budget. We have always been unsuccessful in getting much from the Budget, and always have had to fight for it the hard way, from the floor of the Senate and the House.

He listened to us only mildly interested. Fairby, one of the men down the line in the Budget was there, too, and he was always one who was at the bottom of our difficulties. He was small-minded and anti-everything, probably because he had a shrunken arm and nobody was able to help him. As a matter of fact, it turned out that they did allow us about a million dollars more in the mental health field and about the same additional amount for the Heart Institute. However, considering that we wanted sizable amounts, it was really not a great success. Laughton did not really understand that it was an economy to find new treatments and cures for the major cripplers and killers of the people of the United States. He did not understand that if people were able to live and stay in good health, they produced goods and earned income, which in turn got back to the Federal Treasury in the form of taxes. He considered our appeal for funds purely





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