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Mary LaskerMary Lasker
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Part:         Session:         Page of 999

page of The New York Times; and, as far as I know, it was used in the Washington Post. They made as much trouble as possible. But you notice they did not investigate the Eye Institute or the Arthritis Institute or anything else that doesn't have as much human emotion connected with it as cancer. They picked cancer because that's what makes headlines.

Q:

That's a PR gimmick, isn't it?

Lasker:

It's a PR gimmick, entirely a PR gimmick, not anything that they found out themselves, that their staff found out themselves. They wanted to make a splash, and they hired this man to do a job on the Cancer Institute. He did it. But the end remains that people want the answer to cancer, and they're not going to get it without spending money, because money is frozen energy that unfreezes itself when you pay people to work. So in the end they may put the fear of God into the people at the Institute and make them even more rigid about what they do or don't do, and they're scared to death about doing anything that they would think of as unconventional, such as interferon was four years ago, it does not necessarily do good. They did it really to make themselves better known I'm sorry to tell you.

Q:

Well, I'm glad I asked you anyway.





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