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Mary LaskerMary Lasker
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sufficient political leverage to do this, and some doctors have told doctors on the committee that it would be unwise and a waste of time to try, which indeed it would: I Because I'm more friendly with Yarborough and Harley Staggers than any of them be:

Q:

What was the reasoning back of the establishment of an Eye Institute?

Lasker:

Well, the truth was that blindness had gotten into the neurological diseases institute when Senator Pepper had IX put through the legislation. I had gotten a bill for a National Blindness Institute introduced, and the Public Health Service opposed it then, and he called me up and said, “Now, they're against these institutes, but I'm going to make two of them -- how about putting blindness together with neurology?” And I said, “All right,” and that's the way it happened. But the truth was that neurology got all the money and all the attention, and blindness got practically nothing, for many years. Now it has gotten up to, it very recently got about 20 million dollars out of 120 million, and we thought that more attention would be put on it if it were a separate institute, as eyes seem to be a very special problem known about by people who are interested in eye problems, and neurologists as a whole are not interested in eye problems. So we're hoping that this will result in some answers to cataracts.





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