Crusade to heal America : the remarkable life of Mary Lasker

Summary/Review: "Mary Lasker: The Woman Who Healed America paints the never-before-told story of a remarkable woman and her remarkable life. As a health activist and philanthropist Lasker worked to raise funds for medical research and was co-creator of the Lasker Foundation. The Lasker Award is considered the most prestigious American award in medical research. Lasker and her husband joined the American Society for the Control of Cancer which at the time was sleepy and ineffectual and transformed it into the American Cancer Society. Following her husband's death, she founded the National Health Education Committee. She also played major roles in promoting and expanding the National Institutes of Health, helping its budget expand by a factor of 2000 times from $2.4 million in 1945 to $5.5 billion in 1985. Lasker was also instrumental in getting the US government to fund the War on Cancer in 1971. The portrait that emerges in Persons's engaging and deeply researched biography is one of a feminist who used her femininity wisely. She was savvy, steely, and deliberate. At a time when women in research laboratories and the halls of Congress were an anomaly, Mary Lasker knew how to play the long game, smashing stereotypes in the fashion of female icons like Jeannette Rankin, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Shirley Chisholm. She is inspirational not because she was poor, down-trodden, or in ill health. In fact, she was quite the opposite of all of thos"--