Mary Woodard Lasker, the philanthropist and champion of medical research and urban beautification, died on Monday at her home in Greenwich, Conn. She was 93 years old and also had an apartment on the East Side of Manhattan.
The cause was heart failure, said her nephew, James W. Fordyce. She made her last public appearance at a luncheon at the Pierre Hotel in October.
As a patron and volunteer lobbyist, Mrs. Lasker furthered medical research on cancer, heart and eye diseases and in other fields. She also lent her support to beautification projects in New York and Washington that included planting trees and flowers and providing fountains and lighting. And she was a noted hostess and art collector.
In her later years she reduced her activities, but at her death she was still president of the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation, honorary president of the American Cancer Society and a trustee and vice chairman of the United Cerebral Palsy Research and Education Foundation.
In a 1958 speech, Robert Moses, then the Parks Commissioner, said Mrs. Lasker possessed "the irresistible combination Madison Avenue dreams of -- the blend of many essences in the beautiful package."
"Intelligence, vision, generosity, charm, kindness -- Mary has them all," Moses continued.
Co-Founded Lasker Awards
Mrs. Lasker and her husband Albert Davis Lasker, a pioneer advertising executive who died in 1952, established the Lasker Foundation in 1942. In almost every year since 1944, it has given Albert Lasker Awards, largely for outstanding contributions to clinical and basic medical research.
The foundation has often been quick to recognize significant new research, and its awards have great prestige. Besides supporting medical research and health programs, it has also given its backing to efforts to beautify New York and to activities in the arts.
Over the years, Mrs. Lasker also served variously as chairman of the board of the American Cancer Society, a trustee of Research to Prevent Blindness and of the Cancer Research Institute and a director of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene. She was also active in other similar organizations.
"I am opposed to heart attacks and cancer and strokes," she used to say, "the way I am opposed to sin."
In addition, Mrs. Lasker strove to persuade Federal, state and city officials and legislators to provide more funds for medical research on major killing and crippling diseases. She worked to persuade Congress to increase appropriations for the National Institutes of Health and to set up additional research centers concentrating on specific diseases.
"Without money," she said in 1985, "nothing gets done." To make sure things got done, she used to visit the White House (during Democratic Administrations, she added wryly). She also paid calls on Washington legislators, corresponded with Presidents and arranged for scientists to meet Government leaders.
'I Couldn't Cut Up a Frog'
Despite her successes in furthering medical research, Mrs. Lasker used to contend that she lacked scientific and medical aptitude. "Nobody would have me in their laboratory for five minutes," she once said, also with a smile. "I couldn't cut up a frog, and I certainly couldn't perform surgery. I'm better at making it possible for other people."
Her passionate interest in medicine was fueled partly by illnesses of people around her and by her own health; she repeatedly had ear infections during her Wisconsin childhood.
Laskers Lead to Nobels
Over the years, the Lasker Foundation helped shape medical history by recognizing and supporting promising research, and it has repeatedly singled out future winners of the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Fifty-one Lasker winners have become Nobel laureates.
For instance, the foundation's prize jury, whose longtime chairman is the heart surgeon Dr. Michael E. DeBakey, chose two winners of 1985 Albert Lasker Medical Research and Public Service awards -- Dr. Michael S. Brown and Dr. Joseph L. Goldstein of the University of Texas, for their studies of cholesterol chemistry in relation to the clogging of coronary arteries. They were also named Nobel Prize laureates that year.
Commenting on Mrs. Lasker's efforts, Dr. DeBakey said in a 1985 interview: "Mary Lasker is an institution unto herself. Asking what her importance has been is like asking what Harvard has meant to this country."
Throughout their history, Lasker awards have been given in every year except 1960, 1990 and 1992. In early 1990, when it was announced that no awards would be given that year, the foundation had assets of about $2.4 million, down from about $4.5 million in 1980, but an executive of the foundation said that omitting the awards, of $15,000 each, in that year "wasn't really a financial decision." Since then, the awards have been increased to $25,000 each.
'Annie Appleseed'
Like her passion for medical research, Mrs. Lasker's interest in and patronage of urban beautification was long standing. In a 1953 column in The New York Times, Meyer Berger referred to her affectionately as "Annie Appleseed."
Her beautification activities included furnishing funds for tulips, daffodils, begonias, chrysanthemums and other flowers at various locations in New York. Her other urban beautification projects ranged from lighted Christmas trees to 300 Japanese cherry trees donated to the United Nations.
Mrs. Lasker acquired her interest in parks and gardens during her girlhood in Watertown, Wis., where she was born to Frank Elwin Woodard, a banker, and Sara Johnson Woodard, who was a founder of two parks there.
She graduated cum laude from Radcliffe College in 1923 and studied briefly at Oxford. Then she went to work for the Reinhardt Galleries, in Manhattan, where her duties were, as she later put it, "arranging benefit loan exhibitions of outstanding old and modern French masters and selling pictures to collectors and museums."
An Art Collector
She also went on buying trips abroad and began building an art collection of her own, which included works by Miro and Renoir. She sold most of the collection years later when she changed Manhattan homes, partly, as she said, "because I wanted to be able to give away the money."
In 1940, after leaving the art-gallery world, she married Mr. Lasker, who had achieved wealth and eminence as an advertising executive, having joined the Lord & Thomas advertising agency in 1898 and become its owner in 1908.
Two years later, he retired from active business and the Lasker Foundation was set up. In addition, drawing on his own experience in public affairs, he encouraged Mrs. Lasker to press Washington to provide more funds for research in medicine. In the decades that followed, her efforts in that direction bore many fruits.
One notable success was the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. "The N.I.H. has flowered," Dr. DeBakey recalled in the 1985 interview, "because in many ways she gave birth to it and nursed it. It was in existence, but it was she who got the funding for it."
Over the years, Mrs. Lasker also served on the boards of trustees or directors of a number of organizations and institutions, including the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Museum of Modern Art, the Norton Simon Museum, New York University and Braniff Airways.
Won Presidential Medal
She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969, a Congressional Gold Medal in 1989, and other honors. A Health Sciences professorship at the Harvard School of Public Health was named for her in 1989, and a new variety of pink tulip was named for her in 1985.
Mrs. Lasker's first marriage, in 1926 to Paul Reinhardt, the owner of the Reinhardt Galleries, ended in divorce in 1934.
Her sister, Alice Fordyce, was the executive vice president of the foundation and director of the Lasker Awards program. She died in 1992.
In addition to her nephew, Mr. Fordyce of Greenwich, who is a trustee of the foundation, Mrs. Lasker is survived by a stepdaughter, Frances Lasker Brody of Los Angeles; a stepson, Edward Lasker of Los Angeles; three great-nephews; five step-grandchildren, one of whom, Christopher W. Brody of Manhattan, is also a trustee of the foundation, and two step great-grandchildren.
Funeral rites and burial are to be private. A memorial service is to be held in the spring.
