Lasker Officials Vow To Carry On In Tradition Established By Alice Fordyce

There won't be any loss of continuity in the Albert Lasker Medical Research Awards program caused by the recent death of Alice Fordyce, former executive vice president of the New York- based Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation, say scientists associated with the program. Fordyce died September 9 at the age of 86, after a brief illness. Jordan U. Gutterman, who replaced Fordyce as Lasker Foundation executive vice president and director of the Lasker awards program on Dec. 31, 1990, says that the time he spent discussing the program with Fordyce before her death provided the necessary background he needed to ensure its successful continuation. Says Gutterman, who administered the awards for the first time when they were given in 1991, after a one-year moratorium in 1990: "Although she traveled a lot that year, she was available quite a bit for me." Gutterman says that, since "we were already going through a transition because she had stepped down," there should be minimal disruption due to the loss of Fordyce. "It was good we had experience without her directly involved," says Gutterman, who is chairman of the department of clinical immunology and biological therapy at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Fordyce, together with her sister, Mary Lasker, and Mary Lasker's husband, the late Albert D. Lasker, owner of the Lord and Thomas advertising agency, established the Lasker awards in 1944. The goal of the program was to attract the public's attention to top biomedical research accomplishments, which, the founders hoped, would stimulate increased federal support of research. The $15,000 awards, while not the most lucrative in the scientific community, are widely recognized as the premier prizes for medical research in the United States. The Laskers have become known as Nobel "predictor" prizes; 49 Lasker award recipients have gone on to win the Nobel. In 1991, an alternate-year schedule was established for the Lasker awards. The next awards are scheduled to be given in the fall of 1993. Fordyce was "extremely important to the jury proceedings--their objectivity and their high quality," says Myron E. Essex, chairman of the department of cancer biology at the Harvard School of Public Health, who has served on the Lasker awards jury. "She was an enormous stabilizing and steadying force for the whole awards program," says Edgar Haber, Elkan R. Blout Professor of Biological Science at the Harvard School of Public Health, who has also served on the awards jury. "She [had] a real sense of history for the awards, and was able to see things in great balance. "Alice provided a wonderful complement to Mary," Haber says. While Mary Lasker traditionally has seen to the selection process, Haber says, "there's more to the Lasker Foundation than identifying the people who are to receive the awards." For example, he says, someone has to see to it "that the committee is put together, that the committee meets, that it functions, that the press is well educated, that the awards are well celebrated. Alice filled in beautifully." Members of Fordyce's family, as well as staffers who have been with the foundation for years, will help ensure that the tradition will be carried on, says Gutterman and others. Fordyce's son, James, and her daughter-in-law, Anne, trustees of the foundation, "will be quite involved," says Gutterman. "They've worked very closely with her over the past several years." Fordyce "felt [the program] needed new blood," says Herbert Pardes, vice president of health sciences and dean of the faculty of medicine at Columbia's College of Physicians and Surgeons, who has been a jury member. "She was less important than the awards, in her own mind." One of Fordyce's great contributions, says Pardes, was that "she brought people together. When you went to her [New York] apartment, there were people from the media, people who were scientists, people who were philanthropists, people from foundations, people from other countries." Among these diverse individuals, there was great respect for Fordyce and Mary Lasker "as the whole symbol of the awards," Pardes says. As a result, he says, the program could "command absolutely splendid talent because [talented people] admired the cause and the women." The sisters' "skills [have been] in translating the importance of science to a broader constituency; specifically, a nonscientific constituency," says former jury member William A. Haseltine, chief of the division of human retrovirology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and a professor of pathology at the Harvard School of Public Health. Essex says that Fordyce was "highly motivated to make these awards not just international, but [to ensure] that candidates from developing countries would also be strongly considered when they made fundamental advances." To that end, he says, "she took it upon herself to monitor advances in China and other regions in Asia." At several points in the history of the Lasker awards, the recipients were a subject of controversy. One such period was 1989, when French biochemist Etienne-Emile Baulieu, developer of the abortifacient RU 486, was selected as the winner of the Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award, spurring a debate over the abortion issue. "I was on the jury then, and I thought she handled it really quite well," says Gutterman. She "dealt with the press in a balanced way," emphasizing that "this was a medical-scientific decision. She kept it out of a political discussion," Gutterman recalls. In Fordyce's view, says Pardes, if the jury opted to "reward an area that was politically controversial, the chips would simply fall where they may." "Science needs more friends like Alice Fordyce," says Haseltine. "We'll all miss her wonderful presence." Nonetheless, he predicts, "the Lasker awards by now have--through their record of selecting truly excellent recipients--so much recognition and prestige that they will survive the loss of Alice. "They will continue in perpetuity; they now have their own momentum."

Lasker Officials Vow To Carry On In Tradition Established By Alice Fordyce

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