Profile · Watertown, Wisconsin
Mary Woodard Lasker
Medical-research philanthropist and Lasker Foundation co-founder; born in Watertown
$10 million
Mary Woodard Lasker was the Watertown banker’s daughter who became one of the most consequential medical-research philanthropists in American history. She co-founded the Lasker Foundation, helped remake the American Cancer Society, and spent decades pushing Congress to fund the National Institutes of Health on a scale that reshaped postwar medicine. She was born on November 30, 1900, at 400 North Washington Street. Her father, Frank, ran the Bank of Watertown; her mother, Sara, helped found two of the city’s three parks, which is why the girl grew up treating flowers as a civic duty. The childhood left scars. Recurrent ear infections arrived before antibiotics. At four she was taken to see the family’s cleaning woman after a double mastectomy and never forgot the helplessness of that room. She graduated from Radcliffe in art history in 1923, worked at Reinhardt Galleries, and built Hollywood Patterns before marrying advertising titan Albert Lasker. Together they founded the Lasker Foundation in 1942, turned a sleepy cancer society into the American Cancer Society, and helped shove the NIH budget from about $2.4 million in 1945 toward $5.5 billion by 1985. She backed the National Cancer Act of 1971 and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. On May 15, 2009, the first-day ceremony for her 78-cent stamp was held on the front lawn of the Woodard house. She left more than $10 million to the foundation. Watertown is the raise; the science and the lobbying were national.