Albert Lasker
Basic Medical Research Award

Acceptance Remarks by K. Sune D. Bergström

In accepting this award, I would first like to acknowledge my great personal scientific indebtedness to this country. For my periods of training at Columbia University and the Squibb Institutes in the early 1940s, for the support of the National Institutes of Health in building up my research team in the 1950s and for the support at the crucial time of our prostaglandin work, followed by 20 years of stimulating cooperation with the Upjohn Company, where Dr. David Weisblat organized an outstanding research and development program that also included the distribution of thousands of samples to research workers around the world, making possible the rapid and expansive exploration of the programs of thousands of analogues in many biomedical fields.

But the most urgent medical problems, today, are not in our industrialized countries, but in the developing world—comprising about two-thirds of mankind. The one common denominator in all these different countries is the desire of each individual to get enough food and decent medical care. However, our knowledge of many types of disease is very limited—with better preventive and curative methods, this situation could be radically changed very fast. A larger part of the biomedical research potential of our industrialized countries must thus be mobilized for this purpose.

With the commitment of part of the enormous resources of the United States, the biomedical sciences of your pharmaceutical industrialists and relevant agencies, the new knowledge and methods emerging from such a cooperative endeavor would make it possible to fulfill each goal of the World Health Organization—to reach every child with preventative measures by 1990 and provide decent primary health care for everybody by the end of the century.

There are many encouraging signs of the United States participating in this endeavor. One is certainly the increasing international focalization of the prestigious Lasker Foundation. It is in this period of increasing international cooperation in all the health sciences that I gratefully accept this Award.