Albert Lasker
Clinical Medical Research Award

Acceptance Remarks by Michael Heidelberger

I was greatly surprised and, naturally, very pleased and honored to receive this second Lasker Award, and am very grateful to the Foundation for it.

In the remaining minute and three quarters available, I would like to give a bare outline of the background of the studies for which the award was given me.

First, there was the enormous stimulus of working with Oswald Avery at the then Rockefeller Institute.

Second, Lloyd D. Pelton's failure, in a massive experiment in the early 1930s, to demonstrate the value of pneumococcal capsular polysaccharides in preventing pneumonia in the unvaccinated Civilian Conservation Corps camps.

Third, without the self-sacrificing cooperation of scores of medical students at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, already overworked by the accelerated wartime schedule, the basic micro-quantitative data on antibody formation due to the vaccine could not have been obtained.

Fourth, the wartime monitoring and field tests of pneumonia at the Sioux Falls camp under the direction of Colin M. MacLeod before and after the vaccination of 8500 persons, one half of the camp's personnel, made this one of the best-controlled and best-documented epidemiological studies in medical history.

Thus we lean on our predecessors and co-workers, and they, too, deserve much credit for our present successes.

Thank you, again.