Mary Woodward Lasker Award
for Public Service

William Foege, this year's awardee of the Mary Lasker Award for Public Service, is long on wisdom, long on inventiveness, and long in the length of his legs. As you will hear from what I say, all of these measures of longitude are significant in his award.

William Foege was Director of the Center for Disease Control when he set out with a few others to eradicate smallpox from the world. Later the CDC under his direction unraveled the medical enigmas of Toxic Shock and Reyes Syndrome and issued early warnings about the spread of AIDS. When the Merck Company decided to make its drug against river blindness available free in Africa, they said they would do so if William Foege were responsible for administrating the program. It was done so well that other companies followed suit and offered their drugs, also free, to underdeveloped and impoverished countries.

A small glimpse of Dr. Foege and the enthusiasm he generates among coworkers, public officials, and natives in Africa can be seen in a couple of events in his life. When he embarked on his campaign to eradicate smallpox, he could generate crowds to come to see him in African villages by getting his cohorts to announce that the tallest man in the world was coming to their village on next Tuesday. When he did arrive he used the publicity to explain about vaccines and get the natives to be willing to be immunized.

A second glance at his ingenuity was his response to an outbreak of smallpox in East Nigeria when they were closing in on its eradication. The conventional wisdom was that the entire population would have to be immunized right away or all was lost. But he didn't have enough vaccine or people to do that. So he quickly collected his helpers—the volunteers and missionaries who had hand radios and contacts with villages—to locate the villages where the outbreaks occurred and quickly immunize everyone who had contact. Moreover, he knew that other villagers who felt healthy and visited other localities would spread the infection, so he interviewed the villagers, found the neighboring markets and schools and quickly immunized the people in those one-day's-walk-away villages. This policy—called surveillance and containment—not only saved the day but became the strategy for the rest of Africa that brought the eradication of the scourge of smallpox more than one and a half years earlier than planned and under the budget allocated.

Dr. Foege later became an adviser to the WHO and had to maneuver his programs for eradication and free drugs to the underprivileged past bureaucrats of many nations, including our own, which requires someone long on wisdom but also long on patience.

Dr. Foege showed his ability to be long on courage when he had to resist in the early days considerable pressure from advocates of aspirin that his identification of it with Reyes Syndrome would have adverse consequences for those who used aspirin for other therapies.

The Mary Lasker Public Service Award is designed to honor those who have been effective in generating support for research or spreading the benefits of research to the wider expanses of society. In a luncheon of this sort with so many distinguished leaders, it is difficult to think of a quick summary of all Dr. Foege's accomplishments that doesn't sound banal, so I will simply fall back on an old cliché that you will see is relevant, even among all these leaders: he is a giant.