Mary Woodward Lasker Award
for Public Service

It is a pleasure to announce the 2005 winner of the Lasker Public Service Award. The members of the selection committee usually complain to me that the enormous range covered by this award makes it very difficult to select the awardee. In the past few years alone we have given the award to former Congressman John Porter for his great public government role in supporting science and medical research, to Christopher Reeve for his heroic response to a terrible accident and his great advocacy of medical research to help victims like himself, to Robert Foege for his pioneering leadership in eradicating the natural origin of the disease smallpox, and to The New York Times for its journalistic highlights on science and medical research.

The committee usually has contentious arguments related to the candidates' differences, some people claiming that it is difficult to decide between "apples and pears." This is true, but this is why the membership of our panel consists of brilliant individuals, including Bruce Alberts, former President of the National Academy of Sciences; Harvey Fineberg, President of the National Institute of Medicine; Barbara Culliton, Senior Journalist and former Editor of Nature Medicine; Enriqueta Bond, President of Burroughs Welcome Fund; Mrs. David Mahoney, Harvard Mahoney Neuroscience Institute; and Alfred Sommer, Dean of the School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. It is interesting to note that this year, in spite of an enormous range of candidates, we came very quickly to our unanimous choice, Nancy Brinker.

In 1982, Nancy Brinker's sister, Susan G. Komen, died of breast cancer. It is hard for us to believe now but at that time breast cancer was only spoken of in whispers and rarely in public. Its usual course involved mutilating surgery. Susan Komen pleaded with her sister to do something so other women might be saved from this horrible and lonely illness. Nancy Brinker had never been in politics, never in fundraising, never in big organizational efforts, and was a little afraid of them. Nevertheless, she remembered the words of a distinguished rabbi—"If not me, who? If not now, when?"—and she got to work. As a result, the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation has raised more than $740 million to support cancer research, education, screening and treatment; it has given away more than $l44 million in grants to leading scientists; its annual "Race for the Cure" is participated in by hundreds of thousands of runners; breast cancer is understood by every informed reader of newspapers to be one of the leading causes of death in women, and there are several drugs that are close to, but not quite yet, cures.

For this magnificent achievement that would be Herculean for an experienced professional, we have to thank the indomitable heart and the great altruism of one incredible human being—Nancy Brinker, our 2005 Awardee of the Mary Woodard Lasker Award in Public Service.