ABSTRACT
In the USA in early 1970, Mary Lasker the philanthropist and notorious lobbyist of American medical research had assembled a panel of consultants. This group, largely consisting of friends and influential associates also known as the ‘Laskerites or Mary’s little lambs’, was to advise the American Senate on legislation involving a ‘moonshot’ approach for cancer that held out the promise of major progress in the officially declared ‘war on cancer’. 2 One of the scientific panel members was Mathilde Krim, a Swiss-born geneticist and virologist at New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, whose husband Arthur Krim, a media tycoon, was influential in the Democratic party. Krim helped draft working papers on the progress of cancer research, which became part of the technical portion of the panel’s report entitled National Program for the Conquest of Cancer. 3
Krim did her share of the work in searching the literature for promising areas of cancer research that deserved more attention. In doing so she ran across the interferon literature and learned that studies had been published claiming that interferon and interferon inducers, by means of their antiviral activity, had an inhibitory effect on tumour viruses and virus-induced tumours in mice and rats. In accordance with the mainstream in virology Krim firmly believed that tumour viruses played a major role in the aetiology of malignancies not only in animals but also in humans. Unlike most of her scientific colleagues, however, she qualified interferon as a potentially interesting anti-tumour agent for use in humans. Krim managed to include interferon research in the panel’s report as a promising area that needed intensive further study. 4
After presentation of the report to the Senate, Krim remained closely involved with the prelegislative agenda-setting activities of Mrs Lasker up to the enactment by President Richard Nixon of the National Cancer Act in December 1971. This event marked the start of a much expanded National Cancer Program and was the outcome of more than a year of political struggle and compromise in which Mathilde Krim became familiar with the ins and outs of American cancer politics. According to Krim it was Lasker who taught her the political groundwork of science lobbying and the persistence needed to succeed as a self-appointed lobbyist. 5 In the case of interferon more than a little endurance would be required.
