Five Pioneers Are Awarded Lasker Medical Prizes
By Lawrence K. Altman
The New York Times
September 18, 2005
The 2005 Lasker Awards for medical research are going to scientists who discovered stem cells, invented genetic fingerprinting and developed a powerful technology that played a crucial role in mapping the human genome.
The research award for stem cell work is going to Drs. Ernest A. McCulloch and James E. Till, emeritus professors at the University of Toronto and the Ontario Cancer Institute.
Sir Edwin Southern of the University of Oxford and Sir Alec J. Jeffreys of the University of Leicester in England received the Lasker Award for developing two powerful technologies, Southern blotting and DNA fingerprinting, that, the foundation said, “together revolutionized human genetics and forensic diagnostics.”
Comment: In arguing against national health insurance for the United States, pro-market advocates frequently state that a government-run program, like they have in Canada and England, will suppress innovation and technological advances that are possible only in a free-market system.
This year’s Lasker awards, presented to Canadian and British researchers, certainly demonstrate that the manner of funding health care in their nations did not suppress research and innovation. In fact, their work was conducted in an environment that spends significantly less on health care than does the United States.
Probably the two greatest technological advances of the last half century are C-T scans and MRIs. Each was appropriately awarded the Nobel Prize, which were shared with British researchers. Again, the very modest funding of Great Britain’s National Health Service did not suppress their research.
One other very important point: No matter the avenue of funds flowing into health care, whether public or private, there is absolutely no way that the health care tech industries are going to simply walk away from the $1.9 trillion that we are already spending. They will continue to do everything in their power to try to get a portion of that, including innovative research and practical applications of publicly-funded research through the NIH.
Although unrelated to this message, it is imperative that we acknowledge the fifth Lasker Award mentioned in the title: “… a nonscientist, Nancy Brinker, is the winner of the Lasker Public Service Award for creating the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, which has helped transform a disease once rarely mentioned in polite conversation into an international issue.”