Man of Millions

Named last week to receive one of the 1957 Albert Lasker Awards of the American Public Health Association was a doctor who has handed out more money for more medical research than any other man in the world--a total far greater than all the Rockefeller grants in this field. The doctor: Cassius James Van Slyke, 56, who has never practiced for any patient other than Uncle Sam.

After a typical run of humdrum assignments as a U.S. Public Health Service surgeon, Van Slyke found himself at World War II's end investigating the potency of penicillin as a treatment for venereal disease. When the price of penicillin plummeted, freeing money previously earmarked for this project. Van Slyke was assigned to distribute $400,000 in grants for medical research. With this modest sum, Van Slyke began in 1946 by cautiously asking medical schools whether they could tse any money. He was promptly deluged with requests, and Congress gradually upped its medical research approprialtion. By now, the U.S. Government is by far the biggest supporter of medical research, footing half of its bills, and one-third of them are paid through the PHS grants program. For fiscal '58, Van Slyke's baby is getting a whopping $108 million for 7,000 projects.

Realizing that no one man could have the knowledge to pass on thousands of requests dealing with projects on the unmarked frontiers of a dozen medical sciences, Van Slyke has organized specialists in each field into study councils to make recommendations. Most of the time, Van Slyke and his advisers were right in their choice of projects to back, notably research with anti-TB drugs, the momentous blood-fractionation work of Harvard's late Edwin J. Cohn (TIME, Sept. 12, 1953), various artificial heart, lung and kidney machines, basic studies seeking better understanding and treatment of heart disease. Ironically, Dr. Van Slyke could not attend last week's Lasker Awards luncheon in Manhattan. The sometime director (1948-52) of the National Heart Institute was at home recovering from a heart attack.

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