Lasker Lens

Besides bringing winners $10,000 in cash and more prestige than any other U.S. medical citation, the Albert Lasker awards have proved to be a reliable lens for focusing international recognition. In the 21 years since Millionaire Adman Lasker founded the annual prize, no fewer than 17 recipients have gone on to receive Nobel awards. The Lasker laurels also honor practical achievement, as well as theoretical research. Of the 1967 winners announced last week in Manhattan, for example, one has virtually eliminated the threat of a killing disease in several Asian nations in the past dozen years; the other has developed key refinements in effective drug therapy.

A prize for clinical research went to Dr. Robert A. Phillips, 61, director of Pakistan-SEATO Cholera Research Laboratory at Dacca, East Pakistan, whose treatment for cholera victims (TIME, Oct. 5, 1959) has cut their death rate from 60% in 1955 to less than 1% today. Cholera, an intestinal infection spread in food and water contaminated by human waste, does not respond to drug treatment alone, kills mainly by dehydration. The key to recovery is in replacement of fluids and salts that the patient can lose at the rate of ten gallons a day through diarrhea.

Iowa-born Dr. Phillips, director of a Naval medical research unit in Taipei before joining SEATO two years ago, simplified a Rockefeller Institute technique for measuring a victim's need for fluids and salts, a process that until then had usually required sophisticated hospital equipment. Working mainly in East Pakistan, Thailand and the Philippines, he developed a new method of intravenous feeding with sodium bicarbonate and other salt solutions. This replacement allowed victims of cholera to outlast the disease until recovery could occur. Because it is cheap and so simple that trained laymen can use it, the Phillips treatment has worked a mass miracle in Southeast Asia.

Formal Entry. As winner of the basic-research award, jurors chose Dr. Bernard B. Brodie, 58, chief of the chemical pharmacology laboratory at the National Heart Institute in Bethesda, Md., whose work has had the effect of upgrading the usefulness of animals as test patients for new drugs. Because different animal species utilize drugs at vastly unequal rates, scientists could apply experimental lab animal results to human patients only in limited ways. But Brodie found that if dosages were gauged to produce comparable levels in the blood plasma, there was less variation in the effects.

Equipped with bloodstream measurements as a common drug denominator, scientists can now take a more meaningful look at medicines discarded as ineffectual. A drug for relief of rheumatoid arthritis called phenylbutazone, for example, once filed away on the basis of trial doses unrefined by Brodie's findings, today has been recognized as effective for humans--even though equated doses have little result in rats.

The citation in public service went to Florida's Democratic Representative Claude Pepper, 67, a congressional partisan of medical legislation for 30 years. It was Pepper, then a Senator, who co-sponsored legislation in 1937 that created the National Cancer Institute, the first of the National Institutes of Health, funded with a then grand budget of $400,000 a year. The institutes, now eight innumber, and the Bureau of Mental Health are provided with a combined yearly budget of $1.5 billion.

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