JIM RISWOLD
THE FAIRY GODMOTHER OF MEDICAL RESEARCH
(PORTRAIT OF MARY LASKER)
2013 color digital print 35-1/2 x 29-3/4 inches
Edition of 10

$1000. unperforated
$1500. perforated


Mary Lasker was the fairy godmother of medical research.

She was married to an advertising big shot named Albert Lasker. She
bemused, “If a toothpaste . . . deserved advertising at the rate of two
or three or four million dollars a year, then research against diseases
maiming and crippling the people in the United States and in the rest of
the world deserved hundreds of millions of dollars.”

She started the War on Cancer with Sidney Farber.

She also dared none other than Richard Fucking Nixon to cure cancer.

In an ad.

On December 9, 1969, President Nixon woke up to a full-page advertisement
in the Washington Post that read:

Mr. Nixon: You can cure cancer.

If prayers are heard in Heaven, this prayer is heard the most:

“Dear God, please. Not cancer.”

Still, more than 318,000 Americans died of cancer last year.

This year, Mr. President, you have it in your power to begin to end this
curse.

As you agonize over the Budget, we beg you to remember the agony of
those 318,000 Americans. And their families.

We urge you to remember also that we spend more each day on military
matters than each year on cancer research. And, last year, more than 21
times as much on space research as on cancer research. . . .

If you fail us, Mr. President, this will happen:

One in six Americans now alive, 34,000,000 people, will die of cancer
unless new cures are found.

One in four Americans now alive, 51,000,000 people, will have cancer
in the future.

We simply cannot afford this.

Nixon listened.

On December 23, 1971, he signed the National Cancer Act.

The War continues today.

This piece is dedicated to my friend Brian Druker. He’s the fairy godfather of
medical research. He’s cancer’s cancer. He has won the Lasker~DeBakey
Clinical Medical Research Award. All this makes it fairly obvious to whom
a portrait of Mary Lasker as a fairy godmother wearing a FUCK CANCER
button should be dedicated, don’t you think?