News releases

May 18, 2009

TO: News directors, editors
FROM: Liz Beyler, 608-263-1986, lbkraak@wisc.edu
RE: ADVISORY: BACKGROUND ON LASKER STAMP-UNVEILING CEREMONY

The new Wisconsin Institutes for Medical Research (WIMR) building at 1111 Highland Ave. was selected as the location for the ceremony at 9:30 a.m. on Tuesday, May 19, because of the university's connections to Mary Woodard Lasker and the groundbreaking medical research that she so generously helped to fund.

The Lasker awards are sometimes referred to as the American Nobels.

Lasker Award recipients from the University of Wisconsin-Madison have included: the late cancer researcher and Nobel laureate Howard Temin; Paul Carbone, who developed a treatment for patients with Hodgkin's disease and for whom the Comprehensive Cancer Center was named; and biochemist Karl Paul Link, whose discovery of an anti-clotting agent some 76 years ago led to the development of the blood thinner Warfarin.

Joining Madison postmaster Paul Nistler at the brief ceremony will be Robert Golden, dean of the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health; Mark Lefebvre (la FAVE), vice president of the University of Wisconsin Foundation; and Walton Schalick, UW-Madison assistant professor of medical history and bioethics.

There is another connection to Lasker. She attended the University of Wisconsin for two years in the early 1920s before transferring to Radcliffe College.

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