Medicine: Oscars for Health

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During the past nine years, 51 medical pioneers and 16 medical groups—responsible for wide areas of public health or working on diseases that are the commonest causes of death—have received gold copies of the Victory of Samothrace plus $1,000 in cash. These medical Oscars are the tokens of the annual, prestigious Lasker Awards, founded by the late Advertising Magnate Albert D. Lasker and his wife Mary and awarded by the American Public Health Association. Of the 51 individual recipients so far, seven have gone on to win Nobel Prizes.* Announced last week were the tenth-year winners'

¶Biochemist Karl Paul Link, 54, University of Wisconsin, discoverer of dicoumarin, an anti-clotting drug, for fundamental contributions to knowledge of bloodclotting.

¶Virologist Robert Davies Defries 56 University of Toronto, for leadership in preventive medicine—his laboratories brewed most of the virus used in the Salk 1954 polio vaccine, made the bulk of Canada's 1955 vaccine.

¶Surgeon Clarence Walton Lillehei. 35, University of Minnesota, and three colleagues, for cross-circulation and other techniques allowing safer surgery inside the heart (TIME, May 10, 1954 and April 4, 1955).

¶Psychiatrists Karl A. and William C. Mennmger, of Topeka, Kans, for pioneering in improved care of mental patients.

¶The nursing services of the U.S. Public Health Service, Bethesda, Md. (specifically, Lucile Petry Leone, Pearl Mclver and Margaret Arnstein), for leadership in public-health nursing.

¶Four tuberculosis researchers and two drug houses (Drs. Walsh McDermott Carl Muschenheim, Edward Robitzek and Irving Selikoff; Hoffman-La Roche Research Laboratories and Squibb Institute for Medical Research), for pioneering with isoniazid.