Research!America: The Syndicate's Biggest Funding Lobby

Research!America was created by the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation, which has controlled the federal health esablishment since the 1940s. Its other principle funding sources in 2006 were the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Daniel E. Koshland, PhD (a longtime director of the Lasker Foundation), and The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. R!A's schtick is opinion polls asking broad, general questions about support for medical research, which predictably generate socially-correct affirmative responses. Then they represent the results to Congress as a broad public mandate to increase funding. Never mind that their polls also show that the vast majority of respondents don't even know what the National Institutes of Health is, let alone how it's misusing their money and violating their trust with fraudulent science and social engineering activities, because of the Lasker Lobby.

Ray Merenstein, Vice-President for Programs at Research America, said that only 3 percent of the American public are knowledgable about NIH and over sixty percent cannot name a research institution in their area even if they live near a university. (Summary of meeting Feb. 7-8, 2001, of the National Advisory Council on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.)

According to the blurb on their website, attributed to the Wall Street Journal, "The driving force behind the huge 15% increase in the NIH budget was an umbrella organization called Research!America." It undoubtably helps that there are two ex-members of Congress on their 435 Project National Leadership Council, Paul Simon of Illinois and Paul G. Rogers of Florida. The notable scum on this council included representatives of the ACS, AHA, and the Mary Woodard Lasker Charitable Trust; former HHS Secretary Louis Sullivan; and that lie-spewing anti-smokers' whore we utterly despise, Sam Donaldson of ABC News. Sullivan, Donaldson, and Ellen Levine of Good Housekeeping are on the Board of Directors; former Assistant Secretary for Health Philip R. Lee is an Honorary Board Member, and former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop is an Emeritus Board Member. William Foege, co-author of the "Sacred Lie of Health Fascism," McGinnis & Foege 1993, is on the Scientific Advisory Council. Former CDC Director and Bush insider William Roper is on the Board of Directors also. (Link died - 435 Project National Leadership Council http://www.researchamerica.org/programs/435_nlc.html)

"Research America, backed by pharmaceutical giants, health associations, medical schools and celebrities, plans to spend $5 million over five years to build support for its goal in all 435 Congressional districts.... Among the corporate backers are Automatic Data Processing Inc., Baxter International, Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., Glaxo Wellcome Inc., Johnson & Johnson, Merck & Co. Inc., Monsanto Co., Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp., Parke-Davis, Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, SmithKline Beecham, Times Mirror and Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories. All stand to benefit from increased research funding. Project 435 funding is from Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation, Burroughs Wellcome Fund, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and other such groups." (Group seeks more for NIH budget. By Gary Shepherd, Health Care Editor. Tampa Bay Business Journal, June 26, 1998.)

No, Research!America is not a puppet of Big Pharma - it is the other way around. The Lasker Lobby has been in the drivers' seat since the 1940s, dictating the agenda and dispensing our money. They represent the Wall Street banksters, lawyers and hucksters, who are idiots that believe in charlatanism.

Mary Woolley

The president of Research!America, is also on the Board of Directors of the Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute; the Coalition for Health Services Research (another umbrella group); and Friends of Cancer Research.

J. Morton Davis

Member of the Board of Directors of Research!America; Chairman and sole owner of D.H. Blair Investment Banking Corp., has an extensive history of dubious ethics.

Thomas W. Langfitt

This R!A director is blamed for The Pew Charitable Trusts' shift from their founders' conservative views, toward radical environmentalism and other leftist causes.

Donnica L. Moore

Moore was "the women's health expert" on NBC's Weekend Today Show from 1997 to to 1999, and the Later Today Show from 1999 to 2000; and had a syndicated radio spot, "Dr. Donnica's Women's Health Report," from 2000 to 2002. She was a member of the board of directors of the American Medical Women's Association for seven years.

Donnica parrots all of the health fascists' psychopathic lies against tobacco.

John Edward Porter

Now a partner in former Rep. Paul G. Rogers's firm Hogan & Hartson, Porter was a Republican Congressman from Illinois from 1980 to 2001. He represented the district of Donald Rumsfeld and the "New Trier Mafia" of William Blair & Company. From 1961 to 1963, he was an Honor Law Graduate attorney with the US Department of Justice [the same era as Lee Loevinger, one of Newton Minow's accomplices in the "Fairness Doctrine" FCC stacking]. He is on the boards of The Brookings Institution, PBS, the American Heart Asociation, the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health, the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, the National Space Biomedical Research Institute, the Kemper Insurance Companies, and the Population Resource Council. In 2001, he was elected a trustee of the RAND Corporation. He has been a director of Zila Inc. since 2003.

Porter was founder and co-chairman of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus with Rep. Tom Lantos, D-CA. In 1990, they presented the false testimony of the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US that Iraqi soldiers had stolen the incubators from a Kuwaiti hospital and "left the babies on the floor to die." (Remember Nayirah, Witness for Kuwait? By John R. MacArthur. Op Ed, New York Times, Jan. 6, 1992.)

In the 1996 campaign cycle Porter received contributions from firms associated with fellow Research!America directors, including Hogan & Hartson and John Whitehead's Whitehead Partners; plus Laurence Tisch's Loews Corp. and William Blair & Co. He also received donations from numerous medical goups including the AMA and Blue Cross-Blue Shield; and equally generous funding from the finance and insurance industry.

Porter is a member of the Executive Committee of the Lasker Trust's Funding First lobbying group.

Porter is a trustee of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, along with former Rep. Paul G. Rogers and Fred Hassan of Schering-Plough.

Paul G. Rogers

Former Rep. Paul G. Rogers (D-FL), chairman of the House Subcommittee on Health and the Environment, was instrumental in passing the National Cancer Act of 1971. He has been Chairman of Research!America since 1996.

William L. Roper

R!A Director Roper is one of President Bush's advisors, as well as a trustee of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Charles A. Sanders

Sanders is the former general director of Massachusetts General Hospital and professor of medicine at Harvard, an emeritus director of R!A, a trustee of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a principal of the Washington Advisory Group, and a director of a multitude of pharmaceutical and other companies.

John Whitehead

Whitehead founded the Campaign for Medical Research, a registered funding lobby, which started the "movement" among Republican Senators to double the budget of the National Institutes of Health between 1998 and 2003 - for which the White House may have been their party's reward.

James B. Wyngaarden

Emeritus Board member James B. Wyngaarden is a crony of Purnell W. Choppin's Howard Hughes Medical Institute program, and a principal of the Washington Advisory Group which is channeling Michigan's tobacco settlement money to the University of Michigan.

There are also representatives from organizations such as the American Society for Microbiology and the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology. Their role appears to be plaintively wishing that funding be distributed more equitably. They are the only ones who really represent science and the nation's health interests, but they are less favored than the health fascists and the purveyors of gene therapies and stem cell treatments. They are forced to consort with those who are really their enemies, because the American people are brainwashed sheep who don't know that they're being ripped off.

Prevention Research Initiative

"With a $400,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Research!America launched its Prevention Research Initiative (PRI) to elevate prevention research to a much higher national priority. Through opinion polls [dimwits who parrot politically correct responses], focus groups [lackeys], and a stakeholder forum [?], the project examines attitudes regarding disease prevention and health promotion with plans of articulating consistent, effective messages designed to generate national support for prevention research" [i.e., b.s.]. The highest concentration of scum is predictably on the Prevention Research Initiative Advisory Council - "prevention" is just a code word for persecuting smokers, primarily, plus spouting some worthless bilge about diet and exercise. This council is packed with ACS-AHA-APHA; RWJF-funded schools of public health (UNC-Chapel Hill, U Mich, The Johns Hopkins); Association of State and Territorial Health Officials and virulently anti-smoking state health departments (MD, MN, WA); a Mahoney (their other one died); the media propagandist, Myrna Blyth of Ladies Home Journal; and miscellaneous others. Jonathan Samet, the anti-smokers' star perjuror in the Minnesota tobacco trial, is a participant.

Research!America has received grants of at least $5,960,442 from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation: "Building support for prevention research, $399,459, ending 7-31-01;" and "Building support for prevention and public health research," $5,560,983. (More Spending on Prevention Research Could Yield Savings in Health Costs. Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Grant Results Report, May 2003.)

Lasker/Funding First Partnership

The Lasker/Funding First Partnership is to tout the Lasker report, "Exceptional Returns." "Murphy and Topel approach the issue of estimating the value of extending life from a somewhat different perspective, asking what the present value of the extra years are worth the way an MBA would estimate the value of an investment as the discounted sum of future income flowing from it," to pretend that increases in life expectancy have produced $57 trillion in savings over two decades. However, extra years are not a financial investment, so this is just these peoples' habitual sophistry of pretending that things are something that they are not. One might as well say, "Let's pretend the moon is made of green cheese, and calculate the national savings in cheese expenditures" to justify the space program. Several members of the Research!America boards are also on the Lasker executive committee, including Paul Rogers, Mary Woolley, Paul Simon, and Louis Sullivan. The media presence and the stupid little factoids that litter the Research!America website like bric-a-brac are classic Lasker touches.

Paul G. Rogers Plaza at NIH

The National Institutes of Health dedicates plaza in honor of Paul G. Rogers. NIH news release 2001 Jun 12. With former Rep. Rogers, now Chairman of the Board of Research!America; NIH Director Ruth Kirschstein; former Reps. John Porter and James Symington; Steve Lawton of the Biotechnology Industry Council; and Research!America President Mary Woolley.

The Whores

Sen. Connie Mack introduced legislation to double the NIH budget in 1998. "Earlier this year, Senator Mack testified before the Senate Commerce Committee to voice his support for a consensual tobacco agreement. He stressed the importance of any agreement containing significant funding for medical research so that tobacco companies would help pay for research into the very diseases their products helped cause. - As debate on tobacco progressed on the Senate floor, Mack felt the bill had lost its focus and was no longer aimed at reducing teen smoking and funding medical research. As a result, he did not support the bill in its final form." He also boasted that "Mack and his wife, Priscilla; are very active in spreading the message that early detection saves lives. Priscilla Mack is Executive Co-chair of National Race for the Cure and travels throughout the state of Florida spreading the message of early detection for the Florida Chapter of the American Cancer Society." Mack and Sen. Diane Feinstein were co-chairs of the Senate Cancer Coalition. (Mack press release, CQ, June 30, 1998.) The House of Representatives has a similar organization, the House Cancer Caucus.

"Progress or Bust: The Rush to Double NIH's Budget." CQ Weekly 1999 May 8. (link died: http://ugsp.info.nih.gov/info_items/info22.htm.)

Research!America rewarded its lackeys in Congress, Sen. Ted Stevens and Rep. Bill Young, with their 2001 Edwin C. Whitehead Award for Medical Research Advocacy; Dr. Isadore Rosenfeld for Impact on Public Opinion Through the Media, for thought control activities as medical editor of Parade magazine, medical consultant to Fox Cable News Network, medical correspondent to CBS Morning News and health columnist for Vogue magazine; and other stooges. Philip R. Lee was one of the chairs of the dinner at the National Academy of Sciences, Mar 20, 2001.

Research Australia

Research Australia is an offshoot of Research!America, designed to create an American-style special interest lobbying machine to disenfranchise and loot the Australian people as they have done to Americans. Its startup is being subsidized by the Australian Stock Exchange.

cast 09-03-06