On Sunday, September 10 from 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm, come to the Mattapoisett Free Public Library to hear Mattapoisett resident and author Shirley Haley talk about her new biography Angel in Mink: The Story of Mary Lasker’s Crusade for Research and the National Institutes of Health. Mary Lasker is one of those amazing women who have affected our lives in a powerful way, yet few of us have ever heard of her. She was a wealthy socialite, who could have used her status to achieve whatever goal she aimed for, yet with intelligence, intensity and focused action, her sponsorship turned the government’s small, poorly funded medical research effort into the largest public funder of that research in the world. The multifaceted enterprise we now know as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) grew essentially from Mary’s activities as what she called a “citizen advocate.” She was supported by her wealthy husband, Albert Lasker, and her close friend Florence Mahoney, a powerful advocate in her own right. Through their efforts, the first of which was to convince Congress and the administration that the health of the nation was their business at all, NIH grew from a single small agency with a budget of less than $3 million to a $4 billion enterprise in 1984, the year they named a building after her. A limited number of copies of Angel in Mink have been made available free of charge at the event by the ACT for NIH foundation. It is also available in electronic form on Amazon and as a free pdf download on the foundation’s website. Shirley Haley is retired from a career in science policy and medical research journalism that started in 1988 as managing editor of “Washington Fax,” a daily science policy publication via a remarkable new technology: the fax machine. The goal was to provide institutions that depended largely on federal funding for their research efforts current reports on happenings in Congress and the administration that might affect them. From there, Shirley moved to covering drug discovery and development for industry and investor-focused publications and attended national meetings focused on the latest discoveries, as well as the biotechs emerging to develop them. She retired in 2014, but was called back into service for what turned out to be a labor of great love: researching and writing the story of a great woman who changed the world. The talk is free and open to all.