Elizabeth A. Sackler, Ph.D.
President

Carol Master, M.D.
Chair, Vice President

Arthur F. Sackler
Secretary, Treasurer

Staff

Elizabeth A. Sackler, Ph.D. CEO Trudy S. Kawami, Ph.D. Director of Research

Jennifer B. Patrick Director of Collections and Exhibitions Stephanie Morillo Collections Management Assistant

“Art and science are two sides of the same coin. Science is a discipline pursued with passion; art is a passion pursued with discipline. At pursuing both, I’ve had a lot of fun.”

Arthur M. Sackler, M.D.
(1913–1987)

Dr. Arthur M. Sackler was, and continues to be, recognized in the many fields that engaged his life’s work—as a research physician and scientist of principle, as an art connoisseur, and as a visionary.

Throughout his life Dr. Sackler made significant contributions in the fields of science and medicine. With each decade his interests and achievements expanded into new areas. In the 1940s, Dr. Sackler pioneered the first racially integrated blood bank in New York City. In that same decade he put together a research team at Creedmoor State Hospital in Queens, New York, identifying the causal effects of chemical imbalance in schizophrenia and manic depression.

During the 1950s, he recognized the carcinogenic impact of nicotine on the human body and advocated for industry changes, long before the Surgeon General was allowed to put a warning on cigarette packs. He was a consultant to drug manufacturers and developed the first pharmaceutical advertising agency, William Douglas McAdams, Inc. In 1960, Dr. Sackler founded Medical Tribune, the first weekly medical newspaper distributed to physicians. Twenty-five years later Medical Tribune was published in six languages and distributed in twenty-one countries, including China and Japan. Throughout his medical career, Dr. Sackler acknowledged and supported contributions of women doctors and nurses. At the height of the feminist movement in the 1970s, he worked with established groups to increase the number of women accepted into medical school and related fields.

In 1974, he worked with Drs. Linus Pauling and Roger J. Williams to establish The Foundation for Nutritional Advancement. In the 1980s, Dr. Sackler traveled often to the People’s Republic of China, attending conferences with the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In 1981, he served as Vice Chairman of the First International Conference on Nutrition in Tianjin and established the Doctors of the Year Award in 1985 to honor gifted students of medicine in China.

Enhancing his commitment to medicine, Dr. Sackler underwrote the Arthur M. Sackler Sciences Center at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, and the Arthur M. Sackler Center for Health Communications at Tufts University, Boston. With his brothers Mortimer D. and Raymond R., he supported the establishment of the Sackler School of Medicine in Tel Aviv, the Sackler Institute of Graduate Biomedical Science at New York University, and the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences at Tufts University, Boston.

Throughout his life Dr. Sackler was an avid student of art and art history and wrote about these pursuits. “One wonderful day in 1950,” he said, “I came upon some Chinese ceramics and Ming furniture. My life has not been the same since.” Asian art, especially Chinese bronze and jade, came to form the core of the Arthur M. Sackler Collections. “I collect as a biologist,” Dr. Sackler said. “To really understand a civilization or society, you must have a large enough corpus of data.” The Arthur M. Sackler Collections ultimately included art from China, Korea, Cambodia, India, Japan, and ancient Iran, as well as Italian majolica and European terracotta sculpture from the 14th to the early 20th century. Dr. Sackler created the Arthur M. Sackler Foundation in 1965 to make the extensive Arthur M. Sackler Collections accessible to scholars, students, and the general public. Furthering his commitment to the arts, Dr. Sackler endowed the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Arthur M. Sackler Galleries at Princeton University, and supported the construction of the Arthur M. Sackler Museum at Harvard University. With his brothers he funded the Sackler Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to house the Temple of Dendur.

Dr. Sackler was the principal benefactor of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, a national museum of Asian art at the Smithsonian Institution, which opened on the Mall in Washington, D.C., in September 1987. His inaugural gift of more than one thousand masterpieces from his private collections and the collection of the Arthur M. Sackler Foundation form the basis of the Gallery’s exquisite holdings.

Now nearing its fourth decade, the Arthur M. Sackler Foundation carries forward Dr. Sackler’s vision by lending art from its collection to museums and traveling exhibitions promoting the understanding and enjoyment of Asian art.