Raymond Sackler
One of three psychiatrist brothers who became pharmaceutical tycoons and major philanthropists
RAYMOND SACKLER, who has died aged 97, was one of three psychiatrist brothers who made a fortune in pharmaceuticals and became philanthropists on a vast scale. The Sackler name is associated with museums and universities around the world, particularly in America and Britain. They donated priceless art to galleries they funded at, among others, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, Harvard, Princeton, and the Royal Academy in London. Other major beneficiaries of their largesse in Britain included the Tate Modern, the V&A, the British Museum and the Serpentine Gallery.
Raymond Sackler’s contributions included financial assistance for five galleries at the British Museum which now display exhibits from Egypt and the Ancient Near East, as well as endowment funds for annual lectures and symposia in Iranian archaeology and in Egyptology. But he and his wife Beverly became particularly well-known for their support for scientific research.
Among numerous endowments they founded the medical research centre that bears their names at the University of Cambridge and were important sponsors of the university’s medical school and a major new cancer research programme. Their support of the Deep Sky Initiative at the university’s Institute of Astronomy enabled the construction of a state-of-the-art infrared camera and infrared spectrometer to improve the performance of land-based telescopes. They also endowed a visiting fellowship programme at the institute and research fellowships in Astronomy at several Cambridge colleges.
In 1995 Sackler was given an honorary knighthood by the Queen for his contributions to the sciences, arts, and astronomy.
Raymond Sackler was born on February 16 1920 in Brooklyn, New York, the youngest of three sons of Isaac and Sophie Sackler, Polish Jewish immigrants who ran a grocery business. All three brothers attended Erasmus Hall High School, Brooklyn, but while the eldest, Arthur, won a place at New York University School of Medicine, the second son, Mortimer, found that quotas prevented him, as a Jew, from being admitted to to the school. Instead, with the encouragement of friends in Glasgow’s Jewish community, he bought a steerage ticket to Britain and was accepted for medical training at Anderson College of Medicine, Glasgow University, where Raymond followed him in due course.
Raymond was still there during the first year of the Second World War when he volunteered for service in the Home Guard. He then followed Mortimer back to the United States, where both completed their studies at the Middlesex University School of Medicine in Waltham, Massachusetts, Raymond qualifying as a doctor in 1944.
All three brothers specialised in psychiatry and by the late 1940s they had become leading lights in the research and clinical outpatient department at Creedmore state hospital, New York.
The department became the Creedmore Institute for Psychobiologic Studies, and during the 1950s the brothers undertook pioneering research into how alterations in bodily function can affect mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and manic depressive psychosis, winning awards for work which contributed to a move away from treatments such as electric shock and lobotomy towards pharmaceutical solutions.
In 1952 the Sacklers acquired the Purdue Frederick Company, a struggling drug company based in Greenwich Village which sold such products as earwax removers, laxatives and antiseptics, with annual revenues of just $20,000. Mortimer and Raymond ran the company while Arthur pioneered techniques for marketing pharmaceuticals. They built up the company through acquisitions and product development, moving the company to Norwalk, then Stamford, and creating new companies along the way. In 1966 they bought Napp Pharmaceuticals, an underperforming British company which flourished under their ownership.
Arthur Sackler died in 1987, and by the mid-1990s the company, now renamed Purdue Pharma, was still a relatively small drug company. In 1996, however, the firm introduced a new blockbuster drug, Oxycontin, a powerful slow-release opium-derived narcotic which has proved highly effective in treating terminal cancer patients and post-operative patients with severe pain. By 2001 Oxycontin was the bestselling non-generic narcotic pain reliever in the United States, accounting for 80 per cent of Purdue Pharma’s revenues and helping the company to join the ranks of industry giants.
After experienced drug addicts found a way to circumvent the pill’s time-release mechanism and started abusing it, however, the company found itself facing several lawsuits. In 2004 the American Public Health Association described the drug as “an integral part of an escalating national abuse of opioids”.
The Sacklers themselves were never accused of any wrongdoing, but three executives pleaded guilty to charges of falsely marketing Oxycontin as less addictive than other opioids and Purdue Pharma was forced to pay $635 million in fines in 2007.
Raymond and Beverly Sackler’s other philanthropic activities include the sponsorship of several international science prizes and major donations to Tel Aviv and Leiden universities. They also endowed numerous programmes concerned with promoting “convergence” in scientific research – the integration of the physical and life sciences to achieve advances in biomedical research.
These include the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Laboratories in the Physics of Medicine at Cambridge University and the Raymond and Beverly Sackler USA-UK Scientific Forum, founded in 2008, which encourages collaboration between the American National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society.
Away from their business and philanthropic activities, the Sacklers tended to keep themselves out of the limelight, though both Mortimer, who died in 2010, and Raymond continued to be involved in the business into old age.
Raymond Sackler is survived by his wife, Beverly, and their two sons.
Raymond Sackler, born February 16 1920, died July 17 2017