Mortimer D. Sackler, a psychiatrist who was a co-owner of Purdue Pharma, maker of the painkiller OxyContin, and whose lavish gifts to the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Columbia University made him one of New York City’s most prominent benefactors, died March 24 in Gstaad, Switzerland. He was 93 and had homes in London, Gstaad, and Antibes, France. His death was confirmed by his daughter Ilene Sackler Lefcourt.
Dr. Sackler, a specialist in psychobiology, did seminal research in the biology of psychiatric illness in the 1940s and ’50s and later established research and training institutes in developmental psychobiology at Columbia and Weill Cornell Medical College as well as at four other universities in England, Scotland, and Canada.
A native New Yorker, he began his medical education in Scotland because, he said, quotas kept him, as a Jew, from being admitted to medical school in New York. Dr. Sackler had lived in Europe since the 1970s, and his philanthropy — often along with that of his older brother, Arthur, and his younger brother, Raymond — encompassed both Britain and the European continent.
He was a major donor to Oxford University, Edinburgh University, Glasgow University, the Tate Gallery in London, the Royal College of Art, the Louvre, the Jewish Museum in Berlin, and Salzburg University, among other institutions.
Once, at a charity auction, wife Theresa Sackler, an ardent gardener, bought the right to name a new breed of rose, which she did, after her husband. The official description of the rose — “The blooms give the impression of delicacy and softness but are, in fact, very tough and little affected by bad weather” — reminded her of him, she said.
In New York, the Sackler brothers were probably best known for the Sackler wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which houses the Temple of Dendur. Through his foundation, Mortimer Sackler financed the Sackler Center for Arts Education at the Guggenheim, and was a major contributor to the American Museum of Natural History. He even had naming rights to a species of rose -- the Mortimer Sackler.
The Sackler brothers were all doctors and all businessmen. In 1952, while the three were working at the Creedmoor state psychiatric hospital, Arthur Sackler financed the purchase of a small drug manufacturer based in Greenwich Village, the Purdue Frederick Co., which Mortimer and Raymond Sackler ran as cochairmen and which later became Purdue Pharma, now based in Stamford, Conn.
In the early years under the Sacklers, Purdue produced among other things an earwax remover, Cerumenex, a laxative marketed under the name Senokot, and later the antiseptic Betadine.
Arthur Sackler died in 1987, and by the mid-1990s Purdue Pharma was still a small drug company. But with a new product, OxyContin, a powerful, long-acting, narcotic painkiller, the company hoped to join the ranks of industry giants. By 2001 sales of the drug had reached nearly $3 billion
