President Barack Obama vowed Tuesday to make the United States the “country that cures cancer” and put Vice President Joe Biden, whose son Beau Biden died this summer after a battle with brain cancer, “in charge of mission control.”
Noting that Biden previously had worked to get more funding for the National Institutes of Health, Obama announced during his State of the Union address that he was putting his Vice President in charge of a new national effort to find a cure.
“Because he’s gone to the mat for all of us, on so many issues over the past 40 years, I’m putting Joe in charge of mission control,” he said. “For the loved ones we’ve all lost, for the family we can still save, let’s make America the country that cures cancer once and for all.”
Watch below:
I retired partly because of the difficulty of getting grants. My work concerned ovarian cancer and getting money to run a lab was the bane of my existence. It was far easier in the 1970’s than in 2012. And it’s, I think, because of republican distrust of science. I would love to be able to continue my work but I cannot w/o funding.
Darr, maybe there can be a new day for your good work.
One satisfaction I have is I know there is a younger scientist who has decades ahead of her who has taken what I did and run with it. In a few years there will be a way to directly “see” the ovary by optical coherence tomography in the human. Right now we can do it in animals. The "seeing’ is a millimeter or two deep into the tissue and we can see structures. … and tumor if it’s there. Human trials are a ways off still. But it will happen and then there will be a way to diagnose ovarian cancer much earlier than we can now. And coupled with biochemical tests that could be done it will be earlier still. I want this to happen. Soon. As in yesterday.
That sounds so promising … and it must satisfying that it’s a legacy from your work.
Did you see this the other day?
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2016/01/08/3737333/google-cardboard-saves-babys-life/
Progress great and small is still progress.
Jinx,
You made my day!
Thanks for that link! I can easily envision that cardboard box being seriously useful in my work. I’m gonna send the link on to the people concerned.
And that our work is being carried forward is satisfying indeed.