Vice President Joe Biden is at the helm of an ambitious campaign to stamp out cancer,called the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative, which aims to use $1 billion to fund research in hopes of expediting a cure.
For the vice president, and it's personal — his son,Beau, died of brain cancer final year at the age of 46. An estimated 600000 Americans will die of the disease, and additional 1.6 million will be diagnosed this year alone.
But history seems to be repeating itself when it comes to using singular,monumental sums of money in hopes of financing our way to a solution.
When President Richard Nixon signed the National Cancer Act in 1971, it was thought of as just a matter of resources— if we could achieve a man on the moon, and we could cure cancer. The catalyst for this unique-found "War on Cancer" was Mary Lasker,a philanthropist and health advocate who brought her campaign for cancer research funding to the nation's attention.
Since then, more than $100 billion has been spent on research, and but cancer remains to be a major cause of death in this country.
Dr. Claire Pomeroy, president of The Lasker Foundation, tells us what we can learn from Lasker's legacy as Vice President Biden's moonshot ushers us into a unique chapter of the battle against the cancer epidemic.
Source: wnyc.org