Fran Visco never asked for $300 million in breast cancer research funding—she demanded it.
An activist of the 1960s, Visco, president of the National Breast Cancer Coalition, changed the landscape of funding for breast cancer research during her 1992 testimony in front of Congress.
“We took a lesson from AIDS activists, and we made a case for why $300 million more was the right number,” Visco said to The Cancer Letter. “They didn’t do it by simply, politely, and softly knocking on a door and saying, ‘If you wouldn’t mind.’ They did it by laying a case for why they needed more money, and then demanding that, and collaborating with scientists to make certain that message got through to Congress.”
At the time, professional societies, NIH, and NCI deemed $300 million in breast cancer research funding “an outlandish figure.”
Visco wasn’t going to achieve NBCC’s goal by going the traditional route of snooze-worthy testimony. She realized this on the train to Washington from Philadelphia, where she was unimpressed with the prepared remarks from NBCC.
“It was very traditional testimony about why we needed more money for breast cancer research,” she said. “I’m an activist from the sixties, women’s rights, anti-war. It just didn’t ring well with me.”
On the train, Visco revised these remarks. “To sit there and just politely ask ‘If you wouldn’t mind,’ that was not my world.”
The testimony itself was for what was known as “Disease Day” on Capitol Hill. “Organization after organization [was] going up and asking for money for research, for their particular issue,” Visco recalled recently. “It was all very polite. It was: ‘We understand that it’s difficult, but if you could see your way through, we would like level funding.’”
As a partner at a law firm in Philadelphia who sits on nonprofit boards, this tip-toeing around the issue was not Visco’s way.
“When it was my turn to get up, I gave the testimony that I had worked on, on the train on the way down,” she said. “It was very much, ‘You found money for a lot of issues—for a war and to bail out the men in suits who all but would destroy the savings and loan system in this country—you can find $300 million more to save women’s lives.’ That was the tone of the testimony, and why I used that tone.”
However, the testimony didn’t immediately lead to success. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA), chair of the Department of Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, told Visco that he could not get $300 million more in the domestic budget.
“But every year, Tom Harkin introduced a transfer amendment to transfer like $4 billion from the domestic budget to the defense budget, to fund women and children’s issues,” she said.
A supermajority was needed to transfer money at the time.
“We convinced him to put our $300 million more in the transfer amendment. He managed to get $220 million in the domestic budget for NCI,” Visco said. “And then he put $210 million in the transfer amendment, because that would have been $300 million more than the prior year for breast cancer research.”
NBCC worked with Harkin to pass the amendment, but the amendment failed. As a result, they worked together on a separate amendment for $210 million that would go toward a peer reviewed DOD Breast Cancer Research Program, “leave it in the defense budget, and then it would only need a simple majority to pass the Senate.”
The amendment passed, which didn’t come as a surprise to Visco.
“We were so passionate and so committed to our mission to end breast cancer,” she said recently. “We were so convinced that $300 million more was needed and that it could be well spent. We knew that we had the amazing power of these grassroots voices from across the country, focused on this one issue.”
This grassroots enthusiasm could be heard the day Visco gave her testimony to Congress.
“The fact that Paul Goldberg was sitting in the room that day, and the fact that my remarks resonated with him, and he wrote about it in The Cancer Letter. That also created a lot of attention and support for the breast cancer movement that was just beginning at the time.”
