Look at where our understanding of cancer was two, five, 10, 15, 20, or more years ago and then consider what has happened over the past two decades. We finally realized how more complex the problem of cancer is—more than any of us imagined.
In December 1971, President Richard Nixon signed the National Cancer Act and declared a “War on Cancer.” In the past 54 years, the U.S. has invested $180 billion nominally, or approximately $322 billion when adjusted for inflation, in cancer research. This investment has paid dividends with more than 100 anticancer drugs brought to market in half a century—virtually all traceable to National Cancer Institute funding.
I always liked poetry, but I was never a poet. I had to marry into that.
I write a weekly blog for Georgetown University’s Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center community. Here I share an updated version of a blog post I wrote in September 2024, now supplemented by some poems I have written over the years that inspired paintings by my wife Harriet Weiner, who is a much better artist than I am a poet or writer.
Multiple components of the healthcare and public health systems are currently under scrutiny. One of them is reportedly the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF: “Task Force”), established in 1984 and managed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. It was created to maintain an ongoing evaluation of disease prevention and screening interventions that... […]
Unless you were sleeping under a rock, you are aware of the coordinated attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities by Israel and the United States.
We recently had the privilege of contributing to a CBS Sunday Morning story on the ongoing crisis in the federal support for research in general and cancer research in particular.
The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine has devastated the Ukrainian healthcare infrastructure, disrupting cancer care, halting clinical trials, and compounding long-standing systemic challenges. Even before the war, Ukraine’s oncology system faced major constraints: Limited access to radiotherapy equipment, outdated chemotherapy supply chains, and workforce shortages. The invasion intensified these issues—cancer hospitals were damaged, warehouses destroyed,... […]
What did President Richard M. Nixon and Senator Edward M. Kennedy have in common? They each played a pivotal role in the passage of the National Cancer Act signed by Nixon on Dec. 23, 1971. The NCA established the National Cancer Program authorizing the initial investment in the NCI-designated Cancer Centers Program.
Last November, the American public voted on America First causes, which include the greatest scientific discovery and achievement enterprise in the world: The National Institutes of Health. NIH has made America first in biomedical science for the past century.
