The National Cancer Act pioneers: The Roswell Park hearings and VCU Massey’s Walter Lawrence

When asked his thoughts on how the funding and research for cancer centers could be improved, the testimony of Roswell Park’s Associate Director, Edwin Mirand, PhD, gave Congress a solution:

“I think a mechanism, which could be established, which would be a large institutional grant in specific categories, could be given to any comprehensive cancer center through a means in which, in some way, a large lump sum could be given to an institute on some formula basis, particularly the comprehensive cancer institutes involved in research, clinical delivery and education,” Dr. Mirand wrote.

“Members of the subcommittee picked that up, and within a week, a version of Dr. Mirand’s language was included in the legislation and used as an appropriate way to allocate funding and became what we now call the ‘Core Grant’ process, that funds NCI designated cancer centers,” says Schwartz.

With the final language now in place, Congress passed the updated National Cancer Act on December 23, 1971. 

Lawrence: When technology hit surgery, that’s when laparoscopic surgery, robotic surgery, and those things came along.

Of course, those of us who had been doing something another way all along resisted a little bit, but it became clear that there were tremendous advantages.

There had been some disadvantages. Part of the disadvantages is the increase in technology has increased subspecialization, so many of the people treating patients have shifted from being, in a sense, physicians to technologists, and they only do one kind of treatment, and they suddenly lose sight of the disease and all its aspects and focus more on the mechanics of treatment.

But it’s one of those things that goes with the territory. I think that, all in all, the technology of some of these improvements in surgery, for example, have really made this less damaging treatment and one that’s better tolerated, and so it is progress overall, it just has a few of those things that make me worried.

That’s part of the reason I still teach medical students, because I don’t spend time teaching them how to treat cancer now. I teach them how to take care of people. That’s still something that’s very necessary in cancer management, and I’m sure you do that well.

Over the past 20 years since the signing of the National Cancer Act, the largest gains in the “war on cancer” have been in cancer prevention, American Cancer Society President Walter Lawrence told a meeting of science writers last week.

While tremendous gains have been made in treatment of childhood leukemia, other childhood cancers, testicular cancers, and breast cancer, there has been modest progress in treatment results for all sites of cancer, Lawrence said. “Clearly, we are far from being able to declare victory in this campaign. My own view is that our biggest gain in this arena is our increased appreciation of, and focus on, cancer prevention strategies,” Lawrence said.