On is a good one, then I think there is a
On is a good one, then I think there is a possibility that some of the people who run American science might want to start getting fitted for a new jacket – the kind where the sleeves wrap around the front and are tied together in back. Before I explain why I think that could happen, it’s worthwhile going PubMed ID:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28914615 over some of the history of scientific funding in the United States in the past 40 years, to see how we got ourselves into the situation we’re in now. In 1971, the US President, Richard Nixon announced a War on Cancer. In his State of the Union address in January of that year, he proclaimed: “I will also ask for an appropriation of an extra 100 million to launch an intensive campaign to find a cure for cancer, and I will ask later for whatever additional funds can effectively be used. e time has come in America when the same kind of concentrated effort that split the atom and took man to the moon should be turned toward conquering this dread disease. Let us make a total national commitment to achieve this goal.” On December 23 that same year, he signed the National Cancer Act into law, declaring, “I hope in the years ahead we will look back on this action today as the most significant action taken during my Administration.” Well, in retrospect, I think we can all agree that the Watergate cover-up probably turned out to be the most significant action of his (-)-Blebbistatin solubility Administration, but this one was right up there. e National Cancer Act (P.L. 92-218), ” e War on Cancer,” gave the National Cancer Institute, one of the institutes at the National Institute of Health (NIH), unique autonomy at NIH with special budgetary authority. Over the last four decades it has grown into, by far, the largest of the 27 Institutes and Centers that make up the biggest biomedical research funding agency in the world. Its annual budget is now just a little under 5 billion (out of a total NIH budget of about 32 billion) and it is still*Correspondence: [email protected] Rosenstiel Basic Medical Sciences Research Center, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA 02454-9110, USA?2010 BioMed Central Ltd ?2011 BioMed Central Ltdcharged with coordinating the National Cancer Program in other words, the War on Cancer goes on. Now, certainly there have been many victories in that war: testicular cancer is no longer a fatal disease thanks to Barnett Rosenberg’s discovery of cisplatinum as an anticancer agent; chronic myelogenous leukemia is now treatable by Gleevec and other Bcr-Abl kinase inhibitors thanks to the discovery by David Baltimore and others that survival of that tumor depends on that kinase and the efforts of Brian Drucker and Nick Lydon to exploit that discovery; Her-2 positive breast cancer is treatable by antibodies directed at that cell surface protein thanks to the work of Dennis Slamon; other forms of breast cancer can now be attacked by aromatase inhibitors thanks to the work of Angela Hartley Brodie; multiple myeloma now has a treatment thanks to the work of Fred Goldberg, who proposed the seemingly insane idea that inhibiting the proteasome might be beneficial and not all that toxic; and I could give many more examples ?the list is a long one and the victories are impressive indeed. But in most of these cases the key work, the initial discovery that led to the treatment, was not funded as part of the War on Cancer and was in many cases – cisplatinum being the greatest example – not even done with curing a disease in mind. And of course, most cancers, especially.