Tom Harkin

Are we putting too many eggs in the basket of finding a drug that masks, that perhaps gets someone through a tough time to respond to the immediacy of a mental illness?

Should we be looking at some of the underlying causes?

You are saying that mental health is 6.2 percent overall? It is not--

But do not draw too much encouragement from it because the budget resolution is only Confederate money.

But we are determined to fight this through.

Senator Harkin and I added an amendment to the budget resolution last week for $2.2 billion.

Senator Harkin and I are leading the fight for embryonic stem cells.

It is scandalous when you have the major responsibility for funding health programs in the Federal Government but are not able to use any funds for stem cell research.

That's a lot of time to take out just for filling out paperwork and stuff.

That was good. I like that a lot.

I have to tell you, I hear that around here, you know, 'Well, we gave you all that money once.'

Well, I think the obvious thing that strikes me is that we're simply not on a growth pattern like we ought to be on.

I just think, Dr. Zerhouni, we're going to have to continue to work on that.

I mean--and how we crack that. I mean, that doesn't seem to me to be the right course that we ought to be on.

That's it. That--now I understand it. Hmm. Three times.

The idea was to get it back up to the level so that the peer-reviewed grants would be about where we were, I don't know, 25-30 years ago.

So, can I--is this a correct statement I'm about to make, that--when we finished the doubling, or during that doubling, that first submissions of--first submissions--not renewals, first submissions--the approval rate would have been three…

I always thought that it was higher than that. I don't know why I thought----

I'm going to ask Dr. Zerhouni to take a microphone.

Well, we had said, when we added that money, that $647 million in the continuing resolution, that some of that would be used for high-risk, high-impact research.

So, the lower the funding level, the----

Uh-huh. Anything else?

Well, obviously it would, what, at least 2.5 times where we are right now.

I'm going to have my staff find out what it would be if we were at 2 percent right now?

For the sake of the American people, please find a political route to keep progress against cancer at a sustainable pace.