Political Quotes

“Last month President Obama came to this Chamber to speak, inter alia, of a moonshot to cure cancer under the leadership of Vice President Biden. This week the President announced specific plans to invest $1 billion to fund that moonshot. As a scientist and as the manager of large scientific projects, I am naturally inclined to be skeptical of such bold claims from politicians. President Nixon famously launched the same war on cancer in 1971. Tragically, we continue to wage that war today. More recently, Andrew von Eschenbach, the director of the National Cancer Institute under President Bush, set the goal of eliminating suffering and death from cancer by 2015. We all know, unfortunately, that that goal was never met. So why is this cancer moonshot any different? Is this a moment like 1961 when President Kennedy stood before a joint session of Congress and announced his goal of sending a man to the Moon by the end of the decade and succeeded? Or is this a moment like 1971 when President Nixon declared war on cancer and failed? I believe that President Obama's cancer initiative will succeed, and the reason that it will succeed is brutally simple: Science, basic science and technology that exists today and did not exist 45 years ago; technology that was generated by decades of curiosity-driven federally funded research paid for by the United States taxpayer.…”