I know of no cadre of people in the world more desperately in need of hope than the sixteen million people with cancer,” Vice President Joe Biden told the nation’s leading cancer researchers and clinicians at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) in Chicago on June 6, 2016.
The speech occurred a year after the death of the Vice President’s own son, Beau, from glioblastoma, and six months after President Obama, in his State of the Union Address, had asked Biden to lead a “Moonshot” against the nation’s second most deadly killer. “As I travel the world, and I’ve now traveled over a million, two hundred thousand miles as Vice President... with any leader I met, without exaggeration, the first thing they said to me was, Mr. Vice President, before we begin, can I talk to you about your Moonshot?”
The Moonshot was the latest salvo in a war on cancer that began when American troops were still on the ground in Viet Nam. Although Congress authorized the National Cancer Institute as part of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1937, and later incorporated the agency into the National Institutes of Health, both the military language of the “war on cancer” and its rise as a matter of serious political concern originated in the Nixon Administration. In his 1971 State of the Union Address, President Richard Nixon declared, “The 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.” What followed was the National Cancer Act of 1971, a law that both reorganized government efforts against the scourge and funded fifteen new cancer research centers.
Denne historien er fra Issue 61-utgaven av Greenwich Country Capitalist Magazine.
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Denne historien er fra Issue 61-utgaven av Greenwich Country Capitalist Magazine.
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Humanity First
As I listened to Donald J. Trump’s “America First” inaugural speech on NPR, I was struck by a conversation I had had with my Afghan daughter before she departed for a semester in Rome the day before the inauguration.
Our Little Racket
In the waning light of the predinner hour, Mina Dawes sat across the table from Isabel, desperate to keep their conversation aloft. During the silences her gaze wandered out over Isabel’s pool, its surface entirely untroubled beneath the late-afternoon sun.
The Palm Beaches
IT WAS WINTER 2011; I was sitting alone in my home in Connecticut.
The Einstein Legacy Project
ALBERT Einstein was a true genius.
Statue Of Limitations
You can go in now, miss,” the receptionist directed.Emma crossed the waiting room and entered the office. The Chairman of the American Committee motioned Emma to a chair across the desk from him.
Hamptons International Film Festival's Silver Anniversary
LIGHTS! Camera! Action! It’s hard to believe the Hamptons International Film Festival (HIFF) is celebrating a quarter century of showcasing great works in film.
Megyn Kelly Settle for More
Rye’s Megyn Kelly, in the Spotlight.
Women Create Their Own Opportunities in New York's Growing Weed Industry
On a recent Thursday evening in downtown Manhattan, nearly 50 women and a few men, ranging from millennials to baby boomers, gathered in a sleek co-working space to talk about weed.
Mah Jong Memory
I remember mah jong through a haze of memory and my mother’s Benson & Hedges cigarette smoke.
The Heirs
Eleanor belonged to that class of New Yorker whose bloodlines were traced in the manner of racehorses: she was Phipps (sire) out of Deering (dam), by Livingston (sire’s dam) and Porter (dam’s dam).
