http://thenexthurrah.typepad.com/the_next_hurrah/2007/04/president_bush_.htmlPresident Bush on Breast Cancer
by emptypockets
Last week, President Bush signed into law a reauthorization of the National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program, an admirable health program that helps pay for breast cancer screenings for low-income women. He took the opportunity to say a few words about his own contributions to the field of cancer research:
"I appreciate working with the United States Congress to fund breast and cervical cancer research and prevention. The span of my administration, we have spent, along with Congress, $6.7 billion. My budget for 2008 includes another billion dollars for research and prevention activities. We'll continue to work to ensure that every American woman has access to the screenings she needs to detect the cancers in time to treat them."
President Bush didn't mention, for some reason, that one of the ways he has "continue(d) to work" to help Americans overcome cancer was by being the first president since Nixon to cut funding for the NIH. Even the National Cancer Insititute, one of the best-funded of the institutes that comprise NIH, had its budget increased only 1.5% in FY2005 (the most recent year for which I find numbers), while inflation raises the cost of doing science around 4% annually. The money going into R01 grants, the core funding units distributed to US labs by NCI, actually dropped 2% from 2004 to 2005. As noted in the April Public Policy Briefing from the American Society for Cell Biology (pdf), one of the top breast cancer researchers in the US, Joan Brugge of Harvard, recently testified to Congress, "Four years of flat funding have had a devastating impact on the trajectory of cancer research." So, thanks for your hard work, President Bush.
He also didn't mention, of course, his decision to veto -- not once but twice -- bills that would allow the NIH to fund stem cell research. The cells that give rise to a breast cancer (or any other cancer) are in many ways like out-of-control stem cells: like a stem cell, they can divide indefinitely and "self-renew," meaning each daughter cell has the full developmental capacity of the mother cell, but unlike stem cells their growth has become unregulated. (There are also some ideas that some breast cancers arise directly from the normal population of stem cells, not differentiated cells, in the breast.) Understanding those basic mechanisms of self-renewal and how these special cells, with such enormous capacity to produce more cells, are usually held in check by developmental regulators, is absolutely fundamental to learning how cancers start and how to treat them. Unfortunately, most of that research has been frozen in time since 2001. Thanks again, President Bush.
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