Using tactics that paid earlier for AIDS patients and breast cancer survivors, a trio of famous men who had a prostate cancer appeared on Capitol hill today to lobby for more research on their disease. The former majority leader in the Senate Bob Dole, New York Yankees baseball manager Joe Torre, and junk bond impresario Michael Milken - now head of an anticancer national movement called CaP CURE - took a step to increase the budget of the National cancer Institute (NCI)
speaking at the same hearing -. held by the Senate subcommittee credits for work, health and social services and education - NCI Director Richard Klausner said he agreed in principle with lobbyists. NCI has increased funding for research on prostate cancer than $ 87 million in 1998 to 141,500,000 $ this year, Klausner said; Furthermore, he published a map 62 pages of "professional judgment" which calls for even more growth, with increases of 50% in 00 and 27% in 01.
Other health activists may have struggled to find an audience, but this group received the red carpet. The chairman of the subcommittee, Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA), praised his former Dole party leader as a witness and invited the current president of the full appropriations committee, Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) to join the show as a guest interviewer. Stevens, himself a prostate cancer survivor, tried to make the National Institutes of Health (NIH) set aside a large pot of money for research into prostate cancer last year but convinced by Specter and others to drop the proposal. During today's hearing, Stevens peppery government witnesses with questions, like why NIH built new buildings with money that could have been spent on research. NIH Director Harold Varmus said that buildings replace outdated structures. Klausner and tried to demonstrate that everything in the new research plan, NCI already famous lawyers have liked.
But Milken, for his part, was not satisfied. In his closing statement, he said the nation's investment in biomedical research is almost an order of magnitude too small, and the NCI current budget of about $ 3 billion a year - "about one-seventh of what Americans spend on cosmetics "- should be increased to at least $ 10 billion He even suggested new strategies for fundraising, for example, the government could issue" war bonds "for war against. cancer says Milken. ". I buy $ 50 million of myself "
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