Researchers at Vanderbilt Ingram Cancer Center watched a live webcast from Iowa (today/yesterday) of Democratic presidential candidates speaking about cancer. Dennis Kucinich, Bill Richardson, John Edwards and Hillary Clinton made commitments to varying degrees to renew a focus on curing the disease.
As Senator Hillary Clinton vowed to fund cancer research, heads at Vanderbilt nodded in agreement.
“I want to double both the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute budgets. We’ve had a flat NIH budget and a decreasing NCI budget.”
Vanderbilt’s cancer biology chair Lynn Matrisian says it’s gotten harder and harder to get grants from the national foundations
“They brought out the point of younger individuals who are being discouraged from continuing in a research career because of the difficulty in funding and we see that on a daily basis. It is a really big issue.”
Matrisian says each candidate is making roughly the same promise but that she’s glad cancer has entered the presidential debate. More than 10-million Americans are either cancer survivors or living with the disease.
Two Republican candidates – Sam Brownback and Mike Huckabee – will participate in the webcast forum tomorrow at 10 a.m. Here’s the link.
On Air - 90.3 WPLN-FM