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Mr. HIGGINS. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague from New Jersey for his leadership on this issue, for his eloquent opening, and I want to echo his sentiments in congratulating the American Society of Clinical Oncology.
As my colleague has said, we have made major advancements in cancer research in this country. Thirty years ago, less than 50 percent of those who were diagnosed with cancer lived beyond 5 years of their diagnosis. Today, it is over 65 percent for adults and over 80 percent for children.
Historically, you had, really, three options with cancer. You could burn it out through radiation, you could cut it out through surgery, or you could poison the fast-growing cancer cells; but the problem is you were also killing healthy cells, as well, through chemotherapy.
Today, because of medical research, we now have smart drugs, drugs that will attack fast-growing cancer cells, without attacking fast-growing healthy cells.
We also have a number of clinical trials going on, including right in Buffalo, New York, at Roswell Park Cancer Institute, clinical trials for vaccines that treat the body's dendritic cells toward the goal of helping the body naturally fight cancer.
We have made major progress, but as my friend from New Jersey has said, we still have much further to go.
People realize that early detection is very, very important in effectively treating cancer. Less than 10 percent of cancer deaths occur from the original tumor.
It is when cancer metastasizes, when it grows, when it advances to a vital organ that we need, is when cancer becomes lethal. That is why it is important for early detection, which will dramatically increase the survival rate of cancer patients.
As the gentleman from New Jersey also indicated, Buffalo and western New York is home to Roswell Park Cancer Institute, the first comprehensive cancer center in the entire Nation.
Roswell Park gave the Nation and the world chemotherapy in 1904. It gave the Nation and the world the prostate-specific antigen test, the PSA test, to detect prostate cancer; and it also did groundbreaking work in the link between tobacco use and smoking and cancer.
One of every three women in this Nation will develop invasive cancer in their lifetime. One of every two men, during their lifetime, will develop invasive cancer. The incidence is higher for men because they smoke more.
We have a long way to go. We have made major progress. The gentleman had said Richard Nixon had declared a war on cancer in 1971, and that was a major, major initiative on the part of the Federal Government.
What we know also, from cancer research, is the only failure in that research is when you quit or you are forced to quit because of lack of funding.
A lot of these new drugs that are coming to market today have been in various phases of discovery for the past 20 years, so to sustain cancer research is to produce promising new therapies, but to also encourage young researchers to stay in the field.
That is our obligation, as Democrats and Republicans of this body, in recognizing that we must fully fund the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute.
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