I received a heads up about this article from Lance Armstrong‘s Twitter feed. It’s very interesting and is best summed up by the concluding sentence in Dr. Mark Thorton’s, Wall Street Journal article, “The Next Front in the War on Cancer.”

“If the dam holding back rapid clinical trials can be broken, there will be new hope of having, in our lifetimes, new drugs speeding toward a cure for cancer, or at least for slowing down death from this disease.”

Dr. Thorton served six years as a medical officer at the Food and Drug Administration and is the president of the Sarcoma Foundation of America. He is also employed in the biotechnology industry. His article points out that increased spending is wonderful but must be proceeded by a thoughtful look backwards to insure the best uses of these precious funds.

“On Tuesday, President Barack Obama announced a massive initiative against cancer. “Our recovery plan will launch a new effort to conquer a disease that has touched nearly every American, including me,” he said in his speech to the nation, “by seeking a cure for cancer in our time.”

“But despite the lofty goal set by Mr. Obama, it appears that the NCI is not mapping out a specific plan or strategy on how to most effectively use its new money. It is simply going to pour more money into the cancer research community.”

“Before that is allowed to happen, however, it is essential that we assess what happened the last time the NCI was entrusted with a spending surge — and what can be done this time to produce a better outcome.”

However we march forward toward the cure and the rapid development of new and effective drugs, we must as citizens of this country, demand that our hard earned tax dollars be spent with true introspection. Once a thoughtful look has taken place, we can then feel good about this new research funding which will serve as a true “continuous effort” and yield a positive long term result.

I have an idea, how about we take one or two billion dollars of the stimulus package and create a couple of research contests? How about one for curing cancer and another for an unlimited clean power source? Let’s unleash the incredible ingenuity, creativity and brain power within our country. Isn’t this what really makes America great – anyway? These contests could be similar to the contest that ventured to create a spacecraft that could fly two round trips into space within a week.

What do they say?  The mind is a terrible thing to waste, creating more useless financial derivatives on Wall Street. The world would beat a path to America’s front door, if we created these two solutions.

MikeZ_together we can defeat anything with continuous effort.

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