The text of NCI Director Richard Klausner’s speech at The March rally Sept. 26 follows in its entirety:
I’m pleased to speak today on behalf of the discoverers, the scientists, the clinicians, and the patients who together are going to make the discoveries, are going to make the advances, that will move us forward.
We have with this march a new and powerful metaphor for our struggle against cancer. Together we will move forward, inexorably, driven not by promises, but by real purpose.
This is not a sprint and we’ll not tire. The scientists are just as frustrated, just as impatient, as the survivors and all who form this community together. It doesn’t matter how long this march takes, we will be motivated by the suffering we all feel, motivated by the sure conviction that ignorance and inaction means defeat, and knowledge and its application are our only certain road to victories.
There are few things that we have ever attempted that would be more difficult and more challenging than preventing and curing cancer. We can’t fool ourselves. This is an incredible challenge. We know, however, that it is possible to achieve the goals of this march, but it won’t come by magic and it won’t come by guesswork. It will come by revealing the actual causes of cancer. It will come by revealing the actual machinery of these diseases.
The nay-sayers who always stood at the threshold of history, looking backward, and claiming with the certainty of those who lack imaginations that the future will never look different than the past—They are wrong.
We are at the turning point. The inadequate preventions, the inadequate treatments we have today are not points to be defended. We have much left to learn, but for the first time, we can see our way past these current inadequacies to a period where we will test entirely new, well-conceived, and powerful ideas. Out of these will come the preventions and treatments of tomorrow.
This new day will only come if we fully support our engine of discovery. We will only know what works if patients are not denied access to clinical trials. People will only benefit from what we learn if they have access to a health care system that works, and that works for the needs of all cancer patients. This is one American dream that must be brought to all Americans.
“No More Cancer” means we will move forward with bold expectations. We will ask, “What do we need know and what must we be able to do to cure cancer?” and we will move to do it.
We will not be timid. We will be audacious. We will describe all the gears and springs of the awful machinery of cancer. We will find drugs that target each of these machines. If it takes thousands, we will find thousands. We will find molecules that give us early tags for every cancer.
We are at a turning point. There is a new power in our science, and we will use it. An unprecedented number of good ideas are emerging. It is clear that progress will not be limited by ideas, but by the resources with which we will use to test those ideas.
It is time to turn that power, like never before, on cancer.
It cannot be said that we saw what was possible and did not move. Of our generation of discoverers, it must be said that they made the imagined possible, seized the moment, saw what could be done, and did it.
