In the early 1970s, Congress was at a pivotal point in shaping the future of cancer research and policy for the United States. I remember vividly the atmosphere “on the Hill” as legislation was pending before both the House and the Senate on the funding of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and its position within the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The American people, the Congress, and President Nixon were concerned about cancer; at the time, most people diagnosed with cancer didn’t have much hope for the future. We were losing many of our best and brightest to this deadly disease and we needed to do something about it. The result in this country was to declare a “war on cancer.”

During this time, I was the chair of the Subcommittee on Health and the Environment in the House. We were known as the “Disease of the Month Club” because of the volume of legislation we were passing. We wore this label as a badge of honor because we were committed to improving the health of the citizens of the United States through increasing the government’s commitment to biomedical research. In 1971, the Senate passed legislation to make an independent agency of NCI, and President Nixon appeared ready to sign the legislation. Our committee understood the importance of this legislation, and we proceeded to hold three weeks of hearings on the bill. (Three weeks of hearings were all but unheard of, but they were necessary to ensure that members of the House were educated on the topic.) Many scientists, including several Nobel laureates, testified to the value of keeping the NCI as part of NIH. They pointed out examples of how advances in one field can impact advances in other fields. A number of prominent researchers questioned whether the exchange of information would be as great if the NCI became independent of NIH. We also had to think of our research commitment to other diseases and whether this would result in separate agencies for each disease. We, on the committee and members of the House, struggled with these issues, but decided at the end of our deliberations to keep NCI a part of NIH. We passed the National Cancer Act of 1971, and our fight against cancer began in earnest.