DOI: 10.1097/01.COT.0000294754.16306.8f

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Issn Print: 0276-2234

Publication Date: 2006/03/10


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American Cancer Society Research Program Marks 60 Years

Peggy Eastman

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WASHINGTON, DC—To celebrate the 60 years of its research program, the American Cancer Society held an evening event at the National Academy of Sciences building here that drew researchers, cancer survivors, donors, patient advocates, and volunteers, as well as ACS officials. The ACS research program, started in 1946, is the largest private, not-for-profit source of funds for investigators studying cancer.
ACS Chairman of the Board Sally West Brooks noted that the research program was started with $1 million raised by Mary Lasker, an amount that has now grown to nearly $3 billion and that has funded 38 Nobel laureates.
Back in 1946, there were many misconceptions about cancer, survival was much lower and some treatments were primitive by today's standards (see box), said ACS President Carolyn Runowicz, MD. “Today, we are making strides; we are winning the war on cancer.”
But while celebrating measurable, life-extending advances, speakers also stressed that the momentum of the last 60 years must not only be maintained but also accelerated to win the war on cancer, a war threatened by a lack of optimal resources.
Today, only one in six of the eligible grant applications in cancer research can be funded by the National Cancer Institute, ACS Chief Executive Officer John Seffrin, PhD, pointed out.
And investigators tend not to be funded until they are well established. Thomas R. Cech, PhD, President of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a Nobel Laureate in chemistry, decried the fact that, unlike the ACS, which has a tradition of funding investigators early in their careers (under age 35), the National Institutes of Health tends to fund older, more established scientists.
Dr. Cech, who was awarded a lifetime professorship by the ACS in 1987, said the average age for receiving a first NIH grant is now 42 for PhDs and 44 for MDs, averages that are going up.
“The Society must continue to support outstanding [young] investigators…who might get lost in a very large biomedical enterprise” without such support, said Mark Clanton, NCI Deputy Director. He praised ACS for “giving birth to biomedical research around cancer,” and for “supporting investigator-initiated research,” especially research by young scientists.
“The Society fed me when I was young and hungry, and now, almost 60 years later, I have not forgotten,” said Paul Talalay, MD, one of the first lifetime ACS Professors and the John Jacob Abel Distinguished Service Professor of Pharmacology and Molecular Sciences at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Dr. Talalay, like Dr. Cech and other speakers, emphasized the importance of funding qualified scientists early in their careers; he noted that he received an ACS postdoctoral grant in 1948, when he was just starting out. He went on to become a pioneer in cancer chemoprevention and completed studies that led to the isolation of sulforaphane, a powerful inducer of protective enzymes in broccoli.
This work led to the establishment of the Brassica Chemoprotection Laboratory at Johns Hopkins, devoted to identifying edible plants rich in protective enzyme-inducer activity, plant substances that show evidence as cancer protectants.
Mary-Claire King, PhD, an ACS Research Professor and Professor of Medicine and Genome Sciences at the University of Washington, noted that ACS funding, along with NIH funding, has been “absolutely critical” in her career.
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