What can I say about Lance Armstrong?

As a cycling fan, he’s given me some of the exhilarating and inspiring moments I’ve ever had watching his record-setting performances time and time again.

As a cancer survivor, he’s reminded all of us that beating this illness can give us courage to go beyond what we thought was possible. He’s reminded us of our special responsibility to speak out so others will be cured.

And as a friend and biking partner, I’ve chased Lance up and down trails in Austin and across the world.

Let me put it this way -- in the fight against cancer and on the bike, it’s a full-time job just trying to keep up with Lance. The Lance Armstrong Foundation has invested nearly $2 million into five survivorship centers across the country. It’s invested nearly $1.6 million into survivorship education and outreach initiatives with over 60 national and regional partnerships. And thanks to their advocacy work, they’ve helped increase the National Cancer Institute’s Office of Cancer Survivorship budget by 256% and the CDC Comprehensive Cancer Control budget by 383%. That is a record to be proud of, and that is a record that saves lives.

I also want to thank Lance for the tiny, yellow gift he gave our country off the bike: the gift of these yellow bracelets. I can’t tell you how many people on the campaign trail – in restaurants, in ropelines, in town hall meetings -- in 2004 noticed my bracelet and pulled me close and pulled back their sleeve to show me they wore one too. Husbands who wore the bracelet for a wife battling ovarian cancer. Children who wore them for a parent. Big guys with their tears in their eyes who wore the bracelet because their father died of prostate cancer, but they beat it. Men who felt so lucky that they would live to see their grandchildren, men who knew they were lucky.

That is my story in a lot of ways, but it’s not the biggest lesson I took away from my brush with cancer.

It’s true -- my father wasn’t as lucky. They caught his prostate cancer too late. He struggled a long time with it and we lost him in the summer of 2000. His struggle was a reminder to me why early testing was so important, and I was lucky to be married to the daughter of a doctor who was always reminded me – pushing me – she’d tell you nagging me – to get tested and to ask questions of my doctor. I’m glad she did.

But the lesson I took away from beating prostate cancer was a little different. I got tested, I got diagnosed, I had surgery, and thank God I was cured. It all happened as I was starting to run for president. Like anyone else, that word “cancer” was jarring. But I got cured. It didn’t stop me from doing what I have spent most of my adult life doing – being an advocate.

Cancer wasn’t my first brush with my own mortality, but it had the same crystallizing, focusing effect on me that I had as a young man when I saw so many of my best friends die too young in a war gone wrong. It made me angry. A lot of us who were lucky enough to come home from Vietnam in one piece did so with a saying: “every day is extra.” 35 years ago, I used those extra days to stop that war. I took my anger and it gave me absolute certainty that I had a responsibility to stop others from getting killed.

I have extra days after cancer as well – and again given a choice between being scared of cancer, or being philosophical about it, I’d rather just be pissed off at cancer – and use my anger to do what I do: be an advocate – and make things better for other people who weren’t as lucky as I was.

What cancer did was open my eyes even more to what was going on around me – outside my own personal experience.

I have a friend in Massachusetts named Tom Farrington. Tom and I are both lucky. We were cured. And once Tom got well, he started learning more and more - and a statistic that stays with me - and with Tom -- who is African American - speaks volumes. African American men are 80% more likely to die of prostate cancer than white men. I started digging more, and discovered the unacceptable apartheid of health care in America: Black children five times more likely than white children to die of asthma; African Americans 70% more likely to have diabetes and 27% more likely to die from it. Just as the doctrine of 'separate but equal,' was wrong in education, it's wrong in health care. The quality of health care should never depend on the color of any American's skin.

Then there’s my daughter Vanessa. I couldn't be more proud of her. She's in her final year of medical school. I've seen her pack up and leave Massachusetts to study immunization in Ghana I've visited her as she's worked in hospitals here at home, and we've had more than our share of father-daughter talks about the kind of public service she's chosen. We lost her mother – my former wife – to cancer this spring. It is tough to know that two daughters in their early thirties won’t have their mom there to turn to. It makes me almost feel like I don’t belong here on this stage talking about how I beat cancer when so many others have struggles with the disease that are like night and day compared to mine. But I think about Vanessa, and I think about her loss of her mother, and I also think about her compassion as a doctor for her patients – and I think, I do have a special responsibility to try and fix the health care system in which Vanessa is going to spend her life trying to help people. That I can do – and that we must all try to do together.

And in those areas – finding a cure for cancer, making health care work for people – we have miles to go – and that’s a race where I’m going to really try my best to keep up with Lance Armstrong.

Make no mistake, we’ve made progress. In 1971, fewer than half of all cancer patients lived five years beyond their diagnosis. Today, the 5-year survival rate is 64% for adults and 79% for kids 14 years and younger. In 1971, this country had 3 million cancer survivors when the National Cancer Act was established, now there are 10 million of us. The question is how those of us who are survivors will use our voices.

I think we need to use our voices to end the doctrine of separate but equal in health care and in cancer treatment. Congressman Greg Meeks and I recently introduced a bill to fight the prostate cancer crisis in the African-American community today. We’re urging Congress to provide the funds necessary, and to encourage African American men in particular to get screened The goal of our resolution is to combat disparities between races in education and awareness and, ultimately, in health. Good luck to any politician who wants to come home to their district and explain it was more important to send your money on a bridge to nowhere or more giveaways for the oil companies than it was to make sure that no one in our country dies of cancer just because of the color of their skin. It is time to say no to the apartheid in cancer treatment in America.

But that’s not all. Every one of us needs to challenge Washington’s lack of vision on cancer research and treatment. We can’t be content to ask whether we’re doing better when the American question has always been “are we doing enough?”

Just think: the science tells us that about one-third of the 570,280 cancer deaths estimated in 2005 were related to nutrition, physical inactivity, and overweight/obesity and therefore could also have been prevented. Are we doing enough?

How many of the one million skin cancers that are expected to be diagnosed in 2005 could have been prevented by protection from the sun’s rays? Are we doing enough?

Every day were finding links between environmental factors and cancers. Workers in oil refineries, rubber, and drug manufacturing facilities, and those who have high exposures to pesticides, are at higher risk for brain cancer. Exposure to radiation or to benzene and other gasoline-related chemicals is known to cause leukemia. Other factors that have been associated with the disease in some studies include exposure to pesticides and to electromagnetic fields -- radiation emitted by power lines and other electrical sources. And yet were moving backwards on the environment – moving backwards n workplace safety – moving backwards even on the protections we demand about knowing what chemicals we put into the air and water. Can anyone really say we’re doing all we can?

Regular screening examinations by a health care professional can result in the prevention of cervical and colorectal cancers through the discovery and removal of precursor lesions.

Screening can detect cancers of the breast, colon, rectum, cervix, prostate, oral cavity, and skin at early stages and when treatment is more likely to be successful. Cancers that can be prevented or detected earlier by screening account for about half of all new cancer cases. Are we doing all we can?

The answer is no – of course not.

When the President signs a bill for $31 million less for cancer research than the year before. -- the first hard cut since the passage of the National Cancer Act in 1971 – something is wrong in Washington. And when the President announces his budget for 2007 that slashes an additional $40 million, it’s clear that we’ve got a Washingon that says one thing and does another.

I know what people say. Are we spending lots of money on cancer research? You bet. But when federal funding is cut you know what happens: it deters young investigators, meaning fewer drugs for development and application in the future. It means other nations are increasing research funding, with the likelihood that some of the top investigators in the U.S. will be drawn overseas, eroding our nation's competitive advantage in this field. When did you ever hear an American citizen write to their congressman and say ‘cut cancer funding – I want the United States to become a follower not a leader.” This is crazy, folks.

And this march backwards comes even as study after study reminds us that the declining death rates we celebrate come from research advances in the early diagnosis and treatment of tumors. So why aren’t we pushing the curve of discovery? We know we’ve made only marginal progress against the most intractable cancers, such as pancreatic, lung, and liver cancers. Why aren’t we committed to making beating them the next great cancer success story?

And why are we tolerating a coarse political culture where Rush Limbaugh can sit comfortably on his backside in a radio studio and attack Michael J Fox for speaking out about stem cell research? We need to use our voices to applaud Michael J Fox, not attack him – and we need to ask why our country isn’t committed to finding the cures of tomorrow today -- and that’s the fight to fund stem cell research that could one day lead to a cure for cancer.

Can you imagine if someone had told me or Tom Farrington that twenty years earlier a bunch of politicians had blocked research that would have cured our father’s cancers and saved their lives? That could well be the future we’re looking at twenty years from now unless we embrace stem cell research and unleash its full potential.

For each of us, and for millions of Americans, this is a personal issue, almost impossible to separate from our own experiences. I will never forget almost two years ago standing in the amphitheater in Denver, talking to people -- many in wheelchairs, many who had lost loved ones to disease, and many who knew a cure wouldn’t come in time for them -- who held out hope that stem cell research might save them, save a loved one, or save others.

They wanted leadership. They wanted someone to fight for them back in Washington, and I promised them that I would. I will never forget the looks in their eyes, or the promise they were asking of leaders they placed their hope in.

When I think about them, when I think about the people I met all over the country who were so personally invested in this issue, I’m even more deeply troubled to see that today we find ourselves in a place of division when we could have been united.

I wrote to President Bush with a very simple message: “Don’t Veto Hope.” But after signing well over a thousand bills into law without raising his pen to veto a single one, he used the first and only veto of his Presidency to stop federal funding for stem cell research. I think that veto sent a message to all Americans that, on crucial issues, our differences are greater than our shared convictions. I think that veto told the world that America no longer wants to be the country that wants to be the world’s leader in scientific knowledge and discovery. That’s not the country that you and I and Lance Armstrong live in, and that’s not the way a President should lead.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. More than 100 million Americans suffer from illnesses that might one day be cured away with stem cell therapy. Stem cells could replace damaged heart cells or cells destroyed by cancer. They could offer a new lease on life to those with a diagnosis that once came with a death sentence. Let me be very clear – curing cancer is the ultimate “pro-life” policy.

These are areas where we have a responsibility to lead. It’s personal to us. Let me tell you, Senators and Congressmen give themselves great health care. I woke up from my surgery in a hospital bed with doctors and nurses in one of our country’s greatest hospitals and they said “we got it all.” Well, beating prostate cancer made me understand better than ever, it’s not just getting health care, it’s quality, affordable health care – for everyone, everywhere, guaranteed, now. That’s my “National Action Plan.” I think health care for every American is just as important as any politician’s health care in Washington, D.C.

Here’s the bottom line. I don’t think I’m special that I beat cancer. I just think I’m lucky. Lucky that I had an early diagnosis and great care. But one of the things I’ve learned from fighting cancer—and I’ve only had it reinforced through my friendship with Lance—is the essential importance of fighting to spread the luck that I’ve had to as many people as possible. That’s the only way to truly beat cancer—to live as fully and as fearlessly as you possibly can. Not just to live as if you’d never had the cancer, but to live with the wisdom and resolve you gain from beating it.

Survivorship isn’t just grace, or relief, its responsibility.

And our responsibility today teaches me that it is immoral to see our great country slow down just as we’re hitting the home stretch in our race for the cure, and it is our responsibility to go out of here and make hone calls and knock on doors to make clear that we won’t let up for one instant until we’ve crossed the finish line and found one.

So many times in the history of our country, we’ve dreamed of something, then made it a reality. Lance is a great example of that. Americans do the impossible very day. Daring and vision is written in the American DNA. We must never compromise on our determination to defeat cancer—in our labs, in our hospitals, and in our homes, regardless of race—and we will never give up on our dream to cure cancer until it’s a reality – that’s who we are, and that is who these little yellow bracelets remind us we must be again today. Let’s go out and make America America again – let’s find a cure, and let’s make it available to every American. Thank you and God Bess.