For all of us dedicated to reducing the burden of cancer, there is a shared
feeling of being on a threshold. Cervantes said, "The beginning of
health is to know the disease." As we hope this document makes clear,
we are beginning to know this disease, and we believe that we are on the
threshold of making great strides in treating it. It is our curiosity that
creates the knowledge, our ingenuity that translates that knowledge into
successful interventions to prevent, detect, and treat cancer, and our humanity
that drives us to do all that we can do to eliminate the suffering that
cancer brings.
This Nation has built an infrastructure that integrates research, education,
training, application, and communication into a coordinated effort to answer
the six questions posed at the beginning of this document:
* What is cancer and how does it develop?
* Who is at risk for which cancers and why?
* How can cancer be prevented?
* How do we screen for, detect, and diagnose cancer?
* How do we best treat cancer?
* How do we improve quality of life for cancer patients and survivors?
To succeed requires the leadership of the NCI to seek and heed the best
advice of all who can contribute. This document represents the fruit of
such advice. To succeed requires that we set priorities and use our resources
well. This we have done and will continue to do. To succeed requires that
we have the vision to recognize new opportunities and the flexibility and
energy to capture opportunities for progress. Such are the opportunities
that we offer to this Nation in this document.
Finally, our responsibility is to all people, for cancer threatens us all.
Our success requires that, while we choose priorities that offer the best
opportunities for advancement, we maintain our commitment to all approaches
to all cancers in all people. Each of the extraordinary opportunities for
new investments that we have identified has the ability to contribute to
reducing the burden of all cancers in all people. It will do us no good
to identify risks, whether in genes, environment, diet, or lifestyle, if
we do not address the behavioral and psychosocial issues raised. It will
do us no good to develop new approaches to prevention, early detection,
diagnosis, and treatment, if we do not use clinical research to establish
what works and what does not work. It will do us no good to establish what
we need to do to reduce the burden of cancer, if that knowledge is not made
available to the benefit of all people.
The National Cancer Institute belongs to the public. This document sets
forth a vision of what we as a Nation must do in order to bring hope to
those who struggle against cancer and to turn that hope into action. We
have charted a course and commit ourselves to follow it and fulfill its
promises.