October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, but the war on cancer needs to be waged all 12 months during the year. That was the message scores of Iowans delivered along with some 10,000 other Americans at the American Cancer Society’s Celebration on the Hill in Washington earlier this fall. And they had another message for their members of Congress: The proposed cuts in funding for cancer research – for a second year in a row – are unconscionable and unacceptable.

For me, this is personal. I have lost two sisters to breast cancer, one brother to prostate cancer, and another brother to thyroid cancer. I appreciate that hundreds of thousands of other Iowans and their loved ones have also been touched by cancer. This is why I have been an outspoken advocate of robust funding for research at the National Cancer Institute. Between 1998 and 2003, I partnered with Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) to double funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), one of the world’s great biomedical research agencies.

We have made tremendous progress in the war against cancer. But, today, proposed budget cuts threaten to take us backward. The President’s budget for fiscal year 2007 would cut funding for the National Cancer Institute by $40 million. That comes on the heels of a $35 million cut in fiscal year 2006. The President’s budget also cuts cancer programs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including reductions to breast and cervical cancer screening programs.

A$40 million cut means that NCI would award 80 fewer new, competing research grants than this year. It means that the United States will say no to 80 potential medical breakthroughs that have gone through the peer-review process, received an excellent score, and been deemed worthy of NIH funding. And that is a real shame.

Instead of funding a war on cancer, these proposed budget cuts would fund a retreat in the war on cancer.

When cancer-survivor Lance Armstrong was in Iowa this summer to ride in RAGBAI, he testified before my Senate field hearing in Ames on cancer research. Lance noted that the war on cancer is not a partisan issue. The war on cancer is everyone’s fight.

President Bush got it right four years ago when he said: “In order to win the war on cancer, we must fund the war on cancer.” It is time for him – it is time for all of us – to make good on that commitment.