:: A Brighter Future for Medical Research ::  

You could immediately tell he had spent most of his life in a laboratory as opposed to an office building. His salt and pepper hair lay messily on his head and an old briefcase worn with years of use sat at his side. He looked as if he would be more comfortable in his lab coat than the neatly pressed blazer he wore. I suspected that visiting a Congressman’s office was quite far out of his daily routine.

“How long did you work on the project?” I asked.

“Seventeen years, everyday,” he responded, carefully annunciating each word.

“Did you feel like you had failed?” I asked.

The lines on his face relaxed as his lips curled into a smile. “No,” he said confidently peering through the thick glasses that rested on his nose. “It was worth every minute and every penny.”

I tried to imagine the last seventeen years of my life. I’d watched my children enter and graduate from high school and college, find jobs, and begin their adult lives. I had been an attorney working with numerous small businesses, served in the General Assembly, and come to Washington to serve in the House of Representatives. So much had happened during these years. And there were so many tangible accomplishments that I could point to.

But also during that time, I remembered vividly the last months and days of Dad’s life as he struggled through the final stages of Parkinson’s disease. And I remembered the three years that my good friend Margaret came to work in our office everyday battling the breast cancer that destroyed her body before it eventually took her life.

Sitting in front of me was a man who had spent the last seventeen years working as medical researcher. For seventeen years he had worked on one drug to treat one disease. And after seventeen years he had perfected the drug until it worked. But while it cured the disease, its side-effects ravaged the body in other areas. Ultimately, the drug would never make it to the prescription counter.

Since coming to Washington, I’ve met with and talked to many medical researchers with similar stories. And I’ve met with countless other organizations, groups, families, and individuals who have depended so completely on the ability of medical researchers to continue working for cures. Each one has told me how critical it is for the federal government to continue investing in medical research to further the cause for better treatments, new vaccines and improved medications.

In Congress, we have made two significant steps towards this goal. Recently, the House of Representatives passed the National Institutes of Health Reform Act of 2006 (H.R. 6164). This bill authorizes a five-percent increase in NIH’s budget each year from 2007-2009. The funding increase allows for continued and new biomedical research projects, research project grants, and biodefense research. Health organizations including the American Heart Association, Association of American Medical Colleges, and the National MS Society have advocated for this increase.

Additionally, this week brought the first announcement in a series of grants resulting from the Stem Cell Therapeutic and Research Act of 2005 (PL 109-129) which authorized the creation of a national bank of umbilical cord blood rich in adult stem cells. The legislation passed by overwhelming margins in Congress and was signed into law last December by President Bush.

Unlike research requiring the destruction of human embryos, these cord blood stem cells are successfully treating human patients today. These grants will truly allow medical waste to be turned into medical miracles. The Stem Cell Therapeutic and Research Act of 2005 authorized the creation of a national program to collect 150,000 units of cord blood, focused on genetic diversity. It also creates a registry to link public cord blood banks nationwide so that physicians can search the whole bank for a blood or bone marrow match.

Adult stem cells derived from umbilical cord blood are non-controversial and are already providing treatments for a host of diseases including leukemia, sickle cell anemia, cerebral palsy, and Hodgkin’s disease. In fact, just this week, scientists in Britain announced that they used cord blood to grow the world’s first artificial liver. While these artificial livers are not yet ready for transplant into humans, the development once again shows that stem cells derived from ethical sources are showing greater promise in delivering real treatments for actual patients.

These advancements, coupled with the increases in funding at the National Institutes of Health, are laying the foundation for even better prospects for medical research and greater hope for the many people across the United States suffering from disease and illness. And with these investments, I am sure we will look back, as the medical researcher did, and say, “It was worth every minute and every penny.”