Updated at 1:45 p.m. April 22, 2018
Former Vice President Joe Biden’s voice rose to near anger Friday night in La Jolla.
Addressing 300 invited donors, trustees and scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies — including Al Gore, another ex-veep — Biden decried the dearth of cooperation in cancer research.
He said that he could use his cell phone to learn what movies were playing at a cinema in Bemidji, Minnesota, but not (until recently) find where nearby cancer trials were being conducted.
“How can that be?” he pleaded to a room with not a few Nobel laureates. “How can that be?”
If someone invented a football helmet that prevented concussions, it would be sold in every sporting goods store in the nation, he said.
But the same can’t be said for breakthrough cancer studies, suggested the co-chair (with wife Jill) of the Biden Cancer Initiative. “How does this continue to be?”
“I know it’s piling on,” said President Obama’s appointee to lead the cancer moonshot initiative. “As the most brilliant people in this country, help me understand what could be done” to foster collaboration, “whether it’s legislation or changing public attitudes.”
Biden, who lost his son Beau to brain cancer in 2015, hailed the launch of Salk’s Conquering Cancer Initiative — focusing on what Biden called “the most difficult cancers.”
In a 52-minute talk that followed a panel discussion by four Salk researchers (all of whom told stories of losing loved ones to cancer and highlighted the center’s culture of collaboration), Biden gave examples of the “fierce urgency of now.”
(Friday’s printed program schedule showed five members on the panel, however. The missing panelist was Inder Verma, 70, who on Saturday was revealed to have been put on administrative leave as Salk looks into allegations against him.)
“Doc, can you give me just another month?” Biden said, channeling a cancer patient. “I want to see my grandchild. Just another month, Doc. I’m not asking to save my life — just another month,” he said, also evoking dads wanting to see their kids graduate or their daughters get married.
Biden told of a University of Chicago doctor, giving him a tour, who bemoaned patients not sharing their medical data.
The former Delaware senator and presidential candidate would have none of it.
“I said: ‘Doc, where the hell have you been? I’ve not found any patient not willing to do that,’” Biden said.
If given 15 minutes of prime-time national TV to ask for individuals’ cancer genomes, Biden said: “I promise you that within the next week, somewhere between a million and 10 million people would send it in.”
He asked “Why? Why?” such a database didn’t exist.
With “all the brilliant research you do,” he told the Conrad T. Prebys Auditorium audience, “you have such cache as an institution. We also need you to help change the system…. You’ve thought through a lot of this stuff.”
At one point, he noted how a possible treatment for his son’s glioblastomas wouldn’t work because radiation had damaged his blood vessels. He urged researchers to share work that would avert bad first-try treatments.
(In his last visit to San Diego, in May, he broke down in tears while recalling Beau. This time, reading from a teleprompter, he kept his composure.)
Salk launches the Conquering Cancer Initiative. An honor to have @JoeBiden help us launch the fight against the 5 deadliest cancers! #breastcancer (triple negative), brain (#glioblastoma), #PancreaticCancer , lung and #ovariancancer. @BidenCancer #CancerFierce pic.twitter.com/VxJpPZyUdw
— Salk Institute (@salkinstitute) April 21, 2018
Biden addressed none of the swirling questions about his 2020 political ambitions (when he’d be 78 if inaugurated as president). But his trademark folksiness was on clear display.
He noted the presence of Tom Whittington, his old University of Delaware classmate. (Whittington’s wife is Salk board vice chair Marna Whittington, who moderated an earlier panel. The couple paid for the event.)
“Good to see ya, pal,” Biden told Whittington, who shared a suite with him for two years in college (but with whom he now had “nothing politically in common.”)
“Probably the two people who graduated on time,” Biden said. “A lot of our classmates did not. We’re the two people who studied the least and still made it.”
Said Whittington after another exchange: “If you weren’t here, I’d be in very serious trouble.”
From his lectern, Biden also chatted with Gore (“Great to see you!”), in the second row with his partner of about six years — Salk trustee Mary Elizabeth “Liz” Keadle, a fellow divorcee.
(Afterward, Gore declined to be interviewed.)
Biden shared his hopes for the Salk program, which is focusing on five cancers — triple-negative breast, brain, pancreatic, lung and ovarian but also potentially helpful in conquering other diseases.
He launched into a sequence reminiscent of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
But for Biden, it was “I see the day.”
- When prevention is more effective, when treatment for cancer is more effective.
- When those of you in this room can take your grandchildren in for a school physical and be vaccinated for certain cancers.
- When with less harmful side effects, “patients get the right therapy the first time, when it’s most likely to be effective.”
He saw progress such as the use of IBM’s Watson supercomputer, which he said has “read” every cancer study in existence.
Biden, speaking in one of only two U.S. cities with three National Cancer Institute-designated cancer centers (along with New York), said drug companies aren’t responsible for doing research for free.
“It’s the responsibility of the American people,” he said after calling the cancer fight “the most bipartisan thing that exists today.”
He promised that, if asked, Congress would underwrite the cost of cancer research “because for the first time there is … expectation that we’re on the precipice of real genuine breakthroughs that we’ve been afraid to dream about until now.”
He told the catered fund-raising event: “You are the most remarkable group of people in the country; I really mean it.”
“The world will be further indebted to you … as the point of the spear in changing the way we think about how to deal with what we find. How we collaborate, how we work together.”
