-- [ From: Seymour Gross * EMC.Ver #2.5.3 ] --
"Moreover, in global terms, America's military budget is four times
that of the second largest military spender, Russia, and is nearly five
times that of Japan. America's military budget is almost seventeen
times as large as the combined spending of the six countries often
identified as our most likely adversaries: Iraq, North Korea, Iran,
Libya, Syria and Cuba.
"One of the advantages of our thriving peacetime economy is the
opportunity it affords us as a nation to focus on improving our quality
of life. Perhaps, the most critical component of this is finding ways
to eliminate or reduce the enormous human suffering caused by disease
and illness. Now is the time for our leaders to seize this historic
opportunity - during a period in which we have the requisite financial
and technological resources - to initiate, and win, an all-out war
against these devastating human maladies.
"Fortunately, precedent exists for the type of concerted national
effort needed to find cures for the disease afflicting our people. We
as a nation must once again invoke the determined, compulsive spirit
that spurred us to put a man on the moon before the Russians - the
relentless, urgent drive behind the Manhattan Project that, in our life-
and-death battle against the Axis powers in World War II, produced the
atomic bomb.
" If we have been able to marshal our resources so successfully
against foreign adversaries, then surely we can do the same against
disease and illness, our greates adversaries here at home. Just as
President Kennedy vowed in 1961 to put a man on the moon by the end of
the decade, our leaders today should make a national commitment to
finding cures, by the end of the next decade, for the principal diseases
afflicting our people.
"To achieve such an ambitious national objective, the United States
must immediately and dramatically increase funding of the National
Institutes of Health and must provide much greater financial support to
our country's major privately endowed and university-
based medical research institutions. Just as we invested in our
engineering schools during the Cold War to produce a generation of
brilliant engineers, scientists and inventors, we must today invest in
the nation's medical schools and biomedical and biotechnological
institutes in order to train an army of doctors and researchers in the
fight against disease and illness.
Part 3 continued ....
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