During their lifetimes, one in two American men and one in three American women will hear the words that staggered Don Chance. "It's cancer," a doctor told Chance after removing a lump in his neck. "The darn thing has spread all over the place."

That was nine years ago and Chance, 52 and in remission today, vividly recalls his response. The knees weakened, his legs splayed, he sat down. "There are two kinds of people in this world: those who have had cancer and those who haven't," says Chance, a Louisiana State University professor. "The ones who have had it no longer have to worry about how they will feel when the doctor says those words. It's nothing you want to hear."

Chance's story can be multiplied a million-fold, which might make one think that the search for a cure would be a potent political issue. But so far, there are few signs that the political will to fully wage war on cancer is present in Washington. The Senate's latest version of the National Cancer Act, a rah-rah piece of legislation mired in committee for two years, doesn't ask for any wallops in funding. Bill co-sponsor Sen. Sam Brownback, a 48-year-old Kansas Republican, calls cancer "the polio of our era," but even he says money isn't the antidote.

"What we need now is a key top-down focus like what [President] Nixon did when he declared war on cancer" in 1971, he says.

Brownback wants Bush to set a date for when cancer will be defeated, like a dare to the cancer-fighting industry. NCI director Dr. Andrew Von Eschenbach says science's goal is to eliminate "the suffering and death" due to cancer by 2015, but Brownback wants a similar charge -- and confidence -- from the White House. "I think people would fall in line," he says. "This would be measurable and time certain ... like balancing the budget in seven years."

Prostate cancer survivor Sen. John Kerry shows his support for cancer research by sporting the mustard-yellow wristband of the Lance Armstrong Foundation, but his office offers few details about how the Democrat from Massachusetts would help if elected president. He would "significantly increase federal funding of cancer research," says Madhu Chugh, the campaign's director of healthcare policy, but she gives no particular strategy or dollar amount.

Instead she steers discussion toward the politically charged issue of embryonic stem-cell research, a budding science that holds no immediate promise for cancer fighters. There are currently no FDA trials for any drugs stemming from embryonic stem cells, and no medicines are likely for at least 10 to 15 years.

As for Bush, Brownback says his forays into the West Wing have been mostly ignored. Because George H.W. Bush lost a daughter to leukemia and is on the board of visitors at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Brownback long ago discussed with the former president his plans for articulating a stand in the cancer war. But, more recently, the idea "didn't get much reception with Dubya," Brownback says.

The priorities of the current administration are clear: The war in Iraq is front and center. The more than 1,000 U.S. soldiers killed there have dominated headlines. Cancer's assault is far less visceral than the bloodshed in Iraq, but its carnage accumulates at an unfathomably greater clip: Since the beginning of the Iraq war, cancer has killed about 3,500 American children and teenagers.

That's why, in May, 15-year-old cancer victim Sonia Bawa made a pleading request of President Bush. "Put the war in Iraq on hold for one month so we can double the national cancer research budget," she wrote on her Web site.

Sonia's impractical appeal is about priorities -- and perspective. Congress spends on average about $6.5 billion per month in Iraq. It gives $405 million per month to the NCI. At least two-thirds of the cancer research proposals that are peer-reviewed and approved by the NIH today don't receive government funding. The ideas are thrown like chum to the free market -- where many sink. Industry doesn't typically invest unless success is shown in preliminary testing, the expensive pre-clinical animal trials supported by charities and taxpayers.

Companies are charged with assessing risk to stockholders, not patients, explains Wall Street biotech analyst Reni J. Benjamin. "At the end of the day," he says, echoing other analysts, "the most humanitarian company does no one any good if it is bankrupt."

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