National Cancer Act of 1971 (War on Cancer)

In president Nixon's 1971 State of the Union address, he allocated $100 million dollars to find a cure for cancer, the second leading cause of death in America.  He signed the National Cancer Act into law on 23 December 1971.  The Act gave the National Cancer Institute "unique autonomy at NIH with special budgetary authority" (NCI, para. 4).  Vincent DeVita, M.D., the Director of NCI between 1980-1988, states in an interview that he was Chief of Medicine when the National Cancer Act was passed.  He describes the reluctant atmosphere at NCI and the feeling of intrusion that he and his colleagues felt.  The act "changed the mission not only of the NCI but the NIH.  The mandate of the Cancer Act was to support research and the applications of the results of the research to reduce the incidents of morbidity and mortality from Cancer.  The NIH [had] never had a mission beyond supporting basic research, so all of the sudden we had to look at the practical application of what was going on.  It was not an easy thing to do" (NCI Video). 

A quote from another interview with DeVita:

the War on Cancer '…did  everything it was supposed to do. It supported basic research handsomely. It set up application programs—the EORTC [European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer] and U.S. clinical trials programs. The incidence of cancer in this country started dropping in 1990 and has continued to drop every year since, and so has mortality. And the morbidity from cancer, comparing 1971 to 2005, is like night and day. . . . So, every benchmark of the mandate has been hit.'² (NCI)

² Haran C. Vince DeVita: the view from the top. Cancer World June–July 2005;38–43 (NCI)

President Nixon's Cancer Panel (1982)

Dr. Elliott Stonehill, Dr. William Longmire, Armand Hammer, Dr. Harold Amos, Dr. Vincent DeVita

(National Cancer Institute, 1982, AV-8200-3476)