Lasker

On December 23, 1971, the United States President Richard Nixon signed the National Cancer Act into law. A number of things happened before Nixon's war on cancer. First, Mary Lasker, who remembered her family's laundress who died terribly of breast cancer with seven children around her bed, decided to lobby for expansion of cancer research when "less is spent on cancer research in America than on chewing gum." Next, Mary Lasker recruited her friend Ann Landers to write a column on Reader's Digest appealing to the public.

Nixon's effort wasn't going too well. We knew Nixon wanted to turn the kind of concentrated effort that took man to the moon toward conquering the dread disease of cancer. That's why the President infused more than 100 billion doctors into cancer research. After that, the jaw-dropping statistics showed little decline in death rates for cancer.

The breakthrough seemed to have surfaced after Dr. Luther Leonidas Terry, the ninth Surgeon General of the United States, released the report concluding that smoking causes lung cancer and chronic bronchitis. He quit smoking and encouraged millions of Americans to do the same. The efforts to cut smoking made bigger impact than that of Nixon. 

Whose responsibility is it to save the lives of the country, you might ask? The President Donald Trump, the anti-vaccine health secretary Robert Francis Kennedy, or the National Institutes of Health paralysed after the funding freeze?