Cancer Prevention
In this video, Samuel Epstein spends about 36 minutes speaking on "Cancer Prevention" at the 31st Annual Cancer Convention held on Labor Day weekend by the Cancer Control Society.
About Samuel Epstein
SAMUEL EPSTEIN, M.D. was born and educated in England. He received his Doctorate of Medicine with honors at Guy's Hospital, London in 1950, and he became a qualified Specialist in Pathology, Tropical Medicine and Internal Medicine. He had a distinguished medical career in England, including Specialist in Pathology, Royal Army Medical Corps, where he was awarded 3 major military prizes, lecturer in Pathology and Bacteriology, University of London, and British Empire Cancer Campaign Research Fellow, in conjunction with the Chester Beatty Cancer Research Institute, and Tumor Pathologist at The Hospital for Sick Children, and Great Ormond Street, London.
In 1960, he was invited to the United States, where he founded the Laboratories of Carcinogenesis and Toxicology, and The Children's Cancer Research Foundation in Boston. He was also appointed Senior Research Associate in Pathology at Harvard Medical School.
Currently, Dr. Epstein is Professor of Occupational and Environmental Medicine at the School of Public Health, University of Illinois Medical Center, Chicago. He is an internationally recognized scientific authority on cancer prevention and on the toxic and carcinogenic effects of environmental pollutants in the air, water, food and the workplace.
Dr. Epstein is the author of some 280 scientific articles and 20 books, including the prize-winning The Politics of Cancer, Hazardous Waste in America, and is co-author, with David Steinman, of The Safe Shoppers Bible, The Breast Prevention Program, The Politics Of Cancer Revisited and the latest, printed in 2005, Cancer-Gate: How To Win The Losing Cancer War.
Dr. Epstein's activities bridging science and public policy include former consultant to the U.S. Senate Committee on Public Works, frequently invited Congressional testimony, and member of Federal Agency Advisory Committees including the Health Advisory Committee of EPA and the Department of Labor Advisory Committee on the Regulation of Occupational Carcinogens. He has been Chairman of the Air Pollution Control Association Committee on Biological Effects of Air Pollutants, President of the Society of Occupational and Environmental Health, Founder and Secretary of the Environmental Mutagen Society and former President of the Rachel Carson Council.
He is also the Chairman of the Cancer Prevention Coalition, formed in 1993 to focus public attention on the avoidable cancer epidemic and to develop policies and strategies based on grass roots initiatives to reverse the losing war against cancer. The Coalition has become a leading group of independent experts on cancer prevention and public health, together with citizen activists, organized labor, public interest and women's cancer groups. They may be contacted at (312) 996-2297, fax: (312) 996-1374, website: www.preventcancer.com or e-mail: [email protected].
On October 7, 1998, Stockholm, Sweden, Dr. Epstein was awarded the Right Livelihood Award, better known as the "Alternative Nobel Prize" for his contributions to cancer prevention.
On June 10, 2005 (at a ceremony at the Royal Castle in Warsaw, Poland), he was awarded the Albert Schweitzer Golden Grand Medal for Humanitarianism, for International Contributions to Cancer Prevention.
Transcription
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. First of all, I'd like to thank Lois Rosen, telephoned me to join you here today.
But far more importantly, I'd like to take up this opportunity to express my own personal admiration to Lois for the decades of extraordinary hard work, organization, skills and dedication to which is brought towards creating this very important national organization. And I would like, if I may. Apart from all that, as we all know, she is one of the most loveable persons you could hope to meet.
So I'd like, if I may, to presume to ask you to join me and stand up in tribute to lowest raise until I'm Tangka.
I'm going to try to cover a rather complex mix, which, as you know, my cousin I mentioned to you, covers more the politics and the science. And in fact, as I think it will become clear, the science is relatively trivial compared to the politics.
Now, first of all, I should start off by saying we're fighting the wrong war, war for the wrong reasons, with the wrong strategy and with the wrong generals.
No, I'm not talking about the Iraq war. I'm talking about the war against cancer.
Now, to give you the background of this and to create a perspective, I have to go back some 30 years or so to 1971 when representatives and spokespersons of the National Cancer Institute, which, as you know, is a federal institution, part of the national health, but semi-autonomous, and the American Cancer Society, which is the world's wealthiest nonprofit institution.
When spokespersons of these two or organizations or institutions created a major national PR campaign with full page advertisements in The New York Times and other newspapers entitled Mr. Nixon, we can win the war against cancer. We can cure cancer in our lifetime.
So this was a very well orchestrated PR campaign by the National Cancer and the math and science spokesman.
And a great pressure was put on President Nixon and he signed very reasonably. He signed the National Cancer Act because he was told to give him more funds. We could cure cancer in our lifetime. So that is how the war against cancer started.
Now we are now some 32 years later. And as far as the National Cancer Institute is concerned. Fifty five billion dollars later. And we're going to review what has happened in that intervening period of 32 years and find that we have gone from bad not to a little worse, but to much worse.
And to find that the public has been misled, not a little, but overwhelmingly, we are, in fact, much further away