Oedipus promptly and wisely responded:

Man. In the morning of his life he travels on all fours, at noon he walks with two feet, which at night he supplements with a cane.

The solving of the riddle robbed the Sphinx of her extraordinary power and rendered her vulnerable. Thereupon Oedipus destroyed her and thus saved from extinction the remnant of the people of Thebes.

As all the dwellers in the Grecian city were threatened by the Sphinx so all the people in the whole wide world are threatened by cancer, a loathsome scourge a thousand times more terrifying and deadly than a wilderness of monsters such as that which the son of Laius and Jocasta slew before the gates of Thebes. Startling facts corroborate this sweeping assertion, and clearly show that mankind is confronted with the dilemma of destroying cancer or being destroyed by it.

A recent authority declares that in England and Wales the death rate from this scourge has increased more than 990 percent in less than 100 years. Hoffman, a great American authority on the mortality from cancer, says, in his comprehensive work which was published in 1915, that its death rate in the United States doubled during the preceding 40 years. For half a century a similar rate of increase has prevailed throughout the world.

In May 1928 I passed through the Senate the first bill for the exclusive purpose of obtaining governmental assistance in solving the cancer problem that was ever approved by either House of Congress. In that year cancer killed 100,558 of the people of the United States who were 40 years of age or older.

In 1943, the last year for which relevant accurate data is available, cancer killed, of the people of this country who had reached the age of 40 years or more, 156,503. This was equivalent to an increase in the death rate of more than 55 percent in 15 years. In 1944 the total death toll from cancer in the United States was 171,171. In the year 1928 cancer caused a death in this country, on the average, every 5 minutes and 30 seconds. In 1944 every time the clock "ticked away" 3 minutes and 4 seconds cancer sent someone's father, mother, brother, sister, husband, wife, or child in unspeakable agony from the joyous land of the living into the voiceless land of the dead.

Medical science has conquered yellow fever, diphtheria, typhoid, smallpox, and many other dire afflictions. Medical science has even robbed leprosy and tuberculosis of their terrors. But in spite of all that physicians, surgeons, chemists, biologists, and all other scientists have amazingly accomplished, cancer is still the unconquered, unconquerable, and defiant foe of the human race. Radium, X-ray, and the surgeon's knife are the only generally approved means of combating this frightful destroyer. Every passing year adds to the demonstrations that cancer cannot be eradicated by these or any other means now known, and that it is impossible, with available funds, existing facilities, and present methods, either to check the persistent acceleration of cancer's terrifying encroachment or stay the progressive increase of its horrifying destruction in this or any other land.

For generations the world has been waging war against cancer with bows and arrows and other primitive weapons of the Stone Age, In this life-and-death struggle no country has yet supplied its scientists with sufficient funds to enable them to advance even to the age of the flintlock musket. And while we persist in feebly combating cancer in the manner approved in our grandmothers' days, the insatiate monster, cancer, continues to "laugh at our calamity and mock at our fear when it cometh as desolation."

Statistics as unerring as Holy Writ demonstrate that every nation is traveling a cancer road that leads straight to the sepulcher of the human race.

The time is ripe, and rotten-ripe for change;
Then let it come: I have no dread of what
Is called for by the instinct of mankind.

The enactment of the bill before you will enable a host of eager scientists, who have long been handicapped by a lack of funds, to exchange their useless bows and arrows for weapons as modern as this afternoon, and with them proceed to win victories in keeping with the general, hopeful, prayerful expectations of the atomic age that has burst upon the world.

It is a most distressing fact that the deadliest types of cancer in their later stages inflict upon their wretched victims torture more excruciating than any other known to man. And it is impossible, without fatal consequences, to administer anesthetics to these pitiful sufferers in sufficient quantities to render them oblivious to their

agony.

Had the famous but frutal artist Parrhasius beheld the heartrending suffering of an expiring victim of cancer, he would have had no reason to tear open the wounds of a dying captive soldier in order to obtain sufficient inspiration to impel him adequately to portray an expression of agony or cry out in ecstacy:

How fearfully he stifles that short moan,
Gods! If I could but paint a dying groan.

According to reliable experts, cancer has already branded 17,000,000 of our living for its future victims. If the United States were in the regular shape of a parallelogram, its entire borderline would be approximately 7,000 miles long. Upon the assumption that the 17,000,000 branded for death are of the average height and that they will eventually be buried in a single grave, side by side, in a double line, that grave will be long enough to extend entirely around the United States and for an additional distance as great as that from New York City to Baltimore.

During the second World War the Nazis and the Japanese killed 273,000 of our service men and women. But during the three war years cancer killed of our people 501,019-nearly twice as many as our warring enemies, armed with the most deadly of modern weapons, were able to destroy in the same length of time.

The appropriation authorized by the bill is insignificant in comparison with the transcendent importance of discovering means of curing and preventng cancer. The atomic bomb cost us $2,000,000,000. The cost of our participation in the recent war was at the average rate of $221,043,000 a day. And please bear in mind that this expenditure

was made to defeat a foe whose power of destruction was only a little more than half as great as that of cancer. The entire appropriation sought by the bill is $10,000,000 less than half a day's cost of our participation in the last World War.

The amount of the appropriation should be contrasted with the enormous loss which the American people will continue to suffer until a cure for cancer is found. Doctor Louis I. Dublin, noted statistician for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., pointed out in 1928 that in the preceding year cancer lost the people of the United States $800,000,000. According to the Doctor, the average necessary cost of medicine and care for each patient who dies of this frightful affiliation is at least a thousand dollars. Upon this basis, in 1944 cancer cost the people of the United States, for care and medicine alone, $171,171,000; and when the estimated economic value of those destroyed is added to the foregoing, it appears that the people of this country in 1944 suffered a total loss from cancer of more than $1,229,000,000. The loss for 1945 has not yet been accurately determined, but it is known to be much greater than it was in 1944.

Mr. Chairman, it is my hope that the committee will make the following brief amendments to the bill:

Insert after the word "place" on page 1 the words "or places;" and on page 2 at the proper place insert "this appropriation shall be available until expended." To all importunities for crippling or restrictive amendments such as that of providing that the appropriation shall be "channeled" through particular agencies or organizations, I entreat you to turn deaf ears.

The distinguished proponent of the bill, Senator Pepper, is obviously alive to the impossibility of solving the cancer problem by any means now known and also to the fact that the only hope of finding a cancer preventive or cure lies in new thought, new methods, and new experiments as revolutionary as those that produced the atomic bomb. The bill, if enacted in its present form, will enable the President to seek the cooperation of the most preeminent scientists of the earth, such, for example, as Dr. Einstein; those who solved the problem of utilizing atomic energy; members of the National Academy of Science; and outstanding experts from the great institutions of learning and investigation of the United States, England, Russia, France, Germany, and all the other countries of the world in which any who are apparently capable of helping to speed humanity's victory over cancer may be found.

Let nothing be written into the bill that will prevent the President and this mobilized army of scientists from determining how and when and where the requested appropriation can be best expended in order to assure the highest probability of success in this the greatest venture ever launched by the Congress or any other legislative body in behalf of the alleviation of the suffering of mankind.

Let every cherished soldier in this mighty army of beneficent service to the cancer-stricken millions of the world be free to proceed in accordance with his own judgment to help achieve the high and holy purposes of the bill; and let every soldier who advances against the

relentless, bloodthirsty cancer foe find impelling inspiration in the stirring supplication of Doctor Oliver Wendell Holmes:

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,

As the swift seasons roll!

Leave thy low-vaulted past!

Let each new temple, nobler than the last,

Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,

Till thou at length art free,

Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!

Mr. Chairman, and gentlemen of the committee, I sincerely thank you again and again for having most generously permitted me to address you in behalf of the supremely important measure before you. Senator PEPPER. Thank you, Senator, I wish that everyone could have heard what you have said.

Mr. NEELY. Mr. Chairman, once more I thank you, and now say good-bye because I am obliged to attend a meeting of the committee that is considering the Department of Labor and Federal Security Agency appropriation bill."

Senator PEPPER. I wish you could remain.

Mr. Albert D. Lasker, would you or Mr. James S. Adams like to come first?

Mr. LASKER. Mr. Adams.

STATEMENT OF JAMES S. ADAMS, PRESIDENT, STANDARD BRANDS; CHAIRMAN, EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE, AMERICAN CANCER SOCIETY, NEW YORK, N. Y.

Mr. ADAMS. I am not used to appearing before congressional committees, Mr. Chairman.

Senator PEPPER. Just take a seat and proceed with such statement as you would like to make on this bill and on this general subject.

Mr. ADAMS. Senator, I am appearing here today as the chairman of the executive committee of the American Cancer Society after our officers and directors have had the opportunity of discussing and considering the problems which are posed by Congressman Neely's very worthy bill. I am sorry he could not remain, as some of the things that I hope to say might clarify certain of the testimony which was given yesterday. I will be as brief as I can.

I think, if you will pardon me, I should tell you that in my business activities in the past at the Johns Manville Corp., the Colgate-Palmolive-Peet Co., and Standard Brands, I have had responsibility for the organization or the reorganization of three very substantial industrial research projects and am famiilar with the problems involved in the planning and organization of general research. It probably was that interest that caused me to take a place in helping to organize the Nutrition Foundation of which I am a trustee, working in the field of nutritional research. I am a trustee of the Spies Committee for Clinical Research in Birmingham, Ala., which deals with important medical research in nutritional deficiencies, such as pellagra, and, lately, successful in finding a cure for the terrible tropical disease,

sprue.

I think, first, I would like to put into the record a list of our officers and directors, and to explain to you that the American Cancer Society was reborn some 15 months ago. It had previously been an organization of devoted medical and scientific men concerned largely with education of the medical profession and the laity on the subject of cancer. Some 18 months ago a group of laymen came into that society and it was completely reorganized. Its objectives were changed and its program was aimed at a full-force strategic attack upon the whole problem of cancer. For the first time the objective of working out a real research program on cancer was undertaken. It was recognized by the medical and scientific men that such programs could best be worked out as were most of our programs during the war, by enlisting laymen, men from industry, men from business, who could be brought in to provide whatever talents they might have in finance and organization and in the promotion of ideas to the public, and in the organization of research work.

It was with that fundamental idea that we set out to build what possibly may turn out to be an entirely new kind of organization in the field of philanthropy and in the medical and health fields.

(The list of names referred to and submitted by the witness is as follows :)

AMERICAN CANCER SOCIETY, INC., NEW YORK CITY

President: Frank E. Adair, M. D.

OFFICERS

Vice president: C. C. Nesselrode, M. D.

Honorary chairman of the board: Mr. Eric A. Johnston.

Chairman of the board: Mr. Theodore R. Gamble..

Vice chairman of the board: Mr. Elmer H. Bobst.

Chairman of the executive committee: Mr. James S. Adams.

Treasurer: Mr. Henry C. Von Elm.

Secretary: Mr. Charles D. Hilles, Jr.

Chairman of medical and scientific committee: Edwin P. Lehman, M. D.

Chairman of medical and scientific executive committee: Edwin P. Lehman, M. D. Medical and scientific director and executive vice president: A. W. Oughterson, M. D.

Business director: Mr. Edwin J. MacEwan.

National commander, field army: Mrs. Harold V. Milligan.

Comptroller: Mr. E. Tyson Matlack.

Assistant secretary: Mr. Harry A. Murphy.

Assistant treasurer: Mr. M. Ray Coffman.

Frank E. Adair, M. D., 75 East Seventy-first Street, New York 21, N. Y. Alfred Blalock, M. D., Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, Md.

Edmund V. Cowdry, M. D., 4580 Scott Avenue, St. Louis, Mo.

A. Raymond Dochez, M. D., Columbia University College of Physicians and
Surgeons, 620 West One Hundred and Sixty-eighth Street, New York City.

Edwin P. Lehman, M. D., University of Virginia Hospital, Charlottesville, Va.
Charles Lund, M. D., Harvard Medical School, Cambridge, Mass.
Harry M. Nelson, M. D., 1067 Fisher Building, Detroit 2, Mich.

Alton Ochsner, M. D., Tulane University, 1430 Tulane Avenue, New
Orleans, La.

Eugene P. Pendergrass, M. D., 3400 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, Pa.
George M. Smith, M. D., Pine Orchard, Conn.

Donald V. Trueblood, M. D., 625 Medical-Dental Building, Seattle, Wash.

Edwin B. Wilson, Ph. D., Harvard University, School of Public Health, 55 Shattuck Street, Boston 15, Mass.