During a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on Wednesday, Sen. Jerry Moran (R-KS) spoke in support of biomedical research.
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00:00Senator Moran. Chairman Collins, thank you very much and
00:05thank you to our witnesses for your presentation. Thank you for your presence here. A couple
00:12of questions that I was going to ask have been asked and answered, but I do want to
00:17take the time that I have to make certain that from my perspective on behalf of many,
00:24most Kansans, that we express our gratitude to those who are working every day to find
00:32the cure for the diseases that my constituents at home in Kansas and people around the country
00:37and in fact around the world, they and their families are facing.
00:42I was thinking as you all were speaking, there's not one American, not one, who doesn't benefit
00:48by the research that takes place in the search for that cure or treatment for disease and
00:55affliction. I can't think of other expenditures that maybe our national defense, every American
01:02benefits by protecting our country from our adversaries, but many of the things that we appropriate
01:08money for are narrow toward a specific cause or a specific organization, a task that government
01:16has been given.
01:18This task of finding the cure for diseases is there is no one who loses. There's no one
01:25that anybody has not benefited, even if they or their families, their people they know,
01:31haven't experienced the diseases that we're trying to find the cure for. I've always said
01:37that medical research provides hope. And I think about you, Ms. Stinson, and you indicated
01:43that not every family would have the capability of having the right kind of research to meet
01:50the needs of your circumstances. But I think all of us have hope if we learned something
01:56about a family member, ourselves, what we can gain from medical research is the hope that
02:04either today or tomorrow or the next day there's going to be that discovery that makes a difference
02:11in a person's life. And I just want to speak in support of this kind of research. We can
02:20prioritize and we can certainly look for ways to be more efficient. We can find ways perhaps
02:25to eliminate things that make no sense at all. But those kind of things should not be the
02:31reason to criticize medical research in general or medical research totally. Criticize the mistakes
02:40that we make. And make certain that it doesn't spill over into destroying an asset that this
02:48country has that is so valuable to us. Very few things in life provide, I happen to believe
02:56there's a thing that provides hope in this world, but very few things that we do in Congress
03:02provide the hope that NIH provides for people across our country.
03:06So let's do our jobs. Let's make certain that we make the right kind of choices and make decisions
03:11that prioritize and eliminate things that need to be eliminated. But don't fall into the trap
03:18of saying that what happens at NIH doesn't matter. And it matters as we've been talking and as I've
03:26been talking at least about individuals and families and people, I want to make certain
03:31that there is no child, no person that we didn't support NIH for that loses out on a trial or a
03:42treatment or something that was discovered. On the other hand, I also want to make sure
03:47that we don't miss some young person whose dream in life it is to be a researcher to find
03:53a cure for a disease. So we have to do our jobs well and do them right.
03:58This is again not just, it's not the so-called throwing money at something to solve a problem.
04:05But it's making certain that no researcher misses out on the opportunity of pursuing their dream
04:11of research and solutions to life's problems. And no patient or potential patient loses the
04:19chance to live another day or another year or live a lifetime. We all want to have the
04:25benefit of long life and time with family and enjoyable things. And I look forward to working
04:33with my colleagues on this committee to make certain that we don't destroy the dream of
04:37a family or destroy the dream of a young person who's going to solve a problem. We focused a lot
04:42of our attention on certainly cancer, but Alzheimer's and Down syndrome. And I just think the potential
04:49is so great that we have a lot to be optimistic about. And we ought to take the chance whenever
04:56things come our way that actually work, Congress ought to take advantage of being supportive of
05:00them. Thank you very much, Madam Chairman.