Cancer

PRESIDENT BARTLET: A President stood up. He said we will land a man on the moon before the end of the decade. You know what we knew when he said that? Nothing. We didn't know anything. We didn't know about the lunar surface. We didn't know how to land one of these things. All we'd ever done is crash it into the ocean. And God knows we could figure out how to land soft. We didn't know how to blast off again, but a President said we're gonna do it, and we did it. So I ask you, why shouldn't I stand up and say we are going to cure cancer in ten years?


(Silence in the room. No one responds.)


BARTLET: I'm really asking.

Watching the Jimmy V movie right now, I'm reminded that we still have no cure for cancer.  Which is something we seem to take for granted, we just kinda shrug our shoulders, "cancer, whaddya gonna do?" I know the body is an incredibly complex machine, but it's also finite. I don't know how much time and money we've put into curing cancer, but I think we've reached a point whereat we can start to become annoyed nobody's found the cure yet.