NCI Director Dr. John E. Niederhuber participated with four other NIH Institute and Center directors in a Senate hearing of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor-HHS-Education on May 21. The theme of the hearing was "Vision of the Future - Health and Medicine (Predictive and Preemptive)." Dr. Niederhuber described the progress NCI has made in cancer research, including advances being made in gene analysis and the increasing cost effectiveness of such tests. Senators' questions for Dr. Niederhuber focused on the development of advanced technologies for early detection and treatment of disease and improving community access to care. Dr. Niederhuber's testimony highlighted some of the exciting opportunities NCI researchers are pursuing; his prepared remarks are available at http://www.cancer.gov/aboutnci/Senate-Subcommittee-on-Labor-HHS-Education-Appropriations.

On May 24, Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) invited all female Senators to convene for a special public meeting on mammography, held in light of a recent NCI study published in Cancer, which reported a 4 percent decrease in screening since 2000. Dr. Niederhuber and Dr. Nancy Breen of NCI's Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences were joined by a panel of experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Cancer Society, and Susan G. Komen for the Cure to discuss the new statistical findings and some of the potential causes to be studied further.

IOM Offers "Blueprint" for Significantly Reducing Tobacco Use A committee convened by the Institute of Medicine has issued a new report in which it calls for major changes in how tobacco products are sold, marketed, and regulated in the United States. The report, Ending the Tobacco Problem: A Blueprint for the Nation, calls for FDA regulation of and increasing nationwide excise taxes on tobacco products, a nationwide nonresidential indoor smoking ban, and new restrictions on sales and marketing of tobacco products, among other actions. "We propose aggressive steps to end the tobacco problem - that is, to reduce tobacco use so substantially that it is no longer a significant public health problem," said the committee's leader, Dr. Richard J. Bonnie, director of the University of Virginia's Institute of Law, Psychiatry, and Public Policy. The recommendations, he added, provide "a blueprint for putting the nation on a course for achieving that goal over the next two decades."