January 13, 2016
When Joe Biden announced that he wouldn't run for president, he committed himself to a far harder and far loftier goal: ending cancer. That odyssey begins this Friday in Philadelphia.
As Newsworks reported, Vice President Biden will kick off a national anti-cancer initiative at the University of Pennsylvania on Friday. The latest congressional budget included a boost in funding for medical research.
It's a deeply personal issue for Biden: His son Beau died of brain cancer less than a year ago. He chose not to run for president because he was still deep in mourning.
"If I could be anything," Biden said when he announced that he would not run, "I would have wanted to have been the president that ended cancer. Because it's possible."
Cancer is also the leading cause of death in Biden's home state of Delaware, according to statistics from the American Cancer Society.
President Barack Obama announced at Tuesday's State of the Union address that Biden will be leading a "national effort" to "make America the country that cures cancer once and for all."
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