Description: Terrorism is not a public health threat relative to cancer.

Question: Collectively, what should we be doing?

Transcript: Well there’s almost nothing that we’re not doing at some level. We could be spending more money on it, but that means we have to be spending less money on something. So it’s really where we move the money from and to. I’m not going to be very profound here. Anybody could say we should be spending less money on wars, especially since we are no longer really seriously threatened. Terrorism is not a public health threat relative to cancer, and heart disease, and malaria and so forth. We need to move that money into things that are health threats and threats to educating the population. If the population were educated it would solve a lot of problems, both scientific and political. So that’s a huge reprioritization that we have historically not been very good at doing. Certainly there are fewer American deaths with each war that we’ve had for the last few wars, but that really isn’t solving the problem of money being spent. And money is life in a certain sense. That money is not being spent on healthcare, education and scientific progress.

Question: Who is responsible for solving these problems?

Transcript: You know if there were a solution I’m sure we’d implement it. It’s a complex combination of getting the voters to stay engaged on these complex issues that require an attention span on the decade level rather than on the five minute level. It’s gonna require politicians to learn more about the opportunities that they’re missing. If they don’t care about science and they don’t see that they’re missing any opportunities there . . . if they don’t see that healthcare can actually change if you injected more money, then why should they move from neocolonialism to healthcare? So it really requires a broad dialogue that we’re doing. I think we are doing it, and hopefully it will get some traction

Question: What should we be doing as individuals?

Transcript: Well I think something very simple that everybody can do is they can participate in medical research as subjects. Personal genome project for example will take on as many subjects as we can find. They can also encourage school children, and teachers, and government to spend more money on that early stage education. I mean I think that’s something they can do at their local level. They can volunteer. They can raise money. They can talk to politicians about making our educational system second to none.

Recorded on: 7/6/07