President Barack Obama vowed Tuesday to make the United States the “country that cures cancer” and put Vice President Joe Biden, whose son Beau Biden died this summer after a battle with brain cancer, “in charge of mission control.”
Noting that Biden previously had worked to get more funding for the National Institutes of Health, Obama announced during his State of the Union address that he was putting his Vice President in charge of a new national effort to find a cure.
“Because he’s gone to the mat for all of us, on so many issues over the past 40 years, I’m putting Joe in charge of mission control,” he said. “For the loved ones we’ve all lost, for the family we can still save, let’s make America the country that cures cancer once and for all.”
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