On March 9, 1990, scores of people with cancer and their supporters converged on Washington, DC to protest the Office of Technology Assessment's (OTA's) draft report on Unconventional Cancer Treatments. What follows is an edited version of the comments made at the OTA meeting at morning by some of the critics of the draft and of the "war on cancer" in general.
We hope you find them a fraction as stirring in print as they were in person. Whatever the outcome of the OTA struggle, we wrote in 1990, these speeches will live on as a ringing indictment of a system that allows half a million people a year to die of cancer--while slamming the door on promising, non-toxic alternatives.
Here are a selection of speeches from that memorable day:
