"The breast cancer spread up and down her spine. She was paralyzed from the neck down." Motivated by his wife's death, Vesely made a      promise to one of his teenage sons to slay the demon disease that ravaged their beautiful mother.

This sounds like a driven man with a mission.  I know, I know, get to the good stuff already.

Doctor Vesely and his team have been dropping heart hormones onto cancer cells in petri dishes, obliterating cancer within 24 hours. "The cells actually blow apart."

...

When asked if seeing the cells die the first time blew his mind, Dr. Vesely said "Yes, it did. We thought it must be lab error."

But when the cancer tumors also disappeared in mice, Dr. Vesely says "Once we started curing these animals, we knew it would be good."

However, not everyone thinks government run health care and research is such an evil thing, including colleagues and this Senator.

Vesely started publishing papers and accolades started pouring in. Like this one from Senator Daniel Akaka of Hawaii. "Dr. Vesely's research achievements, accomplished as a federal employee, are a major breakthrough that could help save millions of lives."

Yet once it is sold to a private company outside the realm of government coffers and tax dollars, there comes stumbling blocks

Dr. Vesely says the University of South Florida and the Veteran's Hospital sold the licensing rights to a California company, who has yet to raise 25 million dollars to start human clinical trials.
...
So he waits, trying the heart hormones on different cancers: pancreatic, colon, lung. But only in the research lab.
...
The good news, so far the worst side effects he's seen are dehydration and lowering blood pressure. Both can be treated.

It is pathetic that we can give billions of tax dollars to Wall Street but can't come up with 25 million for human trials for a potential cure for cancer.

If this works, this could be the biggest American science break through since the Apollo moon landing.

And it would be due to a single-payer government run health care system.

http://www.vawatchdog.org/09/nf09/nfoct09/nf102709-4.htm

UPDATE h/t Snud

The heart hormone is being studied all over the world, and many drug companies are hard at work trying to adapt it for use as a drug. Indeed major companies, working with doctors at hospitals here and abroad, are already testing the hormone in humans. It has been the subject of thousands of scientific reports and several conferences, including a large international meeting held earlier this year in New York under joint chairmanship of Dr. John H. Laragh of New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center and Dr. Barry Brenner of Harvard Medical School.

This article is dated 1986.  Is this a breakthrough now or has this been going on a while?