I want to thank all of you at Memorial Sloan-Kettering . . . not only for your encouragement for the people that we honor today, but for the tremendous research and work that has been done here at a time when the desire to learn more about our universe seems to wane from some of the institutions of government.
I also want to congratulate the Weill Cornell graduates for your great service and for what I hope is a prelude to your participation in a medical revolution at a time when so many discoveries are being made and there are so many opportunities to help. . . . The only thing missing is the participation of government -- the lack of prioritization that we often have for dedicating more resources to research and development, in order to give medical personnel and scientists the opportunity to explore as they have since the beginning of time. . . .
Throughout the centuries, there have been men and women who have taken first steps down new roads, sometimes armed with nothing but their own vision. . . . The great thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors, often stood alone against the societies of their time because every new thought was opposed and every new invention was denounced. Aren't we lucky that these people went ahead? They fought, and they suffered . . . but they won. And I think what they really won -- the best way to classify it -- is freedom.
Interestingly, in the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, they talk about two freedoms: One was the freedom of speech, and the second was the freedom to do medical research. This is because at the time of the drafting of the Declaration, there was a dispute in the colonies as to what to do when people acquired yellow fever, whether there should be quarantine or attempts at treatment.
So the struggle has gone back to the inception of this country. Yet our foreparents, who put into words a doctrine that was probably the most historic and the most meaningful of its time, understood the value of medical and scientific research even then. . . .
When we [then-Governor Eliot Spitzer and then-Lieutenant Governor Paterson] came into government in 2007, we wanted to keep our promise to the public to bring hundreds of millions of dollars in research funding for the development of stem cells. And on March 31, 2007, we passed a stem cell research bill. . . .
I then asked Dr. [Harold] Varmus and many others to come to my office, and said to them, "Now that we have legislation that calls for $600 million to be dedicated over the next decade to stem cell research, would you help me put this plan together?" And amazingly, within seven months -- on January 7, 2008 -- we announced the funding of 23 organizations statewide to the tune of $14.5 million. We immediately launched New York State from 50th among the 50 states to fifth, trailing only California, Maryland, Illinois, and Connecticut.
Today I am very proud to announce that we are going another step forward. We are going to provide an additional $109 million [in funding] that will now put us second in this country only to California. . . .
What we are pledging is to continue to allow our best and our brightest -- hopefully right here in the State of New York -- to pursue what are dreams now but can be reality later. . . . And what we've seen here today is the graduation of new researchers, people who will take us to that next level and to those new discoveries.
