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REMARKS BY:  	DONNA E. SHALALA, SECRETARY OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES
Place: 		Congressional Biomedical Research Caucus, Washington, D.C.	
DATE:           Wednesday, March 29, 2000

10th Anniversary of the Congressional Biomedical Research Caucus -- Honoring Dr. Harold Varmus

I'm pleased to join in the celebration of the 10th anniversary of the Congressional Biomedical Research Caucus. It's been said that an anniversary celebrates love, trust, partnership, tolerance, and tenacity. It's just that the order varies for any given year.

Well, this anniversary celebrates all of these things - because it's celebrating ten years of bringing the sharpest scientific minds to Capitol Hill, and ten years of strengthening the health of our nation and encouraging this golden age of biomedical research.

I thank all of you for your partnership -- for having the courage to embrace and increase support for scientific research and for having the foresight to invest in America's future.

Your efforts on behalf of our nation's future remind me of something Louis Pasteur once said: "Chance favors only the mind that is prepared."

Discovery is rarely about luck and almost always about toil. Few people know that better than Dr. Harold Varmus. From the day he arrived at NIH, he began working to make an already great institution into an extraordinary one.

For me, Harold's time at NIH was like a comet that briefly blazes through the night sky - but leaves a dazzling mark in its wake. Today, at the helm of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, I have no doubt that he will continue to reach for the stars - and manage to catch a few while he's there.

Of course, if I'm going to talk about Harold's unforgettable professional record, I must also share with you a little about Harold the person.

When I first met Harold, I was expecting the textbook scientist: a shy person with the usual fashion sense of a medical researcher -- a white lab coat and plaid pants. Instead, I met a warm, humorous man with a perpetual grin and an infectious intellectual curiosity for science -- and everything else.

He's a man of legendary charm and limitless vision who has used his incredibly gifted mind in the service of science, health, and above all, people. And, he's a man who proves that good and great can exist in the same person.

Last spring, the New Yorker said that this man, "may change the entire understanding of health, disease, and the limits of the human life span."

I would now like to introduce one of the most dedicated, creative and brilliant scientists in the world -- my colleague, my friend -- the incomparable Dr. Harold Varmus.

Thank you.

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