President Joe Biden has jump-started efforts to bolster research on cancer treatments and cures, picking up from where he left off as Barack Obama's vice president.

The issue has been a priority for Biden, whose son Beau Biden died of brain cancer in 2015.  

At a White House meeting on Wednesday afternoon with a bipartisan group of nine lawmakers, Biden laid out his plans, including how the nominee to be his top science advisor, Eric Lander — a world-famous geneticist — would spearhead the effort, lawmakers told Insider.

The lawmakers also discussed ways the federal government could quickly allocate grants for cancer research. The meeting is one of the earliest steps Biden is taking in what is expected to be an ongoing push to expand funding for medical research. 

Sen. Dick Durbin, a Democrat of Illinois who attended the meeting, told Insider that Biden introduced the lawmakers to Lander, who is awaiting Senate confirmation for the role of director of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy. He added that Biden said he planned to invite the lawmakers back soon for another meeting. 

"He says, 'I'm not going to wait a month to call you back you're going to be back in two weeks,'" Durbin said of Biden. "'We are going to get this moving.'"

Durbin said he and Biden would like to increase funding for medical research by "5% real growth every year," part of which would go into cancer studies. 

The task Biden is placing on Lander is one Biden is familiar with. During Obama's final State of the Union speech in 2016, the former president surprised a teary-eyed Biden by placing him in charge of the cancer "moonshot" effort. 

Tapping a biologist like Lander to lead the science-policy shop is a shift from previous administrations, which typically selected physicists and used that office to seek advice about nuclear weapons.  

"Cancer's personal for almost everybody," Biden told reporters ahead of the meeting on Wednesday. "Probably the one word that is the most frightening word in the English language to people, when they hear that C-word, 'cancer,' it is just devastating."

Shortly after his son's death, Biden announced he wouldn't be running for the White House in 2016. He then set up a nonprofit cancer-research foundation in 2017 called the Biden Cancer Initiative. He suspended its operations in 2019 after announcing his plan to run for president.

"If I could be anything," Biden said in 2015 after the death of his son, "I would have wanted to have been the president that ended cancer, because it's possible."

Biden also credits his son Beau with introducing him to Vice President Kamala Harris whose mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was a cancer-research scientist. 

The president told reporters earlier on Wednesday ahead of  the meeting that he thought the US was "on the cusp of some real breakthroughs across the board on cancer."

Expediting cancer research funding

The nine lawmakers who went to the White House meeting also included Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, who leads the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and Sen. Roy Blunt, a Republican of Missouri, as well as Reps. Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican, and Diana DeGette, a Colorado Democrat.

Biden wants to set up new ways for the federal government to quickly distribute funding to a small number of promising initiatives — a topic that came up during his White House meeting, DeGette and Upton said in a joint statement following the meeting. 

"We welcome this exciting, bold proposal that builds on our goal of speeding up the development of treatments and cures while bringing consumer costs down," DeGette and Upton said. "We need every tool in the toolbox to find faster cures." 

The two lawmakers last year released a plan that would create the "2.0" version of Obama's 21st Century Cures Act, a sweeping health bill that provided $1.8 billion to hasten cancer research. 

DeGette and Upton said they talked about the act with Biden and discussed and what they could do next legislatively. 

The National Institutes of Health's National Cancer Institute receives more than $6.5 billion in funding each year, much of which goes toward medical-research grants. But applying for the funding is a lengthy and bureaucratic process. 

Biden briefly described his vision for medical research on cancer in a February 25 speech, during which he talked about making it possible to hasten medical-research funding. He likened it to the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which develops cutting-edge national security technologies. 

During the February 25 speech, Biden also mentioned the formation of Break Through Cancer, a $250 million collaboration of five academic cancer centers focused on four of the deadliest types of cancer: pancreatic cancer, ovarian cancer, glioblastoma, and acute myelogenous leukemia.

During the Democratic presidential primaries, Biden promised voters that if elected, he would "cure cancer." The statement was met with skepticism and seen as giving patients false hope or being unrealistic. 

Cancer is the second-leading cause of death in the US, and there are more than 100 types. Each type has different treatments or cures that may not be effective in treating everyone who tries them.

In 2016, Lander said it would take more than four decades to turn many cancers into chronic illnesses. Lander was a science advisor to Obama and was part of the race to help sequence the human genome, an effort that concluded in 2003.

Lander is also founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, a Boston biomedical research center that focused on DNA-editing technology, and was on the board of directors for the Biden Cancer Initiative. 

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In February, the National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC) released an unclassified version of its report on Chinese intelligence efforts against US citizens.

The report provides a scathing breakdown of how China has been stealing data, including DNA files, which are like a biological ID of your health data and medical background, to pursue its economic, security, and foreign-policy goals.

On the face of it, China is using legally and illegally acquired healthcare data as part of an effort to become the global leader in biotechnology and medicine. But that data theft reflects a more sinister ambition.

In addition to financial gains, China is using stolen data to target dissidents, foreign intelligence officers, and even its own citizens, including ones spying on their government.

In data, China sees control; in control, it sees security.

Who's Big Brother?

Beijing's focus on data and the creation of a security state where every movement, interaction, and transaction are monitored makes George Orwell's "Big Brother" look like a petty amateur.

China's interest in stolen data isn't new, but it was only in the early 2010s that it ramped up its data-collection efforts. Around that time, the Chinese security services discovered just how deep US intelligence had penetrated China's security and military apparatuses.

The Chinese government's interest in data exceeds traditional security norms. For example, in 2015, the US government revealed that Chinese hackers broke into the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and stole sensitive data — including security background forms, fingerprint records, and health and financial data — from millions of current and former US officials and applicants for federal jobs.

Although the OPM hack was an attempt to map out the US national-security community in general, it primarily targeted the intelligence community to determine who works there.

The purloined data compromised several former and current intelligence officers. Equally concerning is the fact that it might endanger future officers and operations and may make the future recruitment of assets inside and outside of China more difficult.

Further, the OPM data offers Chinese intelligence services ample information with which to recruit US assets through blackmail or financial enticement.

Indeed, through successive cyberattacks, China has taken hold of the personal data of much of the American population, regardless of their occupation. (Chinese firms also gather this data by investing in US companies and through partnerships with US researchers.)

In addition to the OPB hack, in the last decade alone China has stolen about 500 million travel and personal records from the Marriott hotel chain, 145 million financial and personal records from Equifax, and 78 million financial, healthcare, and personal records from Anthem.

While data itself used to be hard to come by, the advancement of bulk-data collection over the past 20 to 30 years has made processing, interpreting, and analyzing it in a timely fashion the bigger challenge.

In the 1990s, access to so much data didn't necessarily translate into actionable intelligence, but investments in and rapid improvements to artificial intelligence are changing that.

Different methods of categorizing and storing data won't necessarily solve the problem.

"The most [technologically] advanced security can often be bypassed using an analog [and simple] method. We've seen a number of different strategies being tossed around in the public discourse, from mounting a stronger offense to focusing almost exclusively on buffering our critical infrastructure defenses," a former Air Force officer with a background in joint special operations and intelligence told Insider.

A more aggressive cyberwarfare strategy might be the solution, and the Biden administration has indicated that it will be more active in the cyber realm.

But according to Privacy Matters, a digital security and privacy publication, there are important considerations to make before opening the Pandora's box of cyberwarfare, where there are still no established norms, even among state actors.

What about you?

According to the NCSC report, the ethnic diversity of US healthcare data, as well as that data's accessibility, makes it especially appealing to China.

China's aggressive bulk-collection strategy, especially of DNA files, poses risks for private citizens.

As the NCSC states, the loss of your DNA isn't like losing your phone or credit card. You can't replace your DNA, and its theft can affect you as well as your immediate family and relatives.

Unfortunately, the theft of financial or travel data by Chinese or Russian hackers may not concern people who aren't immediately affected. But losing your DNA is a wholly different proposition, as it's literally your biological identity and can be used to track you or to design a biological weapon tailored to you.

"Things can seem pretty helpless from an individual perspective, especially when we read headlines suggesting the NSA has had their own cyber hacking tools stolen and reused against them," the former officer said.

"We can't very well defend our financial institutions or other companies from Chinese hackers, but we can know what to do when that inevitably occurs and our personal information is leaked online (along with millions' of others)," the officer said. "All of this is to say that maintaining an understanding of your online privacy and digital security is an individual responsibility — all else is supplemental."

For a private citizen, caught in a cyber war between world powers, there are few responses to such theft. Understanding the threat and acting to safeguard the information you can beforehand is probably the best defense.

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When a soldier dies in war, their remains can be a last consolation for a grieving family, though some families don't even get that.

The remains of some 6,000 soldiers who died in World War II have still not been identified. And around 50 of them are soldiers from the 92nd Infantry Division, the African-American soldiers who fought in Italy in 1944 and 1945.

Current rules require a DNA sample from a relative before remains can be exhumed for testing. But now the Pentagon is considering a more expansive way to use DNA.

The World's Marco Werman spoke with two people on the subject. The first interview was with Timothy McMahon, the director of the Defense Department's DNA Operations, which oversees the labs involved in identifying American soldiers missing or unaccounted for from past and current wars.

Marco Werman: Can you say a little about what the Pentagon hopes to do?

Timothy McMahon: What we're trying to do is modernize, to meet the new technology that is out in the field. So, in our case, when we're talking about past accounting of remains — and those are remains from World War II, Korea, Vietnam or the Cold War — these are remains that have been out in the environment for 70-plus years or have been chemically treated prior to burial.

And so, the DNA is vastly different than what is done with typical current-day losses. What we want to do is take what Ancestry.com and 23andMe have brought to the table to assist with cold cases in your state and local crime labs, and transition that, modernize it, and we have to optimize it to work with very, very damaged DNA.

Werman: So, I get Ancestry.com and 23andMe. Can you talk about the technology that you're referring to, how it works and what it complements as a tool to identify remains?

McMahon: So, when an individual goes to Ancestry.com and 23andMe, they're using their DNA, they're looking at these identity markers and they're asking, who am I related to? And that's what we call a nuclear DNA test. And that gives us a greater statistical ability to identify somebody.

But, current technology, for example, is if we look at the paternal line, if this missing service member had a brother and the brother is dead, but had a daughter, that daughter cannot be utilized to assist with the identification of the missing service member, because it's a paternal niece.

Under the new testing that we're looking to optimize using these single nucleotide polymorphisms, we can utilize that daughter now as a viable reference to identify that missing service member.

Werman: So, you've been using Ancestry.com and 23andMe. Are you using those as examples or would you actually use the data on those sites to kind of identify what remains?

McMahon: So, I use those as an example to give people a frame of reference. You cannot utilize Ancestry.com or 23andMe for this type of searching. And there are reasons, they're protected because the person is giving a DNA sample to it. There is an existing database that was referenced.

The famous case was the Golden State Killer, and that is one where individuals freely upload their results that they've gotten from 23andMe. And you can actually search that if you need to. And that's what your state and local crime labs are actually looking to do, and they've been doing with what is called investigative genetic genealogy.

Werman: I think of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, that sacred site in Arlington National Cemetery. I mean, there are many countries that have similar monuments to the unknown war dead. Are we at a point now where there will never have to be such a place, that we have the scientific tools to name the dead from present as well as past wars?

McMahon: We are at a place like that. And historically, if you look at the Tomb of the Unknown, back in 1998, there were four families who presented enough evidence to the secretary of defense in regards to the Vietnam unknown to make a case that the secretary of defense allowed the disinterment of the unknown, the individual representing all of the unknowns for Vietnam from the Tomb of the Unknown. We had references for those four families. We did DNA testing and the individuals identified as Michael J. Blassie.

So, currently in the tomb, there is not a representative of an unknown for Vietnam. So, to answer your question is, through DNA technology, the constant evolution of new methods and the ability to open up more and more references, will we be able to identify everyone? The answer is the technology is getting there, through not just DNA, but through modern anthropological testing. But it all comes back to records, too.

The Defense Department relies on genealogists to find relatives of soldiers unaccounted for from past wars. Megan Smolenyak is one of them.

She has consulted with the Pentagon for 20 years, including on cases involving African-Americans who served in World War II. Smolenyak told The World that she almost always confronts the history of slavery.

Werman: Can you talk about how that history comes up in your research?

Megan Smolenyak: Once you get back past a certain point, what genealogists refer to as the wall of 1870, and we call it that because the 1870 census is the first census in which formerly enslaved individuals finally show up under their own names, and full names, with surnames.

So, up until that point, it's about the same as anybody else. But once you hit that point, then you start hitting obstacles. Unfortunately, those who are enslaved were treated like property. And so, you have to try to identify who the enslaver was and then dig into their paper trail anything that puts their property.

So, you're mostly talking probates and estates, deeds, that kind of thing. It's uncomfortable research because — I don't care how long you've been doing it — you never get accustomed to seeing individuals mixed in with livestock and crops and furniture. That's what happens in the estate records of these people.

Werman: So, what you're saying is that the history of slavery and Jim Crow laws really affect your ability to find past records on soldiers, I mean, soldiers from World War II, like from the 92nd Infantry.

Smolenyak: Yes, that's true, that's true. But, any good genealogist is stubborn. You need to just keep on dealing with the records that you can find, but you have to know what those records are. And it is gradually becoming easier. Many probate records, many estate records in different states have been digitized and indexed and put online over the years.

But Ancestry.com, for example, only recently, they're going back and they're doing a complete indexing. What I mean by that is up until now, they've only indexed the names of the person who died and the person who administered the estate.

Now, they're including everybody who is mentioned in the estate. So, you take an estate, say, from South Carolina, all of a sudden, now those who are enslaved claim to be indexed, and that means that their descendants will be able to find them simply by researching.

Werman: I wonder if you can tell us about one soldier from the 92nd Infantry Division that you were able to find a blood relative for, what that process was like.

Smolenyak: I can't share too many specifics just because we always protect the privacy of the families. In all genealogy, you start with the present and you walk backwards in time. And so, you start with a few details that you're given about the soldier and you are also given the place that they enlisted from.

But again, if you think about African-American genealogy and, you know, the Great Migration where they enlisted from, maybe they enlisted in Philadelphia, but they were really born in South Carolina, and that's where most of their family are. So, you have to figure that out.

Once you start hitting brick walls, that's when you start digging into specialized records, especially if you do hit the wall of 1870 where, all of a sudden, you're having to deal with kind of the invisible aspect that was created by slavery.

These interviews have been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

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