Let the high priests of journalism judge, but I will tell you here and now that this particular scribe has a deep-seated bias: I like Joe Biden.
It’s not a prejudgment based on politics, mind you, but rather personhood—or whatever the right word is that describes the layer of person-ness beneath a person’s personality: that part of the individual that signals to the rest of the world, “Hey, this is me! This is what I care about. This is what drives me.”
Now, truth be told, I don’t really know Joe. I’ve met him just once (about six weeks ago). Still, I feel confident that I know what he cares about if only for the epic, deeply ambitious quest he has all-in embraced over the past many months: trying to double the pace of progress in the millennia-old war on cancer.
Mr. Biden, the 47th Vice President of the United States, is not a molecular biologist by trade, nor a clinical oncologist, nor a card-carrying radiologist. He’s just a guy who knows that, if you’ve got an age-old, brutally complex, science-defying problem to solve, then collaborating to solve it is smarter than not collaborating…that sharing research and clinical data is a better strategy than hoarding it…and that making technological tools and research funding widely available is a whole lot better than the opposite.
Obvious, you say? Well, trust me: It’s been a hard bunch of messages to get across. (I tried.) But that said, Joe Biden has proven to be a guy who’s awfully good at communicating them—at making them sound clear, and commonsensible, and irrefutable—and more important, he’s gotten many others to take them to heart.
Faithful readers of the Fortune Brainstorm Health Daily newsletter will recall that I’ve written about Mr. Biden’s real and measurable successes in this effort (by way of the White House Cancer Moonshot he led)—and that I’ve written about his moving passion for the cause. And I’m excited to share with yawl now that in 15 days, on May 2, Vice President Joe Biden will join our Fortune Brainstorm Health gathering in San Diego to share first-hand—in an in-depth keynote conversation with my co-chair Dr. David Agus—what he learned during his Moonshot effort and where we need to go now.
I’m excited for a lot of conversations we’re planning for Brainstorm Health. But I suspect this one is going to be truly unforgettable. Hope you can join us—on Fortune.com (for the conference highlights) or in person. (If you haven’t yet applied to be a delegate, here’s your last chance. We’re closing the nominations today.)
This essay appears in today’s edition of the Fortune Brainstorm Health Daily. Get it delivered straight to your inbox.
