The following is a transcript of former Biden Cancer Initiative President Greg Simon's remarks at the 2022 Forbes China Healthcare Summit.

A lot of times people ask me how I got involved in cancer. The short answer is, I didn’t volunteer, but I did it the easy way: I got cancer. What was interesting was every step of my journey with cancer made clear to me why patients had so much trouble dealing with the system.

I found out I had cancer when I called my doctor four days after a physical because I hadn’t heard the results. When I called him, he said, “Oh I’m glad you called. You have leukemia.” Most people would not want to find out that they had cancer over a phone call that they had to make to their doctor. But fortunately, I was able to get treated at Memorial Sloan Kettering. On the last day of my chemo, I was walking down the street, and I get a call from Vice President Biden’s office asking if I would come talk to him about running the Moonshot. If I didn’t believe in God before that, I sure did then, because how in the world did they know to ask me to do this when they didn’t even know I had cancer? So sometimes, things line up.

What Mr. Biden and Jill Biden wanted to do was make cancer a matter of urgent importance.. The original Moonshot only had nine months to do what it was going to do, so what we had to do was lay a marker down about how we could change the culture of research, the culture of clinical trials, of data sharing, and change the culture of international cooperation.

I like to say that when we call it the Cancer Moonshot, we’re focusing on cancer. The punch line about cancer is that cancer is the only part of the cancer ecosystem that is always focused on the patients. Cancer is always doing its best to stay alive within all of us. We — humans — don’t have the capacity or the will to focus on patients 24/7. We don’t have the capacity, or the will, to focus on patients instead of tenure, and publications, and patents, and moving up the chain with IP and commercialization. All of those things are fine, but when they take time away from focusing on the patient, that is a cultural problem we need to address.

Now the first Moonshot tried to do a lot of things. We had a Blue Ribbon panel that put together a proposal for ten different areas that got integrated into the National Cancer Institute with the $1.8 billion they got from Congress in the last days of the Obama administration. We got agencies to work together in new ways—the VA actually gave the DOE $4 million to build a data network that could handle the records from the world’s largest hospital—the VA—to the world’s fastest computers at the Department of Energy. We got NASA to start using their radiation laboratories with the radiation studies at NCI. The Commerce Department accelerated reviews of oncology-related patents without charge. Everybody wanted to pitch in: the National Endowment for the Arts, the EPA, NASA, and the Defense Department. One of the biggest programs was between the DOD, DOE, and NCI called Apollo which is a proteogenomics project that now has many international partners. Then VP Biden himself gave a speech at a proteomics conference in Dublin and at a cancer conference at the Vatican. We did all we could during those nine months to bring everyone under the fold. And when we had our summit, we not only had 250 sites within the United States, but we had a site in Afghanistan and Kenya for people to see what was going on with the rest of the world.

The first Moonshot got a lot of things done under the radar that the public may not have seen, but the people who were helped saw it. Unlike the original space Moonshot, which was a spectator sport, this Moonshot was about being involved. We had patients, caregivers, doctors, researchers, innovators, and people from other fields like mathematics and geology who had ideas about how to contain cancer rather than always attacking it. And now we come to the new Moonshot. The new one laid the markers, but now we have 2-3 years to move those markers down the field. My former deputy Danielle Carnival is running the current Moonshot. And just this week, the Office of Science and Technology Policy put out a requirement that all federally funded cancer research must be published in open journals and not behind paywalls at all, not for a month or a year, but at all. We’ve been trying to do this for twenty years. People say but what about the publication model? And I say, what about it? That’s easier to fix than cancer. Let’s keep our eye on the ball. And the ball is people.

Now I have said in a Forbes interview and every speech I’ve given since I left the White House that the biggest regret I have is that we didn’t do enough to distribute the benefits of our miraculous research, as described by Steve Forbes, to all people equally. And the only way that is going to happen is for us all to make it a priority. We cannot continue to come up with therapies to cure people, but only the wealthy or the well-insured can get them. We have to add social justice as a critical, core element of everything we do. I personally can’t live with the idea that someone with my cancer who happens to be of a different race would not get the same care and treatment that I have. I can’t bear the thought that my sister survived breast cancer, but a black woman has far less chance of surviving breast cancer. None of us should live with that. All of us should fight for social justice in the distribution of the miraculous rewards of the research that we have spent billions on and dedicated an army of brilliant people who are willing to sacrifice a lot of things to help everybody else.

In terms of the global look, we have to get out of the 1950s view of clinical trials. Clinical trials are no longer just experiments. They are treatment. It used to be unethical to call them treatment; we are long past that. I have met so many people, in their 20s, who were in hospice until they found a clinical trial that brought them back to life. We have to have regulatory harmonization. We have to have trust. We have to have confidence in each other’s data. And the new Moonshot is capable of doing that. We can create synthetic control arms to save putting patients in control arms when we have historical data about what works. We could create new trials that are adaptive, that move people through the possible therapies much more quickly than we do in the old system. We have got to take these pearls that we have and put them in a necklace and tighten them up. We can no longer afford to spend a year between Phase II and Phase III — or spend six years even getting to a clinical trial. With artificial intelligence and machine learning, there is no excuse for us to use the pen and paper we’ve been using for the last fifty years.

I want to say one last thing about what happens at the end. I get a lot of requests to help people with their cancer and I have so many wonderful doctors who volunteer to help them. Only once, and it was recently, did one of my doctor friends come back to me and say, there’s nothing left to be done. That’s the first time that happened to me. So, the family said, what do we do now? And this is what I told them and this is what I say to all of you: “Why are we here? On this crust of earth on top of a molten lava core, spinning around a star that is so hot, we can’t even move a degree closer to it and survive. We’re here to love each other. Because life itself is so precious. And when cancer wins, the only thing we as humans can do is love each other. That is why I would like to change the Cancer Moonshot name to the Human Moonshot. How we treat other people defines our view of humanity. And as a human moonshot, it is my great hope that we will learn how to bring all these wonderful therapies to people we will never meet, to people who don’t look like us, and to people we’ve been trained to think are our enemies but they are not — that is my goal and my hope. That we can turn the Human Moonshot into a truly global effort to show people how we can care for each other and love each other in this miraculous amount of time that each of us has to be alive in this universe where we have no idea if there is any other life out there. How we cherish it will define our species. I hope all of us can do whatever we can to make this a reality — that the Cancer Moonshot becomes the Human Moonshot and we do all we can to spread hope all over the world.

Thank you for the chance to talk to you all today.