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(background chatter)

(woman): The pink ribbon, to me, symbolizes solidarity,

it symbolizes the universality of women and men.

(man): We think of hope, and life,

and family,

and growing old together.

(woman): I think about my sisters,

who are all fighting this battle.

(woman): I think of me. Like, I survived!

(laughing) Oh, yeah! Yes...

(speaker): Check, one, two. This is a test.

(sound check) Check, one, two.

This is a test.

Thank you. Thank you. (background chatter)

(announcer): Good morning, walkers and runners.

Welcome to the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure.

Our opening ceremonies will begin

in just 15 minutes. All runners,

please make your way to the weather star

at Madison and 7th.

Walkers will start the race

from the main-stage area.

All survivors who wish to participate

in the Survivor Parade,

please make your way

to the Survivor Check-In Tent at this time.

Once again, our opening ceremony will begin in just 15 minutes.

(background chatter)

(speaker): So we're gonna go right back out

to Angie at the start line. (upbeat music)

(cheering)

(announcer): The 2010...

Susan G. Komen Global Race for the Cure

is up and running!

(cheering)

(crowd): Whoo-hoo! (music)

* It's a celebration

(crowd): Whoo-hoo!

* It's a celebration

* Celebrate good times

* Come on

* Let's celebrate

* Celebrate good times come on

* Let's celebrate

* There's a party going on right here **

- It's amazing to see people

come together,

uh... showing the energy, showing the spirit.

It's very emotional.

- When I was being treated for breast cancer,

in 2000 and 2001,

I did a strange thing:

I wasn't... did not research the science.

I became fascinated more by...

this breast-cancer culture that I was encountering

on the Internet and in other forms at that time.

So I became more...

I turned sort of into an anthropologist, I think,

"What's going on here?" You know?

"What is it with all these pink ribbons and everything?"

(soft music)

- Go! (cheering)

Very good.

(chanting): Too many lives! Too many lives!

Too many lives!

Too many lives! Too many lives!

(speaker): We are losing far too many women to an epidemic

that goes unnoticed except for those who grieve

and for those who live in fear.

- We found sisterhood from other women

and looking critically at what was going on

with our healthcare.

The sisterhood now is supposed to be supplied

by the runs and races for the cure.

I mean, what a change. We used to march in the streets;

now you're supposed to run for a cure or walk for a cure,

or jump for a cure, or whatever it is.

Ah, so I think the effect of the whole pink-ribbon culture

was to drain and deflect

the kind of militancy we had as women

who were appalled to have a disease

that is epidemic,

and yet that we don't even know the cause of.

- There are a lot of people, I've heard many people say,

"Well, anger - not helpful."

Actually anger is helpful,

depending on what you do with it.

And I think if people actually knew what was happening,

they would be really pissed off.

They should be.

(cheering)

(live music) (announcer)

- Whoo-hoo! - Let's rock!

- Tobago!

(laughing)

(soft music)

(cheering)

- Women die from breast cancer

just because they're women, right?

We don't know...

what lifestyle, or what it is,

that makes women get breast cancer.

The most important risk factor for breast cancer

is being a woman.

(applause)

- Excessive government spending, taxing and regulating,

no matter how well intended, is a formula for disaster.

Volunteer activities and philanthropy play a role,

as well as economic incentives and investment opportunities.

To be certain,

we're talking about America's deep spirit of generosity.

But we're also talking about a buck for business,

if it helps to solve our social ills.

With the same energy that Franklin Roosevelt

sought government solutions to problems,

we will seek private solutions.

- Well, certainly philanthropy has,

for over 100 years,

played a central part in American culture,

but it wasn't until Reagan came to power

that we saw explicit policies

designed to shift responsibility

away from health and welfare from the government

towards private entities,

philanthropic organizations,

and the encouragement specifically

of corporations to participate in that.

(background chatter) - Two dollars! Two dollars only!

- Three dollars! Three dollars! Three dollars!

We got more calorie cards on the table if you need 'em.

Come by the table, would you please?

(background chatter)

- As you can see behind me,

we handed out about 12,000 bottles of Honest Tea

and Honest Ade today.

We introduced our new flavour:

our organic half-and-half iced tea,

which is half black tea, half lemonade,

into the, uh... into the trade.

And what a better way to kick it off

than handing it out to 55,000 thirsty men and women?

- Now, cause marketing...

is a phenomenon, uh... unique,

I think, to capitalism,

where a company decides

that if they just associate with a cause people care about,

the buyers care about, they will increase their sales.

That's about the bottom line.

Now, I think there are, within those companies,

people who care deeply about what the issue is,

but breast cancer is the poster child

of cause marketing.

And there's more of it for breast cancer

than any other disease, and I think it's partly

because it's about breast cancer

and women make most of the buying decisions

and we get to say "breast" out loud

on public television.

(woman): You don't have to look far

to find products in pink on store shelves.

(man): You know, if one had benefits

going towards any kind of charity,

I'd probably choose that one, or if it was similar in price,

and knew it was going for a good cause.

- I keep thinking that we're going to reach saturation point.

Certainly when I began researching the book in 1998,

I could not have imagined

that women would be able to buy products

ranging from handguns to gasoline

in the name of raising money

for breast cancer.

- Come in, Miss Kane. Sit down.

- Thank you.

- I've been reading

the laboratory report again.

- I...

- Miss Kane...

you require immediate surgery, you have cancer.

- Uh, well, all right.

Now I think we have an opportunity

for some pictorial comment here.

Diana, you've just been handed

the most startling news of your life.

You have cancer.

Now anyone who has faced this moment

knows that this is a serious, frightening time.

Play this as if you are tongue-tied for a moment.

You see? - All right.

- Charlie, uh...

take a tight close-up of her face.

We want to see her reaction to this news.

Uh, start the action here, Doctor.

- It means we have to operate to remove the breast.

- There must be some other way. - There are only two ways

to cure cancer: surgery and irradiation,

Miss Kane.

- It means I'll be permanently disfigured, doesn't it?

- I stopped working as a surgeon in about 1998.

Um... I did it for 20 years,

and I found

that we really hadn't made that much progress.

We were still doing surgery, radiation and chemotherapy,

you know, maybe slightly different.

We weren't doing as much surgery,

and maybe we were doing more chemotherapy

than when I started.

But, really, we were still doing the same things,

what I've been known to call "slash, burn and poison,"

which are very crude ways

of dealing with a disease, you know?

That's what you do when you don't understand it.

And I really felt like I needed to get more involved

in figuring out how to stop it.

- We are thrilled

that we have been lighting monuments

all over the world, and this year,

200 monuments will have been lit

um... for breast-cancer awareness.

So if you see a pink monument that's lit,

that should give you a reminder,

along with the pink ribbon,

which, um... will remind everyone

to take care of their breast health.

- Connect, communicate, conquer.

(cheering)

(bells tolling)

(bagpipes)

- Good evening, everyone.

Welcome and thank you all for joining us.

It's great to be here tonight.

It's a wonderful way to highlight

Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

Our message is simple:

be vigilant and get regular mammograms.

It can save your life.

Tell your mothers, tell your sisters,

tell your daughters.

Connect, communicate and conquer.

(crowd): Five, four, three...

two, one...

zero!

- Whoo!

(cheering) (choir)

* You raise me up

* So I can stand on mountains

* You raise me up

* To walk on stormy seas

* You raise me up

* To more than I can be

* You raise me up

* To more than I can be

* You raise me up

* To more than I can be *

- I think that what this ties into is the very warm-and-fuzzy

sort of sentimentality around pink,

which is supposed to be a comforting thing

rather than something that is jarring to people.

Uh... my question would be:

What does raising or lighting up Niagara Falls

for 24 hours in pink really do to affect change?

- It's a great thing that women are more aware,

but awareness is different from doing something about it.

So behavioural change, you know,

you could be aware of your risk.

I'm sure everyone has heard

that women can get breast cancer.

But does every woman think

she is likely to get breast cancer? No.

Everyone always thinks: Oh, it's the other woman

that's gonna get breast cancer, not me.

- There are many people, to this day,

who believe that if they get a mammogram,

they won't get breast cancer.

They end up with breast cancer and say,

"But I got my mammograms. How can I have breast cancer?"

That's because we gave them the wrong message.

It's the wrong message.

It's that simple.

So then it became:

"Early detection is your best protection."

Against what?

(sighing)

Early detection, put simply, works for some.

You find some cancers early enough,

they're treatable.

They get those treatments, they live a long life.

For some people,

early detection just means we're finding something

that will never be life-threatening,

and we treat them anyway,

and they get sick from the treatment.

And for some people, early detection means

you have a kind of cancer that's so aggressive

that our currently available treatments cannot help you;

it doesn't matter when we find it.

That's not hard to understand,

but people don't like that message.

Everybody wants to think they're in the first group.

- My name is Rosemary Parker and I'm, uh...

been a member

of the Ivy League Breast Cancer support group for a year.

Uh... I've been diagnosed with a metastatic 4 stage

a year and a half ago.

- I'm Sandy Kugelman and, um...

I was originally diagnosed in 2001

with stage-2 breast cancer,

and, um, tried to do all the right things

to never allow it to come back into my life again.

And I thought that I had "beaten it,"

as they say,

and then, in 2004, was re-diagnosed with stage 4.

And when you're stage 4,

it means that the disease has spread

to some other part outside of the breast.

It's also known as metastasis.

And the only thing that I ever knew about stage 4,

um... was that you die when you get stage 4.

That that's the stage before you die.

There's no stage 5.

- There are very few of these groups in the United States.

There are extremely few stage-4 groups,

and that's just a tragedy. - Mm-hmm.

- Because you go to a regular breast-cancer support group,

and you're the angel of death, you know?

You're the elephant in the room.

And they're...

... they're learning to live and you're learning to die.

(soft music)

- It is my true honour to introduce you

to the amazing breast-cancer survivors

of the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer San Francisco.

(cheering) (dance music)

- Way to go, ladies!

High-five! - Whoo!

(sighing)

- As much as I know that people have...

many people who are, you know,

really do have good intentions with a pink ribbon,

however, maybe that's all they're seeing is a pink ribbon.

I want them to see the faces.

I want them to see women.

I want them to see lives.

I want them to see people that are hurting,

and people that are living

with stage-4 breast cancer, you know?

We're living. We're human beings.

We're not just a little pink ribbon.

(cheering) (speaker): ... women and men

whose bravery has no limits.

Our mothers, our daughters,

our wives and husbands,

our sisters and our friends who have fought this disease.

(cheering)

- Since our inception,

we have donated to this cause, to this mission,

over 1.5 billion dollars.

Well over 600 million of it

has gone to basic and clinical research.

And at any one time,

we will have hundreds of millions of dollars in grants,

uh... that are active

and that are carefully, carefully looked at by, um...

teams of what we believe to be the best scientists in the U.S.,

patient advocates... And of course our board,

in the end, looks first at our priorities,

and tries to understand what's happening in the world

and the science of cancer and breast cancer.

- So the Avon Foundation for Women is a public charity now.

It was founded in 1955, and it was... at that time,

the corporate-affiliated foundation for Avon products.

And today the Avon Foundation

is an independent public charity in the United States.

And it raises money

through the Avon Walks for Breast Cancer,

through the sale of pink-ribbon products

that Avon, the company, manufactures each year,

like the pin that I'm wearing.

And also through general donations from the public.

- I believe that there is a sisterhood

that has been created around breast cancer.

And I believe it was done by two entities, very much so:

Komen - the Susan G. Komen Foundation for the Cure -

as well as Avon.

The two of them were so powerful in touching so many lives

in so many ways,

I believe they created this momentum

that then other companies decided:

"There is this cause,

there has been this positive way of creating relationship;

perhaps it's something

I should get engaged in as well."

(live music)

(background chatter)

- Today we applaud Revlon

for helping women help themselves!

(cheering)

So go out there today,

walk as if your life depended on it,

because it does!

(cheering) Let's go!

(eruption)

(crowd): Stop the cancer where it starts!

Stop the cancer where it starts!

Stop the cancer where it starts!

Stop the cancer where it starts!

- We had a little coalition called The Toxic Links Coalition

in the Bay area, which, um...

of which I was a founding member.

And one of the things

we used to do every single October

was to hold what we called a "cancer industry tour,"

in which we visited

the headquarters of some of the worst polluters

in the Downtown Financial District.

They have never, in all their years,

taken a stand on any environmental issue,

despite the overwhelming evidence

that cancer and a whole host of other diseases

is caused by environmental pollution.

(crowd): Hey, polluters, don't you know,

poison profits got to go!

- In response to the question that people often ask is:

Why... are we putting a pretty pink face on this?

Absolutely, categorically not.

Because when you... when you lead from only anger,

you do not include or incent people

to be part of a mission.

If people feel there is no hope,

they will not participate long-term.

They will feel they're in an endless fight.

- If we look back through history

from anti-colonial movements

to the civil-rights movement

to the feminist movement,

people were able to quite nicely combine anger

with pride and optimism.

What has happened

with the mainstream breast-cancer organizations

is that they have tied themselves

so closely to corporations

that they have to sell the disease in a particular way.

And they feel that if they don't do that,

that they'll alienate customers

or their potential audience.

(background chatter) (cash register beeping)

(man): It'll be $21.44.

- We got four different flavours.

We got strawberry-banana,

strawberry-mango-pineapple and blueberry-pomegranate.

Coming at you, blueberry-pomegranate.

And it tastes delicious.

Everybody's lovin' it. You could try it if you want.

- A company like Yoplait or a company like Avon

needs to find an innovative way to tie to the cause

and year over year over year,

commit to certain things. Like Yoplait:

Take the lid, clean the lid,

put it in an envelope and send it back.

And they do it with deep, deep genuine authenticity,

every single year.

(hands clapping)

- So you take the top off the Yoplait container,

you clean it off presumably,

you put it in an envelope, you put a stamp -

now 45 cents in the U.S. -

um... and you send it to the company.

And for every top you send in,

it's... they give 10 cents.

If you ate three cups of Yoplait every day

for the four months of the campaign,

September to December, and sent in every lid,

your total donation would be $34.

Really, write a cheque.

My favourite example of this

is actually American Express,

which in 2002 had a campaign:

"In the fight against breast cancer,

every dollar counts."

I would like to come back to the question

of the language we use about "fight," but okay.

"In the fight against breast cancer, every dollar counts."

And then you read the fine print.

And the fine print says:

For every purchase

made between September and December

at participating stores,

with your American Express card,

the company would give one penny per purchase.

If you bought a $1,000 coat, a penny.

If you bought a $10 item, a penny.

So while every dollar counts,

it was only a penny they were giving.

You know, some things are like bacteria,

that exposed to sunlight disappear.

So we exposed that campaign in 2002,

and they stopped it.

(cheering) (whistle blowing)

(man): Hut! Hut! Hut!

(men grunting)

(drums)

(cheerleaders): Defence!

(clapping) Defence!

- The National Football League was in the midst

of what was called a character crisis,

where several of their players had been in trouble with the law

and they were looking for ways to rehabilitate their image.

At the same time,

they had discovered that women actually made up

a much larger percentage of their viewership

than they had previously realized.

And so they were interested in maintaining and extending

their female audience.

One of the things that we've seen with...

the emergence of the pink-ribbon industry

is the construction of breast cancer

as a disease that primarily affects middle-class,

ultra-feminine white women.

And this of course has to do with the fact

that corporations are trying to sell products,

they're trying to sell products

to a particular and preferred demographic.

And this is the kind of image

that they think will move those products.

- The cause, if done right over time,

can create a glue and a word of mouth

that no promotion or no advertising

could ever afford to create.

- Hi, this is Kitty Van Bortel.

When I was diagnosed with breast cancer,

all I wanted to do

was to get into a Ford Mustang convertible and go.

I wanna give another woman that same opportunity.

Are you a breast-cancer survivor?

If so, please visit Van Bortel Ford today,

or online at vanbortelford.com., for your chance to win

a brand-new 2008 Mustang convertible.

- You combine the passion behind a Mustang

with the passion behind this cause,

the breast-cancer cause,

and you put the two of them together,

and it's a bit of an explosion.

Several years ago, uh...

after we had been involved with Komen for a long time,

we developed the Warriors in Pink campaign,

and wanted to drive deeper,

and make a bigger connection and a bigger impact.

And, uh, one of the things we, uh... decided,

after talking with a lot of breast-cancer survivors,

those going through the battle and their loved ones,

that there was a need for some sort of symbolism

to represent the journey they're going through.

And so we came up with, uh...

12 symbols of a warrior;

a warrior being someone who's fighting breast cancer,

or someone who's helping someone fight breast cancer.

- When I was going through chemotherapy,

I was, uh... completely baffled by the language

that said I was "battling" a disease.

I wasn't battling anything.

I was forcing myself to comply with the treatments

that were recommended.

I was showing up for the chemotherapy sessions.

Is that a battle?

- The message there is that if you try hard enough,

you put forth the effort, if you "just do it,"

if you live... strong, maybe, even,

I don't know, um...

you can beat it. You can. You can do it.

So just try really hard.

And the problem with that message

is that you can't have that message

and then not see people who die

as somehow not having lost.

They lost their battle because why?

They didn't maybe try hard enough;

they just weren't trying hard enough.

And I don't know that people really think that through,

but it's a very clear message that we are aware of so much.

- I particularly reject the word "survivor"

as a label for myself,

uh... not only because I'm a little superstitious -

and who knows, you know -

but also because it seemed...

seems to me to be a putdown

of those women who don't survive.

- Public meetings,

arranged by leaders in the war against cancer,

are being held throughout the country

under the auspices of the Women's Field Army

of the American Society for the Control of Cancer.

Through these meetings

and by other educational efforts,

the truth about cancer is presented to the people.

And the truth is:

cancer is curable

when taken in time.

- The Women's Field Army, uh...

was one of the first national efforts

to really begin to batter these militaristic...

metaphors to death.

They had their own uniforms with...

sashes going across and badges.

We're mobilizing against an enemy

which requires all of our cunning,

all of our might,

and without this...

bellicose approach,

we're not going to conquer this enemy.

- So for somebody to have to be faced

with that kind of message,

the most fragile

and vulnerable amongst the cancer community,

people who are...

who are really in the process of leaving,

to be faced with that kind of painful messaging,

it's wrong, it's just wrong.

And I don't know any other way to say it.

And it's.... there is this hard thing,

because there's this balance between hope

and having the energy to go through treatment

that is potentially very difficult.

And on the other side, understanding...

that it may not work,

and at that point, what do you do?

That there's that reality,

that we don't deny that there's that possibility,

and that it's not a failure.

It's not a failure.

You can die in a perfectly healed state,

and I think that that's what we're forgetting.

(live music)

(speaker): It's up to each of you

to take care of yourselves and one another this weekend.

Don't forget the taking-care- of-each-other part.

You'll get out of this weekend what you put into it.

Remember to keep smiling, because it's contagious.

- We do use a lot of upbeat music,

and try to use a lot of words like "inspiring" and "hope,"

because that's what we're doing.

The fact that all these thousands of people are here

is a pretty incredible statement about a disease

that they want to see end.

(cheering)

I speak to a lot

of breast-cancer survivors, and I write their stories,

and help them get up on stage and tell them.

And while many of the same thread

goes through a lot of those stories,

everybody has a different story.

And our survivor this weekend is 24 years old.

(cheering)

- Good morning.

I'm walking my first Avon Walk

because I want to share my story of survival

and to remind you

that you're never too young to get breast cancer.

A year ago, I was a 23-year-old single mom

who thought that cancer was the least of my worries.

But even with no family history,

I found a lump that turned out to be breast cancer.

So I've come to walk

to support the other young survivors out there,

to help build a better future for my son Gianni,

and to begin to give back for all of the loving support

I got from my family and friends.

My name is Marissa Castoro, from San Francisco, California,

and I'm a one-year breast-cancer survivor.

(cheering)

(live music)

I'm in it to end it for me...

(cheering)

I'm in it to end it for me and for every other person

battling breast cancer, young and old,

across the country and around the world.

(cheering)

- Good morning, walkers! (crowd): Good morning!

- Your commitment and hard work have really paid off,

because, as of today,

the walkers and crew of the Avon Walk San Francisco

have already raised more than an amazing...

$5.5 million!

(cheering)

Are you ready to walk?

(crowd): Yes!

- Then let's start the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer San Francisco!

(cheering) (live music)

- Nexus Ta-Tas!

- Whoo! Yes!

Whoo-hoo...!

- I really didn't...

really didn't want to even talk about, uh... dying.

I didn't want to think about it, and...

But I realized it was there,

it was always there, the thoughts, and, um...

And I'd realized one of the reasons

I didn't want to die was because I was told, you know...

I wasn't given any time when I was diagnosed,

and I was diagnosed last year with stage-4 breast cancer.

Prior to that, in '06, I was diagnosed with stage 1.

So when it came back, it came back very strong,

and it came back in my liver and my bones.

And when it did come back,

it just progressed so quickly

that they couldn't give me a date of how long I could live.

(soft music)

(broken voice): I was raised in a very religious...

um... family, and I did, I went,

"Oh, my God, is God punishing me?"

And then, you know, I couldn't help but...

I don't know why, but it did occur to me.

And then of course I realized,

you've never believed that kind of bullshit anyways.

(laughter) So, I mean, you know,

the God you've always believed in is a loving God

and a loving God would never set out to hurt you.

(soft music)

(waves washing ashore)

- Every year I hate to raise the... the funds,

but as I get going, doing it, and then this morning,

you know, I... we got up and got going.

And I just said, you know, "I'm ready. I'm ready."

- We've been preparing for nine months for this,

so we had no idea what to expect and just...

Everybody around and everybody supporting us

is just a really, really, really great feeling.

- Our team is Tickled Pink for a Cure,

and today I'm walking for one of my friends

who is a survivor

and she's also been diagnosed again.

So she's currently going through chemo a second time.

- When a family member is diagnosed with breast cancer,

you feel helpless and you feel...

like you want to do something, either, uh... you know,

driving them to appointments or doing this walk.

Just a... just a small part

to lessen their pain and suffering.

- In the waiting room of the radiologist,

the place where you get the mammograms,

and this was a second mammogram.

Uh... it went on for about an hour and a half,

because the radiologist would keep asking

for more angles or something.

And I ran out of my other reading material,

started reading the local weekly newspaper

all the way down to the classified advertisements.

And there was an advertisement

for a pink...

breast-cancer teddy bear.

I can't tell you how much this offended my sense of dignity.

Here I am, you know, at the time a middle-aged woman,

facing the most serious health crisis of my life,

facing my own mortality,

and somebody's offering me a pink teddy bear?!

I'm sorry, I'm not six years old!

* I rode my bicycle

* Past your window last night

* I roller-skated to your door at daylight *

* It almost seems like

* You're avoiding me

* I'm okay alone

* But you got something I need

* Well I got a brand-new pair of roller skates *

* You got a brand-new key

* I think that we should get together *

* And try them out to see

* I been looking around a while *

* You got something for me

* Oh I got a brand-new pair of roller skates *

* You got a brand new key *

(cheering) (honking)

- It feels great!

This is awesome! Everybody should come out!

(honking)

- Slide that door open! (cameraman laughing)

(cheering)

- There may be more pressure

on breast-cancer patients, uh, to be positive,

simply because there's more pressure

on women in general

to be smiling and helpful

and perky and cheerful at all times.

- What I found in my research

is that many women actually feel alienated

by the overly optimistic approach.

They feel like

they can't have their feelings of anger

or despair or hopelessness,

and feel like a legitimate person

with breast cancer.

That in order to be a survivor,

you must maintain this optimistic outlook

and participate in what I call the tyranny of cheerfulness.

(cheering)

- All right!

Let's party!

(live music)

- See, my girl, it's 22.8!

- Good drive, you guys. Good drive!

- We're handing out... we're handing out the hard candy

because we're at mile 22.8,

and they've been walking since 6:30 this morning.

And these hard candies will help them

to have their blood sugar to be elevated,

and also it'll help keep their mouth moist,

because that's the biggest problem you have at this point.

And they need to keep their hands in the air,

because their hands start swelling.

It's incredibly difficult.

Actually tomorrow's gonna be even more difficult.

Today's a longer distance,

but tomorrow they're gonna be going up hills,

13 miles of hills.

And if you know San Francisco, some of them are very difficult.

Oh! (inaudible question)

Yeah, I love San Francisco!

- I don't wanna be a grinch... (laughing)

... and discourage people from running or racing.

I'm all into fitness and everything like that.

But, uh...

I wish that they could also hear from all the women

who have been through breast cancer

and resent the effort to make it pretty

and feminine and normal.

It's not normal.

It's horrible. It has to be stopped.

- We really have softened the disease, uh...

We have a lot of people who are survivors

and that also helps to make it feel it's a...

you know, it's a triumph or...

as opposed to something we should be angry about.

And I think the time is to re-politicize it.

And re-politicizing it is pointing out to people

that they don't know

where this research money is going.

I mean, if somebody really is concerned

about environmental causes of breast cancer -

and there are a lot of people who are -

then they should make sure that the money they're raising

is going to that kind of research.

You know, if you wanna find out what the cause is,

and not have your kid get it, then you want to make sure.

But we have to learn as women to ask questions,

not just raise the money and hand it over,

and then never know what happens to it.

- This is extremely puzzling to me,

that so little has come from any of this research.

That all of these, uh... organizations

that brag about giving money to research,

instead of saying

what has come out of this investment,

they tell you how much money they've put into it.

So they say, you know,

"Last year we gave 15 million to breast-cancer research."

Or in the case of Komen,

I think it's really huge, like, 450 million,

something like that.

But they, uh... have,

to my mind, very little to show for it,

and very little that goes beyond the status quo.

- My hope for the future is to find a cure very soon.

- I hope that they find a cure so that my grandchildren

won't have to go through what we've gone through.

- That they'll find a cure for it,

but I don't know if they're gonna find one,

but if it's God's will, they'll find it, you know?

- Find a cure. Please find a cure.

(all): Cheers to the cure!

Cheers to the cure!

- Arms out! Out! (all): Cheers to the cure!

Cheers to the cure! (live music)

- Washington Redskins cheerleaders

support breast-cancer cure!

Research for a cure!

- All right! Whoo! - Be safe!

(cheering)

- I think that the public isn't critical

even if they maybe do know,

because so much is invested in pharmaceutical treatment,

so we think that a cure is the answer.

And if we think that a cure is the answer,

we're not actually gonna have a very critical perspective

on pharmaceutical-company work in the area.

- They go with the flow,

and the flow is toward...

looking at research

that will have a marketable product at the end.

Something which can improve survival by three weeks,

but which can be very profitable for the promoters

for the period in which they enjoy that slight edge,

because of this slight improvement in survival.

They do not seem to be interested in prevention,

but this is how capitalism works.

They're looking for markets and expanding their markets,

and their understanding of how this works

would be to medicalize American women.

- I want prevention.

And our federal government,

of all the funds it allocates to cancer research each year,

gives between 3% and 5% to prevention.

And if you ask people - medical people,

scientists, politicians, corporate people -

if you raise the issue of prevention,

they will say, "Well, we can't prevent it

when we don't know what causes it."

Well, how the hell can you call "cure"

what you don't know?

(marching band)

(chanting): I am the cure!

- Start right by living right. (all): I am the cure.

Keep it up, keep it up! Keep that Komen spirit up.

And keep... it... up! (cheering)

- Well, now, we're starting to have a lot of observations

that say cancer is more complex.

That there are five or six different kinds

of breast cancers.

And that how they behave and how they act

is not just a matter of the cells

slowly growing and taking over.

I mean, we've really thought about cancer

as if it were a foreign invader.

The cell comes from somewhere else,

it comes, it attacks, you know, it's like a terrorist, right?

And we have to kill it, we have to blast it away.

We have to slash, burn and poison.

Everything we can do to get rid of it.

But actually, it's not from outside;

it's one of our own cells that goes bad.

You know, I say, in the United States,

it's not Osama bin Laden, it's Timothy McVeigh.

It's our own terrorists that we grew ourselves.

And so we don't wanna...

It's not the same as just blasting it out.

We have to figure out why we grew that terrorist,

what neighbourhood,

what was it that really egged it on and fostered it.

- More than half of the women diagnosed with breast cancer

don't have one of the major risk factors

that we know about for breast cancer.

So what is it that made them develop breast cancer?

And right now most of the research

is not targeted at answering those questions.

We at the California Breast Cancer Research Program

are trying hard to identify,

to examine possible environmental links

to breast cancer and, uh...

We hope that will result in finding answers

for that other 50% of women.

Uh, but we are... kind of a lone voice.

And the majority of breast-cancer research

is not focused in that direction.

- I think we're ingesting plastic.

Um... we cook in it, we live in it.

Um... the seafood is eating it in the ocean

and we're eating the seafood.

It's just... it's become part of our food chain.

And I think that, uh...

before all of these plastics,

people didn't have breast cancer like this,

or other kinds of cancer.

And I'm just convinced that there's...

that there's a link.

- Now we know that only about 20 or 30% of breast cancer

happens in women with risk factors.

If we can only explain 20 to 30% of breast cancers,

then we don't know what causes it.

We're missing something big.

And if we keep looking at the same risk factors

over and over again, we're not gonna figure it out.

We need to broaden, we need to look at new things.

We need... could be a virus; wouldn't surprise me a bit

if breast cancer wasn't caused by a virus.

It could be something we haven't even thought of yet.

And we really have to be creative,

and we have to really take on the challenge

of finding the cause and stopping it.

(man): Survivor!

(cheering)

- Hi, my name if Dao Tran.

I... came from Vietnam,

and live in New York City for 29 years.

Um...

I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2005,

and did all the treatments and everything,

and finished and went back to work.

I thought, I'm done,

but last year I found out I just had...

My cancer came back

and according to when it came back,

I became a stage 4.

At first I thought stage 4 was just like a number.

I didn't know stage 4 is the final stage.

(clapping her hands) And I... I didn't know that...

... it's not curable.

And then I went to a doctor.

And the doctor told me there's no cure.

So... I don't believe it.

So I went for a second opinion.

I went to MD Anderson.

And they tell me the same thing.

They tell me the same thing.

And they say, "This cancer has no cure."

So I... I ask him,

"So how many years do I have left?"

He goes, "We don't know.

It depends on a person; each person is different."

And so, "What do I do,

if I don't choose to do any treatment?"

He goes, "Then you may not live that long."

I go, "But isn't it you die anyway

even if you get treatment?

All those poisons will kill you."

And he says, um...

"But it keeps you alive longer."

And I ask him, "Are you telling me

that I'm gonna live on drugs

for the rest of my life?"

And he said,

"Kind of."

And I go, "Okay, I see.

So what if you get drugs,

and then you get so sick,

what kind of life are you living?"

So he... he told me that,

"Well, there are several drugs out there.

Some of them may get you very sick

but some of them won't.

So it depends on your body, how your body responds to it."

Then I go, "Okay.

Why don't you pick me the mildest drug

that I can handle,

and I can live my life

until the day I couldn't take it anymore?"

(soft music)

(distant cow bells)

(background chatter)

- I twisted my ankle going down the hill. Yeah.

- Lots of hills in San Francisco!

(interviewer): So do you think you can continue tomorrow?

- Yes. - You want to.

- Yes. Yes. I'll keep my, um... leg elevated tonight.

And ice, put ice on it. - Definitely.

- Yes. - Is that comfortable?

- Yes, it is. Feels great. - Not too tight? Feel your toes?

- Yes. - All right.

- Yes, I'm walking, um...

because my mom died of cancer, uh...

so I'm walking for my mom.

My grandmother and my great-grandmother,

they all died of cancer. Yeah.

(interviewer): You are alone doing this walk?

- No, my daughter's right behind me.

(interviewer): Where? (laughter)

She's also hurt?

(cheering)

- I'm fightin' for breast cancer!

For my grandma,

my great-grandma and all those involved.

Whoo-hoo!

- We do a lot of work

on the safety of personal-care products.

We have a big database online called Skin Deep.

We show safety reviews

for 50,000 personal-care products.

What we find in that research

is that many of these products

contain chemicals linked to cancer

and other kinds of health problems.

Right now we have federal standards in place

that don't protect public health.

And that includes everything from cosmetics,

where there's no safety standard at all in federal law,

to the broader world of industrial chemicals,

where companies can bring new chemicals onto the market

and into consumer products

with no requirement in federal law

to conduct even a single health-and-safety test.

It's really hard to tell

what companies are doing individually

to assess the safety of their products.

Um... Revlon, Procter & Gamble, Avon...

they... aren't making their basic safety studies public,

aren't making their risk assessments public.

- It is my firm belief that Avon products are safe,

that they have been safe

for the 124-year history of the company,

and that product safety is one of Avon's key concerns.

(music)

(narrator): The average woman in the U.S.

uses about 12 personal-care products daily.

The average man about six.

Each product containing a dozen or more chemicals.

Less than 20% of chemicals in cosmetics

have been assessed for safety by the industry's safety panel.

So we just don't know what they do to us when we use them.

Would you fly in an airline

that only inspects 20% of its planes?

It turns out the important decisions don't happen

when I choose to take a product off the shelf.

They happen when companies and governments decide

what products should go on the shelves.

So who are these companies?

Oh, here's Estée Lauder offering me a chance

to help find a cure for breast cancer.

That's nice. But wait.

They're also using chemicals linked to cancer.

- It is hypocrisy to use carcinogens in products

and at the same time be advocating for a cure,

raising money for a cure in other ways.

Really, companies need to,

um, be in harmony across all their operations

when it comes to their cancer activism.

- Evelyn Lauder, Estée Lauder's um... daughter-in-law,

has designed a lipstick set, as indeed have I.

And inside each one

there's a lipstick, a lip pencil,

and a lip gloss.

And we also have beautiful jewelled pins like this one.

(funky music)

- The first ribbon for breast cancer was not pink.

It was sort of salmon-coloured, sort of orange,

made by a woman named Charlotte Haley.

And Charlotte had lost a lot of people in her family

to breast cancer.

She saw what was happening in AIDS,

she came up with this ribbon, she put...

They were made of cloth, they weren't... diamond,

they weren't platinum, they were made of cloth.

And she put five of them on a card on which she wrote:

"Did you know that less than 5%

"of the National Cancer Institute's budget

"goes to cancer prevention?

You can change this. Write to the NCI."

- And there it is.

It's one of the first cards.

(interviewer): Can you read us what is written?

- Yes.

"Breast Cancer Awareness Ribbon...

... and America by wearing this ribbon."

- In the meantime,

Estée Lauder, the cosmetics company,

and Se magazine came to her and said,

"We love your ribbon and we love women,

and we wanna make this the symbol of breast cancer."

And Charlotte very quickly said,

"No, that's about your bottom line,

that's not about women's lives, you can't use my ribbon."

- They said, "Well, all we have to do if we want it

is to change the ribbon."

- Now, these companies had lawyers,

so they ran to the lawyers. "What are we gonna do?"

And the lawyers said, "Find another colour."

So they convened focus groups of women, only women,

and they asked them for the colour or colours

most comforting, reassuring, non-threatening.

Everything a breast-cancer diagnosis is not.

The colour was pink.

(background chatter)

- We are a nation which likes a quick fix.

We always have, uh...

and the pink ribbon is clearly a quick fix.

We are a nation which... which has swallowed the...

... again, I think, mythology,

that research is the key,

without ever questioning what that research is.

And when they come and say,

"You will support breast-cancer research...

If you do thus." We say, "Oh, yes," you know?

There's the quick fix.

- Many things help prevent breast cancer.

One of them is to stop smoking.

A second one is to stay lean and not to be overweight.

To do exercise and to, um...

really, uh... have a healthy lifestyle.

- You know, if I tell you now

that you need to eat fewer calories

and reduce your cholesterol

to lower your risk of dying from heart disease,

I think most people would say, "Yes, I can do that.

I can measure my cholesterol and I can take...

even take medicine to lower it."

And we see that the mortality from heart disease is declining.

Well, we can't say that about breast cancer,

because we just haven't done the research

to tell us exactly what to do.

And now we're beginning to know

that breast cancer is not even one disease, right?

It affects young women differently,

it affects older women differently,

there's estrogen-receptor- positive breast cancer...

So until we do fundamental research

to find out what's propelling breast cancer,

we can't begin to legislate what to do to prevent it.

- I do not eat sweets,

I eat only vegetables and fruit.

I eat very little meat.

I don't drink coffee, I don't drink soda,

I don't drink alcohol, and I'm very mad at myself

that... how I get cancer?! - Yeah!

- Not only does it divert us

from looking at what's outside of our control,

but also suggests that it's our problem.

It's not somebody else's problem.

It's not the problem of how we structure things in society.

And that's bad. And we say that every time:

"Don't blame,

and don't give people the tools to blame themselves."

- Poor women can't go into the supermarket

and buy lean meat for them and their kids.

They just can't.

At what, $20 a pound or something?

I mean, give me a break.

The answer is not to try and tell them

they should go organic or they should go vegetarian

or they should buy this and not this.

The answer is: get the stuff out of the product

that we are ingesting every day...

... because that's how we survive as human beings.

(upbeat music)

* It's a beautiful world

* Passing by

* Country stretches far and wide *

* It's a beautiful world

* Passing by

* Makes me want to drive and drive *

* It's a beautiful world *

- Last summer, uh...

the summer of 2010,

we started seeing things posted

on Breast Cancer Action's Facebook page about a KFC...

Kentucky Fried Chicken campaign with Komen.

First we knew that it was going on.

And the bloggers in nutrition were going nuts.

They were, like,

"What? We're gonna sell this really terrible food

and raise money for... What?!

What are we gonna do?"

Well, we're activists, we know what to do.

So we got the email addresses of the head of KFC,

and the head of Komen,

and the people in charge of marketing in Komen,

and we sent...

sent an email to our base,

which is about 15,000 email addresses...

... uh, that headlined: "What the cluck?

"If you don't like this campaign,

tell them you don't like it and tell them why."

And people by the thousands actually did that.

- The Kentucky Fried Chicken campaign suggested to me

that the Komen Foundation

has really lost sight of its vision,

which is to see a world without breast cancer.

And that the bottom line in raising money

has become the priority,

regardless of the consequences,

or how that money is raised.

- And what was so astonishing about Komen doing this,

was because Komen has done

a lot of work in poor communities.

So the disconnect was just... shocking.

- Our grassroots and our member of Susan G. Komen and,

you know, the general population,

lines up with a lot of the customer base

of many, many private-sector companies

all over the world, frankly.

We're often asked to do programs.

And in this case, um...

the restaurant company came to us,

and asked us to, uh, do a program

where they were introducing a grilled product.

Well, we felt that was a very good thing because the fact is,

um, again, training people how to eat right,

and... and doing those sorts of,

um... of educational programs don't happen overnight.

- For Carol.

- For my wife. - For my mom.

- For every pink bucket of grilled or original recipe,

KFC makes a 50-cent contribution to Susan G. Komen for the Cure.

Together we could make the largest donation

in Komen history to help end breast cancer forever.

- For the last 30 years,

Margaret and I have been working

in the area of occupational

and environmental health.

Currently we're looking specifically at breast cancer,

and the impact that environmental

and occupational exposures have

on the risk of women developing this disease.

Very little of these resources is going after the issues

around pesticides, around combustion products,

around plastics and petrochemicals and solvents.

Many of the things that, really,

millions of women are being exposed to every day,

either in the general ambient environment

or in their workplaces.

There hasn't been work done in that area.

- The reason, I think, that the Komens, the whole...

the pink-ribbon battalions, the whole schmear of them,

don't work with environmental-justice groups

is that environmental-justice groups

stand in pretty direct opposition

to where the money comes from.

- They can't go there.

They just can't.

Because it undermines their people

to actually insist that we have clean air.

I mean, if you insist we have clean air,

what do you do about your partnership with Ford?

- I think there's a lot of, uh... criticism out there

uh... with respect to a lot of environmental factors.

Komen is working hard to identify

what environmental factors are real,

and what are... what are people taking liberties with.

Uh... you know,

plastics was one that there was a lot of,

uh... uproar over that recently.

- There was a study of General Motors workers

where they found an elevated breast-cancer risk

among women exposed to soluble metalworking fluids,

where they think that, again,

polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, PAHs,

were involved.

So there's a whole host of occupations

within the broad auto industry

in which many women, and men,

are exposed to substances that are toxic

and are endocrine disrupters.

(narrator): Barb Wimbush is the union safety rep

at Binder Tool and Moulds Promo Plastics Division,

a company that processes plastic materials.

During the moulding process, gasses are given off.

But the gasses given off during the normal operations

aren't the worst of it:

the fumes and smoke can almost be unbearable

during a process called "purging."

- These are just screen shots from a documentary

that was done in 1980, I believe.

We've interviewed over 1,000 women with breast cancer,

and 1,150 community controls who don't have breast cancer.

And we've got their full occupational histories.

And what we're trying to do is to compare these two groups

to see if there are differences between the women

who develop cancer and the women who don't.

- When I started there, back then,

like, material...

safety training was not mandatory,

we didn't really have data sheets,

we didn't know what we were being exposed to.

And depending on the type of plastic you were using,

some of those purgings would burn like fluorescent colours

and would burn for hours.

Just putting all kinds of obnoxious smoke often,

with the fans blowing.

What was supposed to be cooling you off

was blowing the smoke onto you,

and then it would go to the machine next to you.

- Then we brought it to another machine,

stuck the clear piece in,

and then it moulded it around...

moulded all this.

Brings back old days.

- Who were you making those parts for? What...? For Ford?

- Ford. Yeah. Ford Marquis.

We did a lot of lenses.

- We've had probably 12 people

that have passed away from cancer.

Uh, there's a couple of them that had breast cancer.

The others, they were full of cancer,

so it was hard to determine... I mean,

we didn't know exactly if they had breast cancer or not.

- How old were you when you developed breast cancer?

- Forty-one. 41 years old. Yeah.

- You know, you run into people now and they say,

"Oh, did you hear about Linda? Linda died of breast cancer."

"Oh, did you hear about Linda's mother?

Linda's mother died of breast cancer."

Both of them I worked with for 17 years.

Uh... Linda being in her forties.

Um, young children at home, and her mother.

And then I run into others,

"Oh, did you hear about Chris? Chris passed away, cancer."

I don't know about breast cancer, but cancer.

And it's really disheartening when you hear that now,

and you wish you would've known back then

what we were dealing with.

And did it actually cause it? Was it a contributor?

I certainly hope we find that out

before more people get stuck.

- Almost all the plastics that you were using were...

are estrogenic.

They mimic the hormone estrogen.

This is what these chemicals are,

and I think, you know... Sandy, you're very active

in the breast-cancer issue, so you know

that it's almost impossible to have breast cancer

in the absence of estrogen.

Right?

- I just... you know,

this is the first time I've ever, ever heard

that they're finding

that the plastics are mimicking the female hormones,

and I think that needs to be put out loud and clear,

'cause I don't believe there's...

all the women out there

who ever worked in the plastics industry

ever knew that, 'cause this is the first for me.

- Yeah. - I'm tellin' ya.

And it's, like, that should be out there.

- These are evidence.

I mean, this is strong evidence.

So you've got the animal studies,

what we know about endocrine disruption.

The human-health studies

that have been finding these associations.

So to say there's no evidence, I... I mean,

there may be a question in some people's mind:

Well, how strong is it?

But I think if you apply the precautionary principle

to what we're talking here,

that we're actually engaged in this process

to save people's lives,

then I think the evidence is overwhelming.

- Many of the big players in the cancer establishment

in the United States and in Canada

have boards of directors

that are filled with representatives

from the pharmaceutical,

chemical and energy industries.

So it's in fact very hard to separate the...

the people who might be responsible

for the perpetuation of this disease

from those who are responsible

for trying to find a way to cure it,

or even better, to prevent it.

(brakes screeching) (crashing)

- So there are categories of pink washers:

cosmetics companies, uh...

companies that make cars, uh...

... some companies that make food,

dairy in particular, and alcohol.

'Cause alcohol is a link to breast cancer.

In the dairy field,

the problem is largely with companies

that stimulate their dairy

with recombinant bovine growth hormone,

which has been linked to breast cancer.

If you're a company doing a pink campaign

that uses rBGH, you're a pinkwasher.

And Yoplait, made by General Mills,

is... was the biggest offender.

They raised millions of dollars for the Komen Foundation,

selling this yogurt

that has in it dairy stimulated with rBGH.

So in - what year is this? 2000... -

in 2008, we launched a campaign called

"Tell General Mills to put a lid on it."

It was an email-based campaign and web-based campaign,

where we asked people

to write to General Mills,

and explain why they needed to stop using rBGH

if they were gonna do breast-cancer stuff.

And lo and behold, they did.

And that is the power of activism.

That's when ordinary people do a simple thing,

like send an email, or write a letter,

or send a postcard.

It changes the world.

- How do you like your coffee, Sharon?

- With cream, please.

- I've been having such a tough time these days

with the stock market the way it is.

- John and I have been shifting our investments

to healthcare companies.

We just bought some shares

in the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly.

They make breast-cancer drugs,

both to treat the disease

and reduce the risk of people getting it.

- Did you know Eli Lilly also makes rBGH?

- rBGH?

What's that?

- It's a synthetic hormone given to dairy cows.

They sell it under the name Posilac.

It increases the risk of cancer in people

who drink milk made from cows treated with it.

In fact, companies like General Mills and Wal-Mart

have stopped using milk

made with rBGH in their products.

And Canada and the European Union have even banned it.

That's probably why Monsanto sold it to Eli Lilly

in the first place.

- So Eli Lilly is making profits from cancer drugs

and a substance that could increase the risk

of people getting cancer?

- Yeah.

- So Eli Lilly is milking cancer.

- When you start looking at who,

um... is actually controlling science,

it goes all the way back,

I think, to, you know, who has the money.

A lot of the research that's being done

is being done by the pharmaceutical companies.

They are...

They also fund research

that they think is going to be in their interest to fund.

Um, AstraZeneca, for example,

which is based in the UK, produces Tamoxifen.

As far as I know,

it still has the patent on it,

and, uh, it's making billions of dollars a year.

Tamoxifen is anti-estrogenic.

It's used as a treatment for breast cancer

to stop estrogen production.

They also own Syngenta,

a, uh... pesticide-producing company

that makes Atrazine.

Atrazine is very, very widely used...

on corn and on a number of other crops.

It's been used widely in North America,

right here in Essex County.

Atrazine has been found to be estrogenic.

In fact, it's been banned in Europe for use,

because of its endocrine- disrupting characteristics.

- It's Breast Cancer Awareness Month,

which has a very nefarious history.

It was invented in the early '80s

by a public-relations expert

at Zeneca in...

in Delaware,

which was the American arm

of what was then

the largest chemical company in the world.

- And this month certainly encourages women,

and men,

to talk about the issue.

What kinds of things are being planned?

- Organizations all over the country

involved with breast-cancer and cancer concerns

are planning something nearly every day.

One notable is National Mammography Day,

on October 19th,

where over 1,700 radiologists are participating

with free mammography for women.

And that's exciting, that's a big breakthrough.

I think it'll encourage people that haven't had

that first mammogram to go get it.

- You talk about the importance of corporations getting involved

and there's no better example than Zeneca Pharmaceuticals.

Bob, tell me what Zeneca's doing and why?

- Well, we've had a very strong interest

in breast cancer for a number of years,

because we are a research-based pharmaceutical company,

we do basic pharmaceutical research into cancer.

We realized that early detection is extremely important

to the long-term survivability of patients.

In 1985, we were one of the founding sponsors

for National Breast Cancer Week in those days,

which has now turned into

National Breast Cancer Awareness Month,

because we wanted to try

to get the message out to women across America

that early detection really is very important.

- The point of Breast Cancer Awareness Month,

since its inception,

has been to promote mammography as the major tool

in winning the fight against breast cancer.

And all promotional materials that use the name

must be approved by AstraZeneca.

So what we have is a situation in which a company

that will benefit

from more people being diagnosed with breast cancer

through the use of mammography,

producing a campaign encouraging people to get screened.

(cheering)

(woman cheering in French)

(cheering)

(honking)

(distant live music)

- I think on the part of the people who are walking the race,

that is really innocent, you know?

- People just don't know. We do trust and why wouldn't we?

And, you know, I think a lot of us feel

really frustrated in the month of October,

because, okay, great, we're getting this recognition,

but at the same time,

it's almost like our disease

is being used for people to profit,

and that's not okay.

It's not, um...

There's no integrity.

- For people to finally...

... rise up and object,

people have to know.

They have to be aware

of the magnitude of the lies

they're being fed.

And the lies are comforting lies.

People are not going to want to give up these lies.

They're comforting.

Breast Cancer Awareness Month is comforting,

because you're doing something about something that scares you.

(background chatter)

(woman): Oh...

- Breast Cancer Awareness Month, despite the fact

that it does not reflect any reality...

... works.

(women): Oh! Ah...

- Pink-ribbon vacuum cleaners work.

Pink-ribbon teddy bears sell.

Pink-ribbon yogurt also sells.

It works.

And as long as it works, they're gonna keep pushing it.

- Black coffee. - Thank you.

Thanks a lot. Thank you!

- And it is tempting to say they must be in a conspiracy.

But that's way too easy.

I wish it were,

because if it were a conspiracy,

then we could expose it,

and suddenly people would be aware.

But it's not.

It's business as usual.

(distant cheering)

- We need, you know, as corporate citizens,

we obviously would love

that the rest of the corporate world

uh, do give back to the communities,

uh, in this manner.

- We look at our position as being that of...

a leader to raise funds, that's our job.

We take that job very seriously, and when we listen

to the researchers tell us about their job,

we need to raise a lot more money.

- That's right.

- The notion that the solution to a complex problem

is throwing money at it

is a typical American solution to a problem.

I don't know if it's just American... it's capitalist.

If we just throw enough money at something,

we'll understand it.

I think that is so wrong-headed.

For one thing, I think... I...

I hear it at many meetings now,

"Well, breast cancer's so complex

and with no simple answers."

The more we invest ourselves in complexity,

the harder it is to find new answers.

Can we take a step back

and actually get some coordination of this problem?

Does the person in the lab in San Diego

know what the person in the lab in Montreal is doing,

or the person in the lab in Berlin?

Are they coordinated? Are they duplicating?

Are they doing the same thing that's failed three times?

What is going on?

- Take, for example,

trying to study the...

genetics of breast cancer in women of African ancestry.

And we found out that, in fact,

while we've had this large established infrastructure

to study breast cancer

and a lot of groups have been funded,

when the genome-wide association studies,

when the results started coming back, coming out,

it turned out that every study upon study

has all been among white women in Western Europe

or in America.

And so, all of the data,

no one could say for sure

whether they apply to minority groups,

to Asian women, to African-American women,

to women in Africa.

And yet we've spent millions of dollars

studying the same population, because these are

the convenient samples, I call them.

You know, white women go to doctors,

they are in major academic medical centres

as set up in areas where they can set up cohorts

of well-educated white women.

- The lack of coordination in breast-cancer research

is appalling.

At the federal level in the U.S.,

there were 30-some different agencies led by the NCI

that fund breast-cancer research.

There are a number of non-profits:

Sue Love's group,

Komen Foundation, ACS...

And there are tons of them.

I mean, everybody's raising money for research.

Good people want to fund research.

And then there are the private pharmaceutical companies,

and we don't know what they're spending.

And nobody's minding the store.

- So what you see is all this money

flooding into the cause,

you see endless repetition of particular kinds of research.

So research, for instance,

that seeks to find

incremental changes in life expectancy

of a mouse given a certain cancer drug.

So you get the needless repetition,

and then you get massive gaps.

So questions about...

what kinds of cancers metastasize - right? -

which is what kills people generally,

not the size of the tumour.

That kind of research isn't funded.

(soft music)

(drums)

- Breast cancer recognizes no border,

and neither must our efforts.

We must expand our reach, country by country,

town by town, village by village,

person by person.

- In recent years,

we've seen the development on the part of organizations

like the Avon Foundation, the Komen Foundation,

the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca,

to do breast-cancer fundraising

and awareness campaigns overseas.

So this is what we can think of

as the globalization of the breast-cancer movement.

What I found in my research is that...

what they're actually doing is producing

a culture of breast-cancer risk in places

where breast cancer may not be

a, or the, primary health concern.

- Basically, now we're gonna take

the same dumb messages to other parts of the world.

We're gonna...

So let me tell you a story about mammogram machines.

In the early '70s,

we were using, in North America,

machines that gave very high doses of radiation.

And we figured out that was not a good idea,

so we stopped.

What do you think we did with those machines?

We sent them to developing countries.

We... we do it all the time.

We send the worst of our stuff to other places.

And I would say that sending more dumb messages

all over the world isn't gonna help.

(background chatter) (Arabic)

- Companies need a license to operate.

There are many, many competitors.

Companies go into new markets. For example,

going into China or India.

In China, for example, the government wants to know:

What are you doing for my people?

What are you doing for my communities?

Even before they're allowed to do business.

When you give back through a cause,

you earn the license to operate.

- Towards the end of the Bush administration,

the U.S. government began using breast-cancer awareness

as a tool of diplomacy in the Middle East.

As a way, they thought, of winning the hearts

and minds of Middle Easterners

who are... angry

at U.S. involvement,

the invasion of Iraq, so on and so forth.

And, to me,

this is the most insidious use of breast-cancer awareness,

but it's also not surprising.

- Until... we,

in the breast-cancer community,

and in the cancer community,

have the equivalent of antiretroviral drugs,

until we have the ability to be able to treat this disease

much the way that diabetes is treated,

until we have those kinds, and even after that,

um, evolutions in this disease,

there's not enough pink.

There's not enough pink.

(speaker): Hello, San Francisco walkers!

(cheering)

You have come a long way since yesterday morning,

but now you are done!

(speaker): The research,

the caring, the lifesaving work

being done across this country and around the world

is all possible

because of people like you.

You didn't choose to stay home this weekend,

you chose to take a stand,

and we thank you so much for being in it

to end it with us. We began here yesterday

as a diverse group from 46 states

who share a common thread

in the fight against breast cancer.

And even though

you're now standing right back where you started,

you're in a very different place.

You are now part of a community, a community deeply connected

to each other and to the cause.

We'd like to demonstrate the strength of that community now,

and ask your family and friends to join us.

(live music)

If you are connected to this community

because you are a breast-cancer survivor,

please raise your hands high above your head

and hold them there. (cheering)

If you are connected

to this community because you walked

as far as you possibly could

to raise funds and awareness,

raise your hands and hold them there.

Now reach up and grab the hands of those around you.

Feel the strength of our connection thousands strong.

Because we need each other

to win this fight.

We need the power of our community to save lives.

But remember... (lively music)

... our journey continues

in three more cities this year

and right back here, in San Francisco,

in 2011.

- The fact that women are willing to walk, run,

jump out of planes, climb mountains,

shows how motivated women are

to find the answer to breast cancer.

- We used to have a phrase that said:

"Do something besides worry...

that might make a difference."

I do think that the public,

individuals, have enormous power

if they would use it.

Closed Captioning: CNST, Montreal

- When I see a pink ribbon on a...

the label of a product, for example,

or even on somebody's lapel,

I feel uncomfortable.

And if I have the time and the energy,

I might even get into an argument and say,

"I know you're coming from a good place,

I know you wanna help,

but I've been through breast cancer,

and I don't think

there's anything pretty and pink about it."

- When I see the pink ribbon, I see breast cancer.

I see a movement.

I see millions and millions of men and women

coming together, with companies,

with government, with NGOs,

with their detractors as well,

stirring it up and saying,

"This is a disease that is too prevalent.

This is a disease that has taken too many lives.

This is a disease that we must stop,

and hopefully in the next lifetime."

- When I see a pink ribbon,

I... think

the same thing of when I see "Made in China."

Doesn't mean anything to me.

- I don't like the pink ribbon. I don't like pink.

I think pink softens

what's really not a soft disease.

And I think that the pink ribbon makes breast cancer

into something friendly and cuddly,

as opposed to a really yucky disease

that's very scary

and that has significant consequences.

- When I see the pink ribbon,

pink is synonymous now with breast cancer,

um, with funds that are raised for research on breast cancer,

but really so much of that effort

goes toward trying to treat the disease after it develops,

and so little of it goes to helping identify

and stomp out the root causes of breast cancer.

- Well, I'm sure that what I think of

when I see a pink ribbon

is not necessarily shared by other people.

I see evil.

- I don't... (distant chatter)

I don't think of something when I see a pink ribbon.

- People often say, "Well, if it's raising money,

or even if it isn't raising that much money,

if it's raising awareness,

like, that could only be a good thing."

And I have to disagree.

I think that the level of misinformation,

and the perky, uh...

image of the disease

is at this point doing more harm than good.