You may have never heard of Fran Visco, but what she is doing could save your life.
Glamour magazine named her Woman of the Year in 1996, Mirabella gave her its first Powerhouse Award, and ABC’s Peter Jennings named her Person of the Week.
Visco is president of the National Breast Cancer Coalition, a group largely responsible for persuading Congress to boost spending for breast-cancer research by more than fivefold since 1991.
Unlike breast-cancer organizations that specialize in educating and supporting victims of the disease, the coalition is a lobbying unit whose sole purpose is to shake hundreds of millions of dollars free from federal coffers to fund research that may one day lead to a cure.
This is not a pink-lapel-pin organization. It’s more like Act Up! with breasts. Oh, the coalition does have a pin, but it’s a little more direct. It says: “BREAST CANCER: Say it. Fight it. Cure it. Damn it!”
Visco, a breast-cancer survivor, is passionate about securing research funds to fight a disease that afflicts more than 2.6 million American women and kills more than 44,000 every year.
After the shock of her diagnosis 10 years ago when she was 39 and the mother of a 14-month-old child, she turned angry. Breast cancer was an epidemic claiming more than 184,000 new victims each year, and there was no known cause, effective treatment or cure.
“My diagnosis was quite a surprise,” she said during an interview at the coalition’s headquarters. “I had no family history of breast cancer, and because I was so uninformed at the time, I thought I was safe and I didn’t have to worry about it.
“I started reading up on the disease after my diagnosis. The more I read about it, the more amazed I became. Like the family-history issue. The reality is, family history accounts for only about 5 percent of all breast cancer, and so the vast majority of women who have breast cancer have no significant family history. It was such a prevalent disease and yet people weren’t talking about it.”
Once Visco, who underwent a lumpectomy in September 1987, completed her radiation and chemotherapy treatments the following summer, she decided to get involved in the breast-cancer fight.
“I wanted to work with an organization where I could reach out to other women and figure out how to get more women educated about the issue,” she said. “When I was first diagnosed, the first thing I wanted to do was talk to other women who had had breast cancer just to see they were still alive.”
She stumbled onto the fledgling Linda Creed Breast Cancer Foundation, named for the Philadelphia songwriter who died in her 30s after a 10-year battle with the disease.
Visco, then a partner in a prestigious Philadelphia law firm, helped the foundation plan strategy and made local appearances to talk about breast cancer. It was important work, she said, but she did not find it very fulfilling.
A letter arrived in May 1991 inviting representatives of the foundation to a meeting in Washington to discuss forming a breast-cancer group devoted to political advocacy and activism.
“When I went to the meeting in Washington, D.C., I felt like it was an epiphany,” she said. “I had all this anger about this incredibly prevalent disease that so few people knew about. This is where I needed to be.”
She recalled the scene.
“The women in that room were talking about political advocacy like we were going to be the Act Up! of breast cancer. We wanted to emulate the AIDS activists in that we knew we had to be politically active, but we were not going to try and emulate their specific strategies.
“After all, we were talking about a population of women in their 40s, 50s and 60s. You’re not going to get women marching topless to Congress–well you could get some of them.”
What the new coalition envisioned, Visco said, was different from what any breast-cancer advocates had requested of Congress before.
“We weren’t asking them to pass resolutions that said, `Yes we want to eradicate breast cancer,’ which helps no one. We weren’t asking them to show up and cut ribbons at the opening of a breast-cancer center. We were asking them to find hundreds of millions of dollars to fund research.”
The coalition met with patronizing responses from the lawmakers. They’d like to help, but there just wasn’t enough money, they were told. So the coalition, with the help of Sen. Tom Harkin, whose two sisters had died from the disease, identified a source of funds–the $32 billion defense budget–and asked for just a small piece of the pie.
Each year, Harkin (D-Iowa) launched a quixotic campaign to transfer a portion of the defense budget to social programs to benefit women and children. And each year, he failed.
But in 1992, the year after the coalition was founded, the allies tried a new tactic: Leave the money in the defense budget but earmark it for breast-cancer research. It worked, and $210 million was designated for that purpose.
It was the first significant increase in breast-cancer-research funding, for which the government had previously allotted less than $90 million a year.
Visco said the coalition always assumed the funds would be transferred to another agency to carry out the research, but a funny thing happened along the way: The Army did a great job.
“After we got the money, we met with the Department of Defense,” Visco remembered. “Being that I was an antiwar activist in the ’60s, I thought they would look me up in their computer and never let me off the base,” she joked. “I never thought I would be sitting down with Major `This’ and Colonel `That,’ talking about breast cancer.
“But they had such an incredible can-do attitude. They were given a mission, and they were going to do whatever it took.”
Visco said Maj. Gen. Richard Travis, the director of the Army’s medical research program, reached out to the scientific community to devise a research strategy and decide how the money should be spent. He also insisted that consumers–breast-cancer victims–be part of the decision-making process.
“We were so comforted and so impressed by their presentation that we opposed any effort to transfer that money back to the” National Institutes of Health, she said. “We felt it would just go back into the same old hole that all the other money had gone into all those years and nothing much had happened.”
What Congress may have considered a one-shot deal has become an annual line item. For fiscal 1997, which ended in September, Congress allocated $530 million for breast-cancer research, including $100 million for the Department of Defense research program.
In 1995, Visco resigned from her law practice to focus her attention on the National Breast Cancer Coalition, at what she described as “a significant reduction in income.”
Was it worth it? “I have a mission,” she said affirmatively. “I am passionately committed to this issue.
“When I started doing this, I felt for the first time in my life I was making use of my skills–I was able to be an advocate and build an organization.”
But she has a love-hate relationship with all the travel her job entails.
She usually spends one day a week in the coalition’s headquarters in Washington and one in her satellite office in Philadelphia. The rest of the time she travels around the country, meeting with women who have started local organizations.
She said what she enjoys most about the job is the chance to mentor younger women. “To me, we are training each and every one of them to lead an organization some day.”
But the traveling is tough on her husband, Arthur Brandolph, a fellow attorney, and their only child, David, 11.
“I have said to my son, anytime he wants me to stop he should tell me,” Visco said. “What he has said to me over and over again is `I really miss you and I really wish I could see you more, but what you are doing is too important.’ “
But he has asked her: “Can’t you get somebody else to do some of the other things?”
So Visco worked out a compromise. She travels all over the country but tries to get home every night. “It’s torture for me, but it’s better for him.” Spoken like a true mother.
Visco recalled that when she was first diagnosed with breast cancer at age 39, she didn’t think she would live to see 40 or her child go to school.
“Now I’m looking at 50 and it looks great.”
She is too cautious to say she is cured after 10 years. “I have not been diagnosed with a recurrence,” she said, noting she is cautious because “I have worked with women in the coalition who have had two, three recurrences, some after 20 years.”
Asked if she has any message for other women, she replied: “It sounds so trite, but it’s true: We can’t afford to sit around and complain about issues of importance to women. We have to get involved.
“It is important for women to believe that they have the power to change what they really don’t like. We have changed the world of breast cancer for all of us: for women, for scientists, for physicians. We’ve done it because we’ve come together, we’ve informed ourselves and we have demanded change.”
