There are a lot of great law schools not represented on the court. I cannot explain to you why it is this way right now. Except perhaps, you have very ambitious people who go to harvard and yale. People who are thinking this is a goal for them. I think, when president s pick nominees, it helps to say, this person went to one of those law schools. I dont think it matters much that they are from those schools. You do have a point in terms of different life experiences. Justice oconnor, put a great deal of her political experience in the court. That is true people in private practice. People from civil rights backgrounds. Those are relevant questions. Im not sure the fact they all went to elite schools. One was a sharecroppers son. Others were immigrant children. It is not just the elite backgrounds. You may remember that president nixon tried to put someone on the court. When the man was defeated because he was demonstrably unqualified to sit on any courts, a senator from nebraska commented, everybody is entitled to representation on court, even mediocre people. Mediocre people dont get into harvard and yale. I think when politicians go looking for people to nominate they have some stars in their eyes about the elite schools. They seldom get beyond that. I am wondering if you guys see any cases coming down the pipeline where there could be a conflict between religion and secularism. I dont know. There has been one case so far which has been about religious accommodation. The length of a prisoners beard. Whether arkansas has to accommodate a muslim prisoner who wants to grow a beard because his religion dictates that. It was an interesting case. Partly because, unlike some of the ones we had last term, theo Obama Administration was on the same side as conservative groups supporting the prisoner. This one did not seem it was going to be as tough as other cases had been. Later in the term, we are going to have the sequels to hobby lobby which do not involve private business corporations but involve nonprofits. If hobby lobby was in some ways a test of sect carrion organization, we could see that recur in those cases were the organizations are more distinct the religious and character. Another question . I think we will get everyone. I am a patent attorney. My question is about i was thinking about how he wrote an article 23 some years ago about having jews on the Supreme Court. I would love to see muslim justices sometime. Muslim american justices that could help with National Security issues. I wanted to get your insights about how far out you see that happening. We could make a very bad joke and say if present obama became a Supreme Court justice [laughter] i was hoping to ask the panel that question myself. Im glad it came up. Let me put in my view. There is a tragic amount of bigotry about people of the muslim faith. It all probably originated on september 11. It runs throughout public policy. The way we treat the people at guantanamo bay, cuba, is nothing less than despicable. Maintaining guantanamo is no different than what we did in world war ii in maintaining the concentration camps for japaneseamericans. That is all driven by a suspicion of the muslim faith. When you see legislatures like those in texas passing laws that say, courts are forbidden to make any judgments based on sharia law, the chance that any muslim, however devout and peaceful in his or her view of public life, there is no way the senate of the u. S. As presently composed and composed anyway we can anticipate for the next generation, that a muslim would get appointed to the Supreme Court and confirmed. Lets start with the lower courts and try to work up. We have muslims in the house. That is an important breakthrough. There was a time, and perhaps i should not be saying this because i am a guy. There was a time when there were not many women in congress. Increasingly, the country has discovered the virtue of the feminine perspective. We are getting more women appropriately and we now have three women on the Supreme Court, which is the high point for that sector of our society. I dont think in my lifetime which is not that much longer, who will not see a muslim on the court we will not see a muslim on the court. One must question. Last question. It seems like we have a people of a fear of people putting religion into the opinion. Can we talk about religious what is the beauty of the religious diversity of the Supreme Court . Positive aspects of this religious diversity . We have covered some of them. Anybody want to add anything . Diversey itself, however you define it, is virtuous. There are different ways to apply and defying the law. We are a long way away from what used to be called mechanistic jurisprudence where you say the law is on most like a mathematical proposition. There are so many intellectual cultural, social logical, Even Economic inputs in making a sound legal judgment. The more input you have from a variety of experiences, a variety of backgrounds including a variety of religious faiths the better the law in substance is going to be. If any president has the option of enlarging the diversity of the court, as wilson did in premade you on the court, putting a jew on the court and reagan did by putting a woman on the court, i hope they take that opportunity. If no one else has anything [applause] nadine and i want to thank everybody. Thank you so much, everyone for coming. For being on the wonderful panel. We now have a reception. Please join us in the other room. Tonight on q a, Glenn Kessler on his biggest pinocchios of 2014 awards, given to politicians and political groups he believes made the biggest false claims this past year. Democrats tend to get more upset at them because i think they have bought into the myth of the liberal media and a kind of think the media is on their side. Republicans firmly believe in a myth of the liberal media. They kind of expect the reporter from the Washington Post they are not going to be fair to me. I hope over the last four years i have done enough back and forth. Treated both parties with equal fervor that people have come to grudgingly say ok, youre someone we can do business with. The Senate Majority pac which is affiliated with harry reid they stopped answering my questions midway through the Campaign Season because they felt they were not getting a fair shake from me. Tonight at 8 00 eastern and pacific on cspans q a. Monday night on cspan, a Funeral Service for the late Washington Post editor ben bradley bradlee. Speakers include bob woodward and carl bernstein, who under his guidance, work the watergate story. September 23, 1972 about 9 00 p. M. , i reached John Mitchell by phone about a story we were running. It said he had controlled the secret fund for undercover operations such as watergate trade watergate. Mitchell was quite upset responding jesus several times as i read him the story. He then proceeded to threaten an important private part of Katharine Grahams anatomy which he said would get caught in a big fat ringer if the post printed the story. He said we are going to do a story on all of you. He hung up the phone. I called ben at home. Woodward and i did much did not much observe the chain of command. Ben interrogated me. Had mitchell been drinking . I could not tell. Did i properly identify myself . Yes. Did i have good notes . Yes. Ok ben said, put all of mitchells comments in the paper but leave out ms. Grahams tell the desk its ok he said. A top official of the knicks on Nixon Campaign called me a few minutes later to make an appeal that mitchell had been caught in an unguarded moment. He has been a cabinet member and so forth. He doesnt want to show up in the paper like that. The official then called bradlee at home to repeat the appeal. Bradlee recalled saying which just boils down to this question , whether mr. Mitchell said it or not. Whether the Washington Post reporter identified himself as a reporter, and if he did that, all my requisites have been satisfied. Mitchells comments state in the paper. Ben bradlee served as editor of the Washington Post for more than 30 years. He died at the age of 93 in october. We will have his Funeral Service monday night on cspan at 8 00 eastern. Now an update on Cancer Research. Dr. Francis collins, director of the National Institutes of health. The latest brick through his and challenges in developing cancer drug therapies. This forum was assisted by the Aspen Institute and friends of Cancer Research. Good afternoon to everyone. Im so glad we have not only a full house at the Aspen Institute, but that cspan is here so well have an audience. Let me very briefly introduced dr. Francis collins. Director of the National Institutes of health, the larger Biomedical Research in the world. He is renowned for his leadership as the genome project. Among many awards, the National Medal of science and president ial medal of freedom. Welcome. Dr. Ronald depinho, president of the university of texas where he leads groundbreaking research. He was also the founding director of the belfry institute for applied Cancer Research. He has received many honors and awards and found this there will Biopharmaceutical Companies focused on cancer. Thank you for being here today. I will post questions myself in the later open the floor to questions from you all. Keep that in mind. We are going to answer the question, how close we are to curing cancer . I think we will start looking back. Dr. Collins, you received your medical degree six years after president nixon declared a war on cancer. Tell us what the assumptions were then about curing cancer, addressing cancer, treating cancer. Did you assume cancer would be cured by 2014 . What were your expectations . I remember when i was a medical student at the university of North Carolina and it was not a specialty at my school when i started in cancer. It happened during my 4 years in a special unit focus on oncology was developed and someone was hired to run it. And what a scary place because it seemed as if what we have to offer for most of the patients who came into that part of the hospital were very toxic poisonous substances. Many of the individuals who had various types of tumors responded quite poorly. It certainly did not seem to me at that point if somebody was interested in having to bring together science and medicine that they had gotten together very clearly in this space. Maybe hard to imagine but at that point, the underlying model we take for granted that cancer is the disease of the genome had not really been appreciated. Going back to the early part of the 20th entry suggesting that was something about the chromosomes. Seeing that emerge as a actionable, unifying approach to this disease that will lead us in the direction of what we now embrace as a remarkable resolution of targeted therapy that wouldve been really impossible for myself or others to imagine happening during her lifetimes. It has been a breathtaking ride. When the war on cancer was initially declared in the early 1970s, we do not have the tools or insight or understanding mechanisms to be able to move at the pace we now can. It was a good thing to draw attention to the problem that needs a solution and affected so many people and the answers were going to have to climb out research is expensive. And this case, Research Cancer was taking far too many lives. Even though it took many years to try to figure out what should the approach me, it was a good thing to get the ball rolling in a significant way. Now, im sure we talk about this afternoon, we see the potential of really tackling the many types of cancer with a rational strategy with great hope of curing this disease. You say are we going to cure cancer . Lets just say cancer is not one disease. It is hundreds of disease. We have already cured some of them. Theres a lot more. They are not all going to fall by the wayside at 1 00 on a thursday afternoon where someone says i have the answer. It will be a hardfought battle and every answer would have a different series of steps. You received your medical degree a few years later in 1981. How attitudes have changed by patients and their families, the diagnosis . How different is if or when you saw when you were getting your medical training . Back then, cancer strikesfear into the heart of cancers and bring despair two families. Patients who were subjected to treatments that been underwent disfiguring surgeries was a little reconstructive capabilities at that point. The chemotherapy was really harsh. Even back then as a result of those advances which really occurred in the 1930s, 1940s, in 1950s, we have significant reduction in cancer mortality with about half of the patients losing their lives to cancer. Now, its about 2 3 that survive with cancer. A lot of that has risen by not just the treatment advances that we talking about but also the preventive strategies we understand a lot more about the indicators of cancer. Patients are more empowered with knowledge to prevent cancer in the first place. And enlisted increasingly into more screening strategies where the chances for cure his greatest. That has led to profound reductions in breast, prostate and other diseases ,colon cancer in particular. Those are changes if you can do something about the disease to prevent or catch early and over the last half a dozen years in particular because of the insights that have been illuminated by a great deal of research, we now have a clear line of sight for many cancers as to how it really bends the art. Patients feel more hopeful as a result of the enhanced diagnostics, enhanced capabilities we have on the treatment friends and so on. As a result, we have increasing survivors with improved quality of life. We are nowhere near where we need to the. I remember my first newspaper job in the 1970s where we did an obituary on every person who died in the state of kansas. Families would ask you not to say or acknowledge it or someone died of cancer and we had a practice of which we would say they died after a long illness which was a code word. It was seen as so terrible to have had cancer. Talk about the turning point. You have talked about the last decade or two, what has been the turning point that make so much difference . Is there one . The biggest was getting an understanding of the fundamental reasons why good cells go bad behave the way its supposed to and stops when is supposed to and starts growing despite all of the signals it shouldve shut it down. That really comes out of the recognition that there are genes in our book that is mutated in a certain way causes this to happen. So when you activate them, they make themselves grow when they shouldnt. Accelerator metaphor. Others which are supposed to apply the brakes, is like losing your front and rear brakes and keep going when it shouldve stopped. And then other variations on top of that. More recently, things we are learning by the genome. Basically, to have that kind of understanding about the mechanics of what controls cell growth was the essential step to move us into a more directed more rational approach instead of him. Try and see what happens. Most of our strategies until we had the understanding where to come up with toxins substances. And tried to dial in at the point where you were killing the cancer cells environment more than the regular cells. Talk about the history. It is extremely important and you talked about one critical event, the initial paradigm. The genetic paradigm. And the 1960s, there was a vigorous debate as to whether or not mutations in genes had anything to do with cancer. Some of the most significant minds of the last century honestly thought that the mutations of genes of cells are not relevant to the development of cancer. There was an especial irony because a discovery of a virus that contains a gene that caused cancer that led bishop to their breakthrough and 17 7 1976 that there are genes within us that look like the genes that cause cancer and viruses. That year i was graduating in 1980 one, we began to identify mutations in those jeans. They were translocated or mutated and changed in cancer cell versus normal sells. It took a wild for us to begin to develop those collection of genes that were real drivers of the disease. A real critical breakthrough occurred in the 1990s thanks to dr. Collins and the human genome project which gave us the blueprint for the human genome. And then and 2007, when he the human cancer genome initiated under dr. Collins leadership and that has given us the periodic table for cancer where we know a lot perhaps not all, but most of the genetic elements that are wrote that actually commandeered the cell. To me, the most significant advance against the back drop of the foundation i just described occurred within a narrow window of 2009, 2010 work across a broad front, a Critical Mass of knowledge that was prosecutable where we understood what caused certain cancers and we could do something about it and reduce the knowledge for practice. It also Game Changing technological advances. The ability to sequence genomes not in a decade in 1990s with billions of dollars but for house of dollars in a time period you can make clinical decisions. That was Game Changing. Also advances in imaging. A couple of decades ago, the most common procedure in surgery was a laparotomy and you have to look inside to see what is going on and now we have noninvasive. The end and the advancing his profound. Our ability and aggregate large volumes of data and use very powerful analytics that allow us not only to understand a disease but to actually inform clinical decisionmaking on that disease is before us. What is exciting to me is that within a very narrow window, we now have a very we are in a good position to make more deliberate assault on the cancer problem. This is somethin