There has been a very disturbing increase in the number of non-smoking younger women being diagnosed now with lung cancer.

This issue is extremely complicated and cannot be resolved unless all parties -- the medical community, the regulatory agencies, the drug development and research communities, and patient advocates -- are willing to work together creatively and constructively to address the needs of dying patients.

This is more of a political problem than a science problem right now. Without the ability to develop grassroots voices and pressures to put on public health leaders, we continue to see lung cancer as the most lethal of all cancers.

Lung cancer continues to be portrayed as a self-induced cancer that does not deserve public research funding.

Sadly, it takes her death, coming just seven months after diagnosis, and the fact that she had never smoked, to let the public see the real picture of lung cancer.

Before the first World War women were arrested for smoking cigarettes in public, for using profanity, for appearing on beaches without stockings, for driving automobiles without a man beside them, for wearing outlandish attire (for example, shorts, s