By CHRISTOPHER SNOW HOPKINS

Biomedical innovation is one thing, but deploying biomedical innovation is something else entirely. According to Catherine Ann Stevens, the widow of Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, apathy among public officials is slowing implementation of cutting-edge treatments and diagnostics.

“There aren’t that many people who are terribly interested in medical research, and part of the struggle is to make the administration and Congress as intrigued and as interested in research as we can,” said Stevens, who last week was named to the board of directors at Friends of Cancer Research, a Washington-based think tank that aims to connect patients with what it calls “the most promising cancer treatments.”

Before his sudden death in a plane crash last year, Stevens’s husband—the longest-serving Republican in the Senate at the time of his political ouster in 2008—was a zealous proponent of biomedical research, known to his colleagues on Capitol Hill as the “nutritional terrorist.”

A survivor of prostate cancer himself, Sen. Stevens proscribed junk food and white sugar at home (while defending dark chocolate, red wine, and wild salmon) and was a vigorous 86-year-old at the time of his death. Decades earlier, when Stevens received an abnormal Prostate-Specific Antigen count—an early indication of cancer—he immediately underwent a more definitive test, which confirmed the presence of a tumor.

“My husband was not afraid of doing anything when it came to medicine and always wanted the best advice there was,” Catherine Stevens said.

For Stevens, her late husband’s grim diagnosis was but one of four encounters with severe illness. Descended from pioneers—gold miners on her father’s side and cattle ranchers on her mother’s—she is a native of Anchorage, Alaska, which she remembers as a hotbed of medical research, owing in part to the devastation of indigenous peoples by diseases like measles and the mumps. Growing up, Stevens and two siblings were babysat by an Eskimo woman, one of only two survivors of a localized mumps epidemic. (The other survivor was a Catholic priest.)

Stevens’s next encounter with illness came decades later when her father died suddenly of stomach cancer at the age of 72. He had been an avid golfer, and Stevens suspects that his illness may have been linked to his exposure to herbicides on the golf course. Her father was diagnosed and treated at the Mayo Clinic Hospital in Arizona, but none of the treatments available at the time could reverse the disease.

Stevens’s last encounter with disease was the most hopeful. Ten years ago, a chief of staff to Sen. Stevens was diagnosed with a brain tumor, but after seeking an innovative treatment at Duke University she made a full recovery and has since returned to the Hill.

When discussing her familiarity with severe illness, Stevens emphasizes her husband’s story to drive home the lesson of her four-part relationship with cancer and other diseases: biomedical research is galloping ahead and today’s most intractable diseases could be neutralized in our lifetimes.

An attorney by profession, Stevens believes her contribution to biomedical research lies in the space between innovation and deployment. At Friends of Cancer Research, she will be a “layperson,” bringing her myriad credentials to bear on the problem of facilitating interaction between scientists and public officials. Currently a partner with Washington-based law firm Mayer Brown, Stevens has previously served as state district attorney in Fairbanks, Alaska, and general counsel for the National Endowment for the Arts.

“Catherine has worked tirelessly to advance and support biomedical research in the United States,” said Ellen Sigal, chair and founder of Friends of Cancer Research, in a letter to National Journal Daily. “Her diversity of knowledge and leadership will be invaluable additions to the organization as we advocate for policies that will get treatments to patients in the safest and quickest way possible.”