At the end of his brief testimony in Congress yesterday, Carnegie Mellon University professor Randy Pausch held up an enlarged photo of his family.

He introduced the House members to his children, 6-year-old Dylan, 3-year-old Logan and 22-month-old Chloe. And then he pointed to his wife, Jai, and said "This is my widow. She will be raising our children after I'm gone."

Dr. Pausch was appearing before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services and Education to ask for more research funding for pancreatic cancer, the disease that is killing him.

When Rep. Michael Honda, D-Calif., asked him why more progress hadn't been made on the disease, Dr. Pausch said that pancreatic cancer gets a paltry share of research funding, and it needs to attract more young researchers using newer techniques.

In prepared remarks for the subcommittee on behalf of the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, the computer science expert noted that pancreatic cancer has the highest death rate of any cancer -- only 5 percent of patients are alive after five years -- and is the fourth-leading cancer killer overall in America.

Yet of the $4.8 billion Congress has appropriated for the National Cancer Institute, Dr. Pausch told the committee, less than 2 percent is being spent on pancreatic cancer research.

Dr. Pausch was largely unknown outside his field until last September, when he delivered a lecture at Carnegie Mellon in which he talked about how he had been able to achieve most of his childhood dreams and offered advice on helping fulfill the dreams of others.

The video of that lecture has now been viewed more than 6 million times on the Internet, and Dr. Pausch has appeared on several national TV network programs and the Oprah Winfrey show.

He is also co-authoring a book based on the lecture with Wall Street Journal columnist Jeffrey Zaslow that is due out next month.

Dr. Pausch told subcommittee members yesterday about his latest medical setback, a stay in the hospital at the end of last week to remove fluid from around his lungs. The fluid had built up because of strain on his heart and kidneys from chemotherapy he is receiving to extend his life.

Doctors removed about a quart of fluid from around one lung, Dr. Pausch said on his medical Web page, and will use diuretics to remove the rest. He got out of the hospital Monday, and was visibly tired after yesterday's testimony, said Julie Fleshman, president of the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, who attended the hearing.

The subject of pancreatic cancer has received renewed attention this month with the revelation that actor Patrick Swayze also is undergoing treatment for the disease.

During his Carnegie Mellon lecture. Dr. Pausch said doctors in August had given him about six months to live. On his Web site, he took a photo of himself in mid-February holding a copy of The New York Times to show he had made it to the six-month mark. Displaying his usual optimism, he wrote:

"I rode my bike today; the cumulative effects of the chemotherapy are hurting my stamina some, but I bet I can still run a quarter mile faster than most Americans."

In his prepared remarks yesterday, Dr. Pausch urged Congress to boost funding for pancreatic cancer in the same way that it created a surge of research into all cancers in the 1970s, into AIDS and HIV in the 1980s and into bioterrorism research in this decade.