[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 54 (Thursday, April 26, 2001)]
[House]
[Page H1653]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             HUMAN CLONING

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Issa). Under a previous order of the 
House, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Weldon) is recognized for 5 
minutes.
  Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak on the 
issue of human cloning.
  What would it be like if we had five Michael Jordans to suit up an 
entire team? Or what if there were two of you to accomplish more in a 
24-hour day? The prospect of human cloning has been the stuff of 
science fiction novels for years. However, on February 27, 1997, Ian 
Wilmut from the Roslin Institute in Scotland cloned Dolly the sheep, a 
feat which has triggered international debate on the issue of human 
cloning. Since that time, scientists have cloned mice, cows and pigs. 
Richard Seed announced he would clone a human being.
  President Clinton called for a 5-year moratorium on human cloning and 
advised the National Bioethics Advisory Commission to review human 
cloning. They recommended that cloning humans for reproductive purposes 
is unsafe and unethical. I would certainly agree.
  If you speak to Dr. Wilmut, he will tell you that they had something 
on the order of 230 or more attempts to produce Dolly, with most of 
those attempts ending in miscarriage, but many, many of them resulting 
in the birth of sheep with very, very severe birth defects. To even 
consider doing such a procedure for the purpose of creating a human 
being is immoral and unethical in the worst possible way. However, 
cloning technology is available that could allow biotechnology 
companies and researchers to produce human embryos in the lab.
  This issue of cloning human embryos, I must stress, is not an issue 
of fetal tissue research or an issue of stem cell research. It is an 
issue of cloning human embryos. This year, Panos Zavos of the 
University of Kentucky and his Italian colleague, Severino Antinori, 
have begun the work of creating a global consortium for the purpose of 
producing a human clone. Dr. Brigitte Boisselier, the Director of 
Clonaid, which has part of the Raelian extraterrestrial movement 
attached to it, has stated that they have already been offered 
substantial sums of money to begin the process of working on developing 
children through the process of human cloning.
  I believe the time now is right and the time is ripe for the Congress 
of the United States to act, and that is why I have introduced 
legislation today that would make human reproductive cloning, as well 
as embryonic cloning, illegal in the United States of America.
  Now, I want to stress that some people who favor embryonic cloning 
like to refer to this as therapeutic cloning. Indeed, this term has 
already been established in the press. I have had two reporters bring 
this issue up. Therapy implies that there is some sort of useful 
purpose for these embryonic clones. I would assert that if you look at 
the medical literature, there is no defined therapeutic purpose for 
cloning human embryos today in science. Therefore, this term is a 
misnomer.
  The proper term is destructive cloning, or embryonic cloning, the 
cloning of a human embryo, the cloning of a human embryo for the 
purpose of just merely doing research on it and then further to proceed 
to just simply destroying it, or destructive cloning.

                              {time}  1515

  I think this process displays a profound disrespect for human life, 
and it needs to be made illegal in the United States of America.
  Many countries in Europe have already taken action on this issue and 
have made human cloning illegal. This is what my bill attempts to do. 
The bill has been introduced in the Senate as well by the Senator from 
Kansas, Sam Brownback.
  I would encourage all of my colleagues to consider seriously getting 
much more well informed on this issue and signing on to my legislation. 
It is timely. It is right. We need to do it.

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