[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 74 (Tuesday, June 7, 2005)]
[House]
[Pages H4179-H4184]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           STEM CELL RESEARCH

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 4, 2005, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Bartlett) is 
recognized for 60 minutes.
  Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, a couple of weeks ago on this 
floor there was a very prolonged and serious debate on stem cells. Now 
that we have had time for emotions to subside, I thought it might be 
productive to spend a little while this evening talking about the 
subject of stem cells and why there is so much interest in it across 
the country.
  A few months ago there was so much interest in this subject in 
California, for instance, that the voters voted favorably for a 
resolution that would make $3 billion from California taxpayers 
available to do research on embryonic stem cells.
  What are stem cells? We have a chart here which kind of shows this.

                              {time}  2215

  There are fundamentally two types of stem cells. There are adult stem 
cells and there are embryonic stem cells.
  I guess the ultimate stem cell is the fertilized ovum, which is 
referred to here as a zygote, because from that cell develops all the 
cells of the body. That single cell, produced from the union of the egg 
and the sperm, divides and divides again and again until finally it is 
a blastocyst; and then it goes to the gastrula stage, and at that stage 
the three germ layers begin to sort out the cells that are already 
differentiating, is the technical term that is used for that.
  Every cell in our body, of course, has all of the same gene 
complement. And by mechanisms that are not clearly understood, during 
the embryonic process genes get turned on and get turned off, and the 
cells that are destined to produce your skin, for instance, the genes 
that are producing all the other tissues of the body are turned off, 
and only those genes necessary for producing the skin are still active.
  Here we have the three germ layers: The ectoderm, which is the outer 
layer, and from that will develop your skin and your nervous system.
  Then we have the mesoderm, that will be the middle layer, meso 
meaning middle, and from that will develop most of the weight of your 
body, all of your skeletal muscle, your cardiac muscle, much of the 
kidney, the blood cells, the smooth muscle in your intestines and 
stomach and so forth.
  Then from the innermost layer of this inner cell mass as it is called 
here, the mass of cells that differentiates into these three germ 
layers, the endoderm, the internal layer, produces not very much of the 
mass of your body, the pancreatic cell and the thyroid gland and the 
line of the things like your lung and intestines and so forth are 
produced from the endoderm.
  Then, of course, there are the unique germ cells produced, the sperm 
in the male and the egg or the ova in the female.
  The reason for the intense interest in these stem cells is because of 
the perceived potential for affecting the course of many diseases and 
hopefully curing many of our diseases.
  We have fundamentally two kinds of problems with our health. One is 
from tissue deficiencies when the tissue no longer does the kind of 
thing that it was destined to do and this embryonic development is 
wearing out or diseased. Then we have diseases from pathogens. These 
are organisms that can be outside that invade us.
  Primarily, the hope is that stem cells will be useful in treating 
diseases of tissue deficiency. Although if the pathogens have destroyed 
a tissue and then the body has marshaled its resources with the help of 
the doctors with the antibiotics and so forth so that the pathogen is 
destroyed, then there is some hope that through the use of stem cells 
that you might be able to repair or replace the tissue damaged by the 
pathogen.
  There are a lot of examples of diseases that might be amenable to 
cure or at least assistance through these stem cells. One is diabetes, 
which is a deficiency of insulin. Insulin is produced by some little 
cells that look like islands under the microscope because they are very 
dissimilar to the cells that they find themselves in. These cells are 
distributed through the tissue of the pancreas.
  The pancreas is a big gland that produces a lot of enzymes. When the 
food leaves the stomach and goes into the small intestine, the pancreas 
produces enzymes for the digestion of fats, carbohydrates and proteins. 
So it is a very important digestive gland.
  There is no real reason why these little islands of tissues, called 
the islets of Langerhans, named for the person who first described 
them, need to be in the pancreas, but that is where they are. They 
could, in fact, be any part of your body and do the same thing, which 
is secreting insulin.
  We use insulin to treat persons with diabetes, but everyone knows, 
particularly the family of those and the patients who have diabetes, 
that insulin does not cure the disease. It simply prolongs life, but, 
ultimately, even with insulin, many of the people who have diabetes 
will end up having peripheral vascular problems with maybe amputation 
of toes or limbs, usually the lower limb, have problems in the eyes 
with the peripheral vascular there in the eyes and have vision 
problems.
  Diabetes is the most expensive disease that we have. It costs more to

[[Page H4180]]

maintain and treat the people with diabetes than any other disease. 
There is the hope that if we could generate islets of Langerhans cells 
from these stem cells that you could eradicate diabetes, that you could 
implant these cells in the body, and it could be in any tissue. It 
could be in muscle tissue or under the skin. You could implant these 
islets of Langerhans cells there that produce insulin and whatever else 
these cells do that is not done simply by replacing the insulin which 
is lost. We might be able to eradicate diabetes, which, of course, 
would be an enormous contribution.
  This is one of the most heart-wrenching things that the congressmen 
see, is when these little kids come to your office, they have to prick 
their finger maybe a dozen times a day, and they need insulin so 
frequently that they have an embedded little pump under their skin, 
about the size of a hockey puck. They may have to wake up during the 
night and prick their finger so that they can set the pump so it 
produces the right amount of insulin.
  This is just one of many diseases that authorities in medicine and 
the general public believes might be helped with stem cell research: 
multiple sclerosis, lateral sclerosis, Lou Gehrig's disease.
  That is one that I am personally very familiar with. My grandmother 
died from that disease. This was a long time ago, and it took quite a 
long time to diagnose that disease. She was falling. For quite a while 
they did not know why, and finally they diagnosed it as Lou Gehrig's 
disease, as was the common name for it then. I remember watching my 
grandmother deteriorate until the only motion that she had left, that 
she could communicate with us, was blinking her eyes: once for yes and 
two for no. Then she slowly died when she could no longer eat or drink. 
She did not want to be force fed.
  We did not have any dream then of stem cells and what they might do 
for that disease, but I can understand the hope that families have who 
have a loved one who has a disease like this and the hope that they 
have that there may be a medical advance and a miracle cure for the 
disease.
  Alzheimer's disease, my mother had Alzheimer's disease. How nice it 
would have been to have turned back the clock in her mind so that she 
was the mother that I spent the first 60 years with.
  Then, of course, there is a very large category of autoimmune 
diseases. I have a list here of 63 autoimmune diseases. That is an 
interesting type of disease. When we are developing in our mother's 
womb very early and our heart is beating and we have a circulatory 
system and we have white cells, there is a particular kind of white 
cell called the T cells. Very early in our embryonic development those 
T cells are imprinted with who we are, and that is very necessary 
because they have to understand who we are, who you are, who I am, so 
that if some foreign invader comes in there or virus or bacterium or 
something, they recognize that as being foreign so that they can reject 
it.
  For reasons that we do not understand, occasionally our autoimmune 
mechanisms get confused, and they see some of us as not being us, as 
being foreign, and so they attack it. We call those autoimmune 
diseases, and there are a lot of those autoimmune diseases: Addison's 
disease, autoimmune hemolytic anemia, autoimmune hepatitis. It goes on 
for 63 of these diseases.
  Multiple sclerosis is one of those, by the way. Lupus was one of the 
first of these diseases that was identified as an autoimmune disease. 
There is a hope that stem cells could be useful in treating all of 
these diseases.
  Then, of course, there are the injuries of central nervous tissue. We 
have two kinds of nervous tissue in our body, the central nervous 
tissue that is in our brain and spinal cord and then the peripheral 
nerves. That is the nerves that run to and from the brain and spinal 
cord. For reasons that is difficult to understand, they have two very 
different responses to injury.
  Peripheral nerves regrow very easily. There is a classic phenomenon 
known as Wallerian degeneration and then regeneration of the nerve. If 
you cut a nerve well up in your leg that goes to your toe, it may be a 
long while before you get feeling back to your toe, almost always, 
unless a lot of scar tissue develops where the nerve was cut.
  But for some reason that we do not yet understand central nervous 
tissue has no power to regenerate. Of course, what we are trying to do 
medically is to find out why central nervous tissue is different than 
peripheral nervous tissue, but absent finding out why so that you can 
turn that around there is the hope that with these stem cells we could 
grow nerve tissue that could then be placed in the body, injected in 
the body to help repair.
  So there are a lot of diseases out there that medical specialists and 
the public generally believe could be cured or at least the course of 
the disease quite favorably changed with the use of stem cell 
technology.
  There are, of course, two kinds of stem cells: embryonic stem cells 
and adult stem cells. Most of the work that we have done so far is with 
adult stem cells because we have been working with them for over three 
decades. We have been working with embryonic stem cells just a little 
over 6 years, and so the techniques for using adult stem cells are far 
better developed.
  So there are more medical applications from adult stem cells than 
there are from embryonic stem cells, but we have not had enough time 
working with embryonic stem cells to determine whether or not they have 
the increased potential that most people believe they should have. The 
medical specialists believe this. The general public understands this.
  If you are dealing with a cell that is not differentiated, that is, 
that it has not developed far enough along so that genes are turned 
off, a lot of leads are turned off, it could then develop into anything 
and everything with proper manipulation in the laboratory. So that if 
you are using embryonic stem cells there is the hope that they should 
have a wider application than adult stem cells.

                              {time}  2230

  There is another interesting characteristic of embryonic stem cells, 
and I do not know how important it will be. Only research will 
determine that.
  At least 50 years ago, embryologists had determined that you could 
take a mother white mouse and a mother black mouse, each of which was 
pregnant and they have multiple babies in their uterus, and you could 
go into the uterus of the black mouse and take a little patch of skin 
out of the black mice, you could sew it into the skin of one of the 
white mice. When the white mouse is born, it has a little patch of 
black skin. Quite amazingly, it is not rejected.
  Everybody knows when you transplant an organ from one person to 
another, there is a big rejection reaction to that. So we have a lot of 
anti-rejection drugs that we give. The person who gets that organ 
transplant must take those anti-rejection drugs. As soon as they stop 
taking them, the T-cells recognize this thing as foreign and start to 
attack it. Its use in the body is destroyed.
  I do not know whether this little mouse experiment, whether the 
miracle of no rejection is a donor phenomenon or host phenomenon; but 
when you take skin from one embryo to another, there is no rejection. 
So using embryo stem cells, they might be less rejected. That would be 
good news.
  I would like to spend just a couple of moments reflecting on some of 
the elements of a debate here in this Chamber. These debates are a bit 
like a battle. They are a battle; you are fighting for your position. 
Like all battles, emotions rise and sometimes things are exaggerated a 
little by one side or another. Now that emotions have subsided and we 
are dealing with other issues, I thought it might be instructive to 
look at some of the arguments made on both sides.
  The argument on the pro-life side was that life is sacred, that these 
little embryos are human life, and the President has a position which I 
very strongly support, that it is just morally wrong to take one life 
hoping you can help another life. There has got to be another way to do 
it.
  The bill we were debating said we should take some of those 400,000 
surplus embryos that were produced in the in vitro fertilization 
clinics that were going to be discarded anyhow, we should take those 
embryos and use them to produce embryonic stem cell lines. For the last 
4 years we have been dealing with what started out as maybe 60 cell 
lines, which has now

[[Page H4181]]

dwindled down to 22, all of them contaminated with mouse feeder cells 
so they are only good for research. They would not be good for medical 
use so there is a need for additional embryo stem cell lines. These are 
the only stem cell lines we can use Federal money exploring. The 
private sector can destroy all of the embryos they wish; there is no 
prohibition. You just cannot use Federal money so there are only 22 
cell lines we can use Federal money to explore.
  The argument on the pro-life side, and I subscribe to that argument, 
that for any one embryo, there is no certainty that embryo is going to 
be destroyed, that it is going to be abandoned. The argument on the 
other side is there are 400,000 of them. Of course they are, you cannot 
keep them frozen forever, and by and by they will be discarded. But not 
all of them, because we now have, I understand, over 100 babies who 
have been born from adoption of these snowflake embryos.
  We have surplus embryos because when you go for in vitro 
fertilization, under hormone stimulation the mother produces more than 
one ovum; and they are put in a petri dish and exposed to sperm and 
fertilized. Then the doctor watches their growth, and the doctor 
chooses generally several because they do not all adhere to the uterus 
and grow to become babies, and so he wants to be sure there will be at 
least a baby. So he implants several in the uterus, and there are 
several left over that are then frozen in the event none of those take 
or the mother wants to have a baby later.
  I remember when I was running a farm several years ago, I was 
breeding cattle to a bull that had been dead for 8 years. I do not know 
how long the sperm and the ovum or these embryos will survive frozen, 
but they will survive for quite a long time.
  The argument on the pro-life side is that for any one of those 
embryos, it could be adopted; and that is true. If you have a reverence 
for life, as I do, you need to find another way to pursue embryonic 
stem cell research without destroying embryos, and we have a bill that 
does just that. We have talked to experts from NIH and others around 
the country, and in a few moments I will be talking about that bill.
  One of the arguments made by the pro-life people is we have had 58 
medical applications from adult stem cells and none from embryonic stem 
cells, and that is true. But as Paul Harvey would say, the rest of the 
story is maybe the reason it is true because we have spent 3 decades 
working with adult stem cells and only about 6 years working with 
embryonic stem cells, and you will not know if they have the same 
potential until you have an equivalent amount of time to work with 
them.
  The arguments on the other side were that these cells are going to be 
thrown away anyhow and why not get some use from them. I have just 
reiterated my argument, which is the argument of the pro-life 
community, which is for any one of those embryos, they could be 
adopted. In fact, some of these snowflake babies came to the White 
House during this debate, so they can be adopted.
  There was another bill that we voted on that night and that was the 
umbilical cord blood bill which many mothers are now having frozen 
because there are some stem cell-like cells there that might be useful. 
But the argument is although they might be useful, they would not be as 
useful as the embryonic stem cells themselves.
  ``As a physician-scientist,'' and this is a direct quote from Curt 
Civin, co-director, Division of Immunology and Hematopoiesis Sydney 
Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center, one of the centers at John Hopkins 
University School of Medicine, and we are fortunate in our State to 
have one of the best universities and one of the best medical schools 
in the world, that is Johns Hopkins, he says, ``As a physician-
scientist who has done research involving umbilical blood cord stem 
cells for over 20 years, I am frequently surprised by the thought from 
nonscientists that cord blood stem cells may provide an alternative to 
embryonic stem cells for research. This is simply wrong,'' he says.

  By the way, all of the 58 diseases that have had applications from 
adult stem cells, all of them are represented by organizations that 
support embryonic stem cell research because the general belief is 
there ought to be more potential from embryonic stem cells than from 
adult stem cells.
  Just a little history why I am standing here this evening and how I 
got involved in this. I did not come to this Congress until, and this 
was 13 years ago, until I was 66 years old, and so I had a former life. 
In that former life, I was a scientist. I have a Ph.D. in human 
physiology. I taught medical school and postgraduate medicine and spent 
a number of years doing research at medical schools and at the National 
Institutes of Health.
  Several years ago, in 2001, I believe it was, there was a little like 
symposium at the National Institutes of Health where staff and members 
went out. I went out with a fairly large number of staff members where 
the experts from NIH were briefing the staff and members who were there 
on stem cell research. This was just before the President came down 
with his executive order on stem cells, and this was kind of an 
educational activity on the part of NIH. There were several researchers 
there; and as we can see in the next chart, I suggested it ought to be 
possible to take cells from an early embryo without hurting the embryo 
and that was because of my knowledge of what happens in twinning.
  Now, the first chart here shows the usual type of twinning. That is 
where you have two zygotes. That is the mother sloughed two ovum, not 
just one, and both were fertilized and both came down and were 
implanted in the uterus and they grew two fetuses, and they are called 
womb mates because they share the womb.
  Well, we also can have twins, and the next chart shows identical 
twins and what happens with identical twins.
  This can occur apparently in at least two different stages in the 
development of the embryo. Here we have the zygote, which is the union 
of the egg and the sperm, and that then divides to two cells; and they 
have left out a lot of stages here because there is a lot of stages 
between the two cell and the inner mass cell stage.
  These embryos can split at the two-cell stage or later on when they 
grow two inner cell masses. You can tell at what time they split by how 
they present themselves. If they are presented in two placenta, they 
split early and they go their separate ways. If they split later, they 
are generally presented at birth in a single placenta so the doctor 
knows the approximate time they split.
  I recognized what was really happening here was in a sense you were 
taking half of the cells away from the original embryo, and both halves 
went on to produce a perfectly normal baby. So it seemed perfectly 
logical to me that you ought to be able to take a cell or two from an 
early embryo without hurting the embryo. There has been a lot of 
research since that.
  By the way, the experts at NIH said, yes, that should be feasible. I 
mentioned this to the President at an event where we had just a few 
moments to talk about it, and he turned the pursuit of this over to 
Karl Rove who went to NIH and asked them about my suggestion that you 
might be able to take cells from an early embryo, and he came back and 
called me and said they tell me they cannot do that.
  I said either they did not understand the question or there is some 
confusion, because these are the same people that can take a single 
cell and take the nucleus out of that cell and put another one in it. 
That is what you do in cloning. If you can do that in a single cell, 
obviously you have the capability of taking a single cell out of a 
fairly large mass of cells.
  So he went back a second time and asked them and they told him the 
same thing, and so the President came down a few days later with his 
executive order that all the stem cell lines we have produced by 
destroying embryos; and since he was opposed to taking one life with 
the hope that you might help another life, he could not support the 
destruction of any additional embryos, but that Federal money could be 
used in pursuing research and medical applications using what he was 
told was roughly 60 lines of stem cells that were in existence at that 
time.

                              {time}  2245

  Several years later in my office, just this year, as a matter of 
fact, talking

[[Page H4182]]

with the people from NIH, they explained how this misunderstanding 
occurred. It is awfully easy to have misunderstandings when your 
backgrounds are very different, which is one of the problems we have in 
dialogues, of course. You can think that you are carrying on a dialogue 
when you are really carrying on simultaneous monologues, which was 
apparently sort of what happened in this discussion between Karl Rove 
and NIH. Because what they had really told him was that they did not 
know if they could make a stem cell line from such an early embryo, and 
that is true, and that is why I wanted animal experimentation to 
determine whether you could do that or not.
  Our next chart shows some of this progression, and it shows what we 
are talking about and what we were talking about there. This is half of 
the reproductive life of a mother. It shows an ovary, and there is one 
on each side, of course. Then it shows a funnel-like thing that sweeps 
over the ovum, it is called the infundibulum, and then the fallopian 
tube and down to the uterus. This shows just half of the tract. There 
is a mirror image of this over on the other side.
  By the way, there is an interesting thing that sometimes happens. 
These sperm are very energetic. They are released, of course, in the 
vagina of the mother, and they then make their way up into the uterus, 
through the cervix into the uterus, and then they swim all the way up 
the fallopian tube, and they can swim out through the end of the 
fallopian tube out into the body cavity. Sometimes the egg is not 
picked up by the cilia in the fallopian tube, and it also floats out 
into the body cavity, and the egg can be fertilized there. We call this 
an ectopic pregnancy and, of course, the baby cannot grow there, so 
that has to be removed.
  The ovum starts down the fallopian tube and very high up in the 
fallopian tube, it is fertilized. Then it divides into two cells and 
four cells and eight cells. It is at the eight-cell stage in the 
laboratory. This same process of fertilization and growth occurs in the 
petri dish in the laboratory, and it is at the eight-cell stage in the 
laboratory that they ordinarily implant the embryos. This goes on, of 
course, to produce the inner cell mass that we saw in the earlier chart 
there which then differentiates into the germ layers. It is at these 
later stages that it actually implants in the mother's uterus.
  The convention is ordinarily that implantation is done at the eight-
cell stage. So my suggestion was that you could take a cell from the 
eight-cell stage, and it would not harm the embryo. As a matter of 
fact, if the embryo splits at this stage or at the two-cell stage or 
down here at the inner cell mass stage of the two inner cell masses, 
both groups of cells go on to produce a perfectly normal baby. So, 
obviously, there was the potential that you could take a cell from an 
early embryo without harming the embryo.
  I have been carrying on this dialogue with the pro-life community and 
with the scientists at NIH now for these 4 years. During one of these 
discussions, the representative of the Catholic bishops, Mr. 
Dorflinger, made a suggestion. There are some things that you see in 
life that are just so obvious that you say, gee, why didn't I think of 
that. His contribution was just that kind of thing. He said, in 
addition to taking a cell out of that inner cell mass, and, by the way, 
this is now done more than a thousand times around the world. We do not 
know how many more than a thousand times. But in the laboratory they 
want to know that this embryo they are going to implant in the mother 
does not have any genetic defects so that they are going to have a 
healthy baby. So they take a cell out of the eight-cell stage and they 
do a preimplantation genetic diagnosis on it and then they implant 
those remaining cells in the mother and more than a thousand times they 
have had a normal baby born.

  Mr. Dorflinger's suggestion was, and in addition to doing that 
preimplantation genetic diagnosis that you also establish a repair kit. 
That is kind of what you hope you are doing when you freeze umbilical 
cord blood. You hope that there are some stem-cell-like cells in there, 
that if there are future medical problems and stem cell research 
development has gone on to the point that you can make some meaningful 
applications that you could then be using tissues that would not be 
rejected like the tissues from an embryonic stem cell from another 
person.
  But clearly if the repair kit was established from a cell taken from 
an early embryo, it would be exactly the genetic composition of the 
child, of the person, of the adult as they grew, and so any defect 
could then be very effectively treated with tissues that would not be 
rejected.
  The President has a group of people, the President's Council on 
Bioethics, and because of the enormous expected potential from stem 
cell research, they have been looking at alternatives for embryonic 
stem cell research that might be ethically acceptable and they have 
just fairly recently issued a report, Alternative Sources of Human 
Pluripotent Stem Cells. It is called a white paper. In the body of that 
white paper they describe four different techniques.
  The next chart shows a little paragraph from that, and I have 
highlighted a part of it.
  It says it may be some time before stem cells can be reliably derived 
from single cells extracted from early embryos and in ways that do no 
harm to the embryo, thus biopsied. But the initial success of the 
Verlinsky's Group's efforts at least raises the future possibility that 
pluripotent stem cells could be derived from single blastomeres. A 
blastomere is simply a cell from the blastula. It merely means a cell 
removed from the early human embryos without apparently harming them.
  Then there is a little asterisk. If you go to the bottom of the page 
you see, ``A similar idea was proposed by Representative Roscoe 
Bartlett of Maryland as far back as 2001.'' This is the proposal that I 
made to the President that was pursued by Karl Rove with the 
misunderstandings that we talked about a few minutes ago.
  In the body of their paper, they talk about four different 
approaches. One of the approaches is to use embryos that obviously are 
not going to live because they are really bad and they are going to 
die. You could take cells from them like taking an organ from a person 
who is brain dead. I would have a little concern, Mr. Speaker, about 
how good a stem cell I was getting from an embryo that was dead.
  Another suggestion is to manipulate the genes of the cells so that if 
they develop they will never produce a baby. It would be kind of a 
freak, I guess, and since it is not going to be a baby, then you could 
take cells from that. Again, I would have a little concern, was I 
really getting a normal cell when I was taking it from something that 
was genetically engineered so that it was not going to grow to be a 
baby?
  In the text of their white paper, they do a very good job of talking 
about developing the repair kit and the fact that the cells could 
probably be taken without hurting the embryo. They look at all of the 
pluses and minuses of this.
  But then it looks like almost, Mr. Speaker, that somebody else wrote 
the recommendations, because let me read from the recommendations here. 
The recommendations say, the second proposal, blastomere extraction 
from living embryos, we find this proposal to be ethically unacceptable 
in humans owing to the reasons given in the ethical analysis: We should 
not impose risk on living embryos destined to become children for the 
sake of getting stem cells for research.
  I agree. That is not what they talked about in the text of their 
white paper. There they talked about preimplantation genetic diagnosis. 
This clearly has to be for the benefit of the baby. The mother does not 
want to have a baby that is going to have a less than optimum 
opportunity for a good life with a genetic defect, and she has the 
opportunity to determine that and so she does it. And then they also 
talk about developing the repair kit.
  So what we were proposing is that there would be cells made 
available, surplus cells from the repair kit, only after the parents 
had made three decisions which were in the interest of their baby. The 
first decision was to do in vitro fertilization. I know that there are 
those who do not believe that we ought to be doing in vitro 
fertilization. They kind of think that is like playing God. But there 
is an old axiom that I really subscribe to, Mr. Speaker, and that is 
that man's extremity is God's

[[Page H4183]]

opportunity and God is not going to do for us what we can do for 
ourselves. And these parents have made the decision they want a baby 
and in vitro fertilization is the only way they are going to get one, 
so they have made the decision.

  Then they have made the decision they really want a healthy baby, so 
they are going to do preimplantation genetic diagnosis. And, by the 
way, they refreeze the embryo that was defective. It could be adopted. 
There are some families and, God bless them, that are really fulfilled 
by taking into their home handicapped babies, babies with defects, that 
they are going to be with them for a lifetime and these people feel 
fulfilled in taking these children into their homes, children who have 
HIV, crack cocaine babies and so forth and so these embryos could be 
adopted.
  By the way, this is not genetic engineering. There have been some 
suggestions that this is an unacceptable technique. Just looking at 
what kind of genes are there, Mr. Speaker, that is not genetic 
engineering. That is not a very believable argument against this.
  Then the parents have made a third choice, and that is to establish a 
repair kit for their baby. And only after the parents have made those 
three what I think are ethical choices, they want to have their own 
baby, they do not want their baby to have a genetic defect and they 
want their baby to have a repair kit and only after they have made 
those three decisions, then we would ask for some surplus cells from 
the repair kit to establish a new stem cell line.
  There are two things that I want to refer to here. One is a letter 
from Dr. Battey, who is the spokesperson at NIH for stem cell research. 
He wrote me on May 23, fairly recently, a three-page letter in which he 
says, live births resulting from embryos which undergo preimplantation 
genetic diagnosis and are subsequently implanted seem to suggest that 
this procedure does not harm the embryo. At least for a thousand times 
we have had a normal baby. They are not adults yet, and so the clock 
has to run for a while before we determine whether there is any defect.
  I would be very surprised, Mr. Speaker, if there is a defect. Because 
you can take half the cells away from an early embryo to produce 
identical twins, and both halves produce what looks like perfectly 
normal people. So I would be surprised if there is any long-term 
effects from this.
  Also, it is not known if the single cell removed from the eight-cell 
stage human embryo has the capacity to become an embryo if cultured in 
the appropriate environment.
  Then I would like to turn, Mr. Speaker, to the Science section, 
Monday, June 6, just yesterday, Stem Cell Advances May Make Moral Issue 
Moot. A Dr. Lanza, and our office has spoken to Dr. Lanza, he is 
publishing a paper imminently. Some of the details could not be in this 
article because he was holding those for his paper.
  In one approach pioneered by Robert Lanza and colleagues at Advanced 
Cell Technology in Worcester, Massachusetts, researchers plucked single 
cells from eight-cell embryos, embryos so young they do not have stem 
cells yet. Stem cells are ordinarily derived from inner cell mass. I do 
not understand saying that these are not the conventional stem cells 
but they certainly, I think, have the capacity to produce stem cells.
  Fertility doctors have known for years that early embryos seem 
unfazed by the removal of any one of their eight virtually identical 
cells called blastomeres. In fact, it is common today to remove a 
single representative blastomere from a laboratory conceived embryo and 
test that cell for diseased genes before deciding whether to transfer 
that embryo into a woman's womb.
  If this technique were applied to humans, and I skipped a couple of 
paragraphs where he talks about work with animals, if this technique 
were applied to humans, then a single cell taken from an eight-cell 
fertility clinic embryo could give rise to a self-replicating line of 
embryonic stem cells without compromising the donor embryo's odds of 
someday growing into a baby.
  So the thing that Dr. Battey said had not yet been, and he was 
correct because this paper is yet to be published, I think it may be 
published today or tomorrow, but he has now in mice, and if it is 
doable in mice it is probably doable in higher animals, including 
humans, that they have developed stem cell lines from a single cell 
taken from an early blastomere.
  I would just like to spend a few moments now talking about the bill 
which we have filed. It has a number of cosponsors, and I am very 
pleased that several doctors in the House have signed on to our bill.

                              {time}  2300

  Our bill really has nothing to do with working on humans because we 
think that we ought to do some animal experimentation before we start 
working with humans. So what our bill does is simply to make some 
moneys available for a several-year study, and we ought to go up to 
nonhuman primates. These are animals like chimpanzees and the great 
apes. To make sure that what has been done in mice and what has been 
done more than 1,000 times in these clinics, and what has been done, of 
course, is taking cells from an early embryo without apparently hurting 
the embryo, that we could develop these cells into a stem cell line. 
That has now been done, as was noted in the paper yesterday. This is 
the science section of The Washington Post. So the potential is there 
to do this. And all that our research does is to ask for animal 
experimentation so that we can check and double-check and make really 
sure that this is a safe procedure for humans.
  I would like to put up the last chart that we are going to refer to 
now. This is a little bit like one that we looked at previously. This 
shows again half of the reproductive tract of the female; and, of 
course, what we are talking about are procedures that are done in the 
laboratory. But they are mimicking what happens in the body. By the 
way, when the little baby girl is born, she has in her ovary all of the 
ova that will ever be there, and they mature generally during her 
reproductive life, which may span 30, 40 years. They generally mature 
from one side or the other one a month. But they are all in there. And 
this shows the development of these ovum. And finally they grow and 
there is like a little blister on the side of the ovary, and then it 
breaks and the ovum is free.
  In the laboratory, of course, these have been washed out of the 
reproductive tract of the female, and they are now put in petri dishes 
and exposed to sperm. In the body, the sperm is deposited in the 
vagina, makes its way through the cervix, up through the uterus, and 
swims clear up through the Fallopian tube. In a laboratory, of course, 
they simply with a pipette put the sperm in the petri dish with the 
ovum. And there will be many sperm. There are millions of sperm. And 
really quite a miraculous and very rapid transformation takes place. As 
soon as one sperm enters the egg, the egg then sets up a defense so 
that no more sperm can enter because if another sperm were able to make 
its way in and they had three sets of chromosomes instead of two, that 
would be fatal.
  By the way, in flowers that is not fatal. That is called polyploidi, 
and that is how we get bigger flowers and better smell and so forth. 
But plants react very differently to extra hormones than humans do. 
Tisomy-21 produces mongoloid babies. That is just having one extra of 
one chromosome. So we do not react well to extra chromosomes; and so 
the ovum, after one sperm has entered, it sets up this defense so that 
no more sperm can enter.
  The same thing happens in the laboratory. And then it divides, and 
the doctor watches that division. And down at eight-cell stage, they 
take a cell out and do preimplantation genetic diagnosis; and as recent 
research has demonstrated, the paper that is going to be published very 
shortly by Dr. Lanza, they have done this in mice, but if it is 
possible there, it ought to be possible in higher animals, and our 
research would determine that. They have produced stem cell lines from 
a single cell taken. What this means is, Mr. Speaker, that we now have 
been able to produce, we will be able to produce, embryonic stem cell 
lines without harming an embryo.
  I have heard people say that they are just unalterably opposed to 
embryonic stem cell research. I hope that is not what they mean. I hope 
what they are

[[Page H4184]]

mean is that they are unalterably opposed to embryonic stem cell 
research if it means killing an embryo. I am unalterably opposed to 
embryonic stem cell research if it means taking one life with the hope 
that we will be able to help another life. But with these recent 
advances in medicine and research in the laboratory, there is the real 
hope that we can take cells from an early embryo to benefit the embryo.

  And I would like to say again the reasons that the parents are taking 
cells from this early embryo, the fundamental reason they are taking 
the cell is to do a preimplantation genetic diagnosis. And the 
President's Council on Bioethics mentions the possibility of creating a 
repair kit, which certainly would benefit the baby. So the parent has 
now done three things which they think is ethical. I think that they 
are ethical, and there ought to be surplus cells from the repair kit, 
and it is those surplus cells that would be made available for 
additional stem cell lines.
  But I want to reiterate again that the bill which we have just looks 
at animal experimentation. Although human research, human developments, 
human applications have gone beyond some of the exploration that we 
have done with animals, we still think that it is prudent to work with 
animals where we can determine with more cases and more intense 
experimental observation to make sure that there are no untoward 
effects of doing this.
  I hope that this research can bring the two sides together. We had a 
couple of weeks ago a very heated debate. The emotions on both sides 
were rather obvious: those who wanted to take some of these more than 
400,000 frozen embryos that they said were going to be discarded anyhow 
to get some good from them, and they were so convinced of this in 
California that they voted for $3 billion to proceed with this. The 
argument on the other side, which position I take, is that morally I 
have big problems with taking one life, and this little embryo could 
become under the right circumstances a baby. More than 100 times it 
has. From these frozen 400,000, there are about 100 or so, we call 
Snowflake babies, because this is a program to offer these embryos for 
adoption, and more than 100 times they have been adopted, and the 
President had some of those babies at the White House a couple of weeks 
ago when we were having that debate, and they came to the Hill also 
when we were having that debate here on the floor.
  With the ability to take cells from an early embryo not to establish 
a stem cell line, that is not why the parents took it. They took the 
cell to do a preimplantation genetic diagnosis. They then would like to 
establish a repair kit. We know they would like to do that because they 
are more and more freezing umbilical cord blood, which, as the one 
doctor I read from said, is a poor second choice to an embryonic stem 
cell line, but it is better than nothing. So we know that parents would 
like to do that. And it is only after that if the animal 
experimentation supported by our bill shows that this is efficacious 
and will not harm the baby, only after that would stem cell lines be 
derived from surplus cells from repair kits that the parents had 
decided to establish for the benefit of their baby.
  I think, Mr. Speaker, that this ought to remove all of the ethical 
objections. But there is just one more, and I just want to spend a 
moment talking about that, and this is a good chart to talk about it 
from. Since these cells at the eight-cell stage are quite 
undifferentiated, which means they have not really decided what they 
are going to be, it is possible that they might take that one cell and 
establish another embryo. The President's Council on Bioethics thinks 
that is very unlikely. But what I would like to see them pursue is the 
development of stem cell lines and the preimplantation genetic 
diagnosis from the inner cell mass stage.
  Now, that is the stage at which embryonic stem cells are ordinarily 
taken from when the embryo is destroyed. That is before the embryo is 
implanted in the normal process. Here is the inner cell mass, and here 
is where it is implanted a couple of days later, 2 or 3 days later, in 
the uterus.

                              {time}  2310

  Ordinarily, and I am not sure why they use the eight cell stage in 
the clinical laboratories, but I would like to see cells taken from the 
inner cell mass. There is no ethical question involved there because 
these cells in the inner cell mass cannot produce a baby because they 
have already lost their ability to produce decidua. The decidua is the 
amnion and chorion which is commonly known as the placenta, and they 
have lost the ability to do that, so they cannot produce a baby, but 
they can produce all of the tissues of a person, because these are what 
produce, back to our first chart that shows the inner cell mass 
differentiating into these three germ layers.
  So the last possible ethical objection to deriving stem cells from 
pre-implantation genetic diagnosis and the development of a repair kit 
would be gone if we could take the cell from the inner cell mass, 
because the inner cell mass, those cells could not possibly produce a 
baby, because they are sufficiently differentiated that they cannot 
produce the decidium.
  I have used this term ``differentiation'' a number of times, and what 
we try to do with adult stem cells, because they are already 
differentiated, we try to de-differentiate them. We try to confuse them 
with ques, with chemicals, with exposing them to other cells and the 
products from other cells so that they can kind of forget their 
development and they now go back to a prior less-differentiated state 
where they could produce more variety of cells. But you avoid those 
problems with the embryonic stem cell, because it has the capability to 
produce any and every cell in the body.
  Mr. Speaker, I believe that with these recent medical advances, with 
the knowledge that we have, that it is perfectly feasible to ethically 
develop embryonic stem cell lines from embryos which should have, in 
the view of many of the experts, and clearly in the view of most 
Americans if you poll them, should have more potential than adult stem 
cells. Only research will tell that, and only time will tell whether or 
not that is true.
  But with the hope that these large numbers of diseases so devastating 
to our people could be affected or maybe cured with embryonic stem 
cells, we really must pursue this, and now we have the opportunity to 
do that without offending those who have a problem with taking one life 
so that we might help another life.
  I think, Mr. Speaker, that we now are on the cusp of advances that 
will bring these two sides together. We have enough things to be 
concerned about and to discuss in our country, we do not need to be 
discussing this, and I think the two sides with these present advances 
can come together. I hope that we will have an early vote on our bill 
and it will reach the President's desk so that he has a bill that he 
can sign that will promote embryonic stem cell research.

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