[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 106 (Friday, July 29, 2005)]
[House]
[Pages H7604-H7608]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
{time} 1400
STEM CELL RESEARCH
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Price of Georgia). Under the Speaker's
announced policy of January 4, 2005, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr.
Bartlett) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority
leader.
Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, I was in my office last
evening about 11 p.m., as was all the rest of the House of
Representatives, waiting for a resolution of some of the concerns on
the transportation bill so that we could vote on it, when we were
looking at the ``Drudge Report'' on our screen and we saw there a
headline that I could hardly believe, that Senator Frist had reversed
his position on embryonic stem cells and was now advocating the passage
of the Senate version of H.R. 810.
I thought it would be appropriate today, with stem cells, embryonic
stem cells being so much in the news, if we could spend a few minutes
looking at what stem cells are and what this is all about, what was
Senator Frist talking about and what is the issue here.
I have here on the easel a chart that shows the development, not all
of the stages, but it shows the development of the human embryo. It
starts with the zygote. The zygote is the fertilized egg. It now has
chromosomes, genes from the sperm and genes from the egg, having what
we call the diploid number of chromosomes. And that develops through
several stages, we will see a little later in another chart, but it
goes through the blastacyst stage here and then it goes down to the
gastrula stage. And by the time you get to the gastrula stage, the
embryo that began as a single cell here just a few days before has now
developed into a large number of cells.
What is shown here is the embryo and the part of the wall of the
uterus to which it is attached. By this stage in its development, the
embryo has already now developed four very specific stem cells that
will go on to produce a variety of tissues and organs in the body, all
of the tissues and the organs in the body, and we see those down here
at the bottom.
Some of them develop into ectoderm. This is the external layer. The
ectoderm becomes primarily two things in the developing baby and in the
adult. It becomes the skin and the nervous system and some of the
pigment cells. Most of what we are in terms of mass is all developed
from the middle layer, or the mesoderm, and from that develops all of
your skeletal muscle, all of your skeleton, all of your bones, all of
your heart muscle, the red blood cells, the smooth muscle in your
intestines and stomach and so forth.
Then a third stem cell here ultimately develops into the entoderm.
And here we see that this is the lining of the lung, the thyroid gland,
and pancreatic cells, nowhere near the mass that is produced by the
mesoderm, but very important tissues nevertheless.
[[Page H7605]]
Then there are some very unique cells. They are different in the male
and the female. They are the germ cells. In the male they produce the
sperm and in the female they produce the egg. Some of these stem cells
persist even into the adult. In the bone marrow of every adult are stem
cells which will produce erythrocytes, your red blood cells, which
produce some of your white blood cells. The polymorphonuclear
leukocytes will produce those cells that help in clotting, the
thrombocytes.
And there are stem cells in other adult tissues. And there has been a
lot of research for more than three decades now on using these stem
cells to see if we cannot cure or help patients with a number of
different diseases. And there have been a number of good applications
of adult stem cells. They have produced betterment in a number of
individuals, in some cases what looks like actual cures.
But these adult stem cells are limited in their capability because
they are already what we call differentiated. They have already split,
and a number of the genes have been turned off, and they now are
destined to produce only a certain kinds of cells. What the researcher
tries to do at times is to take these adult stem cells and put them in
an environment that convinces them that they are not really an adult
stem cell, but that they have gone now back to a more primordial state,
that they are back to an embryonic stem cell.
Here in the blastula we see embryonic stem cells. Of course, the
ultimate embryonic stem cell is the zygote: one cell, which will divide
again and again and again, and then differentiate, and then finally
produce all of the cells of the body. But here in the blastula stage we
have the cells already differentiated into two different categories:
those cells which are going to produce the embryo, and they are shown
here in this inner cell mass; and then those cells which will produce
the dissidua. And the dissidua is the cells around this which will
become amnion and corion parts of the placenta. In the stage just
before this are the cells that can produce the full embryo.
I would like now to look at our next chart here because this shows
the development of the embryo, and it has all of the stages there. It
starts with the zygote. Here we have the fertilized egg, or the zygote.
Of course, this all begins with an ovary. This is only half of the
reproductive system of the female. An ovary which every month routinely
during the childbearing years will produce an ovum. Here it shows the
follicle rupturing and the ovum coming out. Here is the oocyte. And
then here are the sperm, and the sperm of course make their way all up
through the uterus and the fallopian tube, clear up here to the end of
the fallopian tube.
And by the way, they actually sometimes get out into the abdominal
cavity. Sometimes this egg is not picked up by this little funnel-
shaped end, and you see part of the funnel here, called the
infundibulum. Sometimes that cell does not get out there, and it does
not get picked up by the fallopian tube and carried down with the
beating of a number of cilia and it goes out into the body cavity. And
the sperm may actually get out there too, and it can be fertilized
there. We call that an ectopic pregnancy. And of course the baby cannot
develop there and it is going to die, and it is going to cause a lot of
problems for the mother. So this ectopic pregnancy has to be terminated
because it will cause the death of the mother if it continues.
After the fertilization, the egg begins its journey, taking several
days, maybe as many as 8, 9, 10 days before it finally reaches the end
of the journey and is implanted in the wall of the uterus. It divides
first two cells, then four cells, and then eight cells. And I would
like to pause for just a moment at that eight-cell stage. Imagine now
that we are not in the reproductive tract of the female, but we are in
a petri dish in the laboratory, because that is what in vitro
fertilization means. In vitro means in glass. And they are now taking
the egg from the mother and sperm from the father and they have
combined these two and produced this fertilized egg, the zygote. It now
divides and divides until they come to the eight-cell stage.
At this stage, more than a thousand times worldwide, in one clinic in
England more than 600 times, they have taken in the laboratory under
the microscope a cell, and sometimes they get two from that eight-cell
stage, and they have done what they call a preimplantation genetic
diagnosis. They look at the genes, and you can do that, we now know
what they ought to look like, and they can determine if there is any
genetic defect.
One of those genetic defects is what we call trisomy 21, mongolism.
If there is an extra chromosome at the 21st chromosome, you get what we
call trisomy 21, or mongolism. If there is no genetic defect in the
cell that they analyze, which would be like all the other cells because
they began as a single cell here, then they implant what is remaining,
that is the six or seven cells that is remaining, and now more than a
thousand times worldwide we have had what looks like a perfectly normal
baby born from this process.
This technique, which has been widely used in England, is now used in
this country; and just outside Washington, here in Virginia, is a
clinic that is doing this. They have done it more than 300 times now.
Several weeks ago, I talked for perhaps a half-hour with two of their
doctors about the procedure.
Let us now take a look at how they get embryonic stem cell lines.
They take an embryo in the laboratory which had been produced by the
fertilization of an egg, and they let it develop, not to the eight-cell
stage, they go just a little beyond that. They go to the inner cell
mass, and then they destroy the embryo. And there are now a lot of
cells, not just eight; and they take a number of the cells from the
inner cell mass, which I indicated previously had all of the genetic
potential to produce the body of the baby, but none of the genetic
potential to produce the dissidua. And so here we see right at the
bottom of this chart we see the dissidua developing there, the little
fingers like that are growing into the lining of the uterus.
Well, what this debate is all about, Mr. Speaker, is about the
morality, really, the ethics of taking this little embryo, which is a
baby in miniature, because, you see, if it goes on just a couple of
days later and implants in the uterus, it will become a baby, although
it is now in the petri dish in the laboratory, but it can be implanted
in the uterus, to take this embryo and to destroy it and take the cells
from the inner cell mass to produce a stem cell line. Up to this time
that has been the only technique that has been available for developing
these stem cell lines.
The President had a very difficult decision to make 4 years ago when
there was an interest in using Federal monies to fund further embryonic
stem cell research. Maybe we ought to pause for a moment, Mr. Speaker,
to look at why we are so much interested in stem cell research. Because
these stem cells, as the earlier chart showed, can produce all of the
tissues in the body, there is the hope, the promise, and in fact even
the realization with some of the work we have done with adult stem
cells that we can use these stem cells to replace tissues which have
been damaged by disease or some other trauma in the body. We can
replace those so as to restore health.
Now, we have a lot of applications from adult stem cells and, as we
stand here today, essentially no applications from embryonic stem
cells. And why should we have this big debate, Mr. Speaker, about
embryonic stem cells when almost all of the applications to medicine
have been from adult stem cells? You see, we have been working with
adult stem cells for more than three decades, so we have had a lot of
opportunity in the medical community to make applications there, but we
have been working with embryonic stem cells for only about 6 years, and
there just has not been the opportunity to make the medical
applications from embryonic stem cells that we have been able to make
from adult stem cells.
But because of what embryonic stem cells are, because embryonic stem
cells still have all of the capability to produce any and every tissue
in the body, doctors and researchers believe intuitively from what they
know of embryology that there ought ultimately to be more and better
applications from embryonic stem cells than there are from adult stem
cells. We do
[[Page H7606]]
not know. It may be that these embryonic stem cells are going to be
like unruly teenagers, very difficult to control. You see, their
destiny in life is to divide and divide and divide.
{time} 1415
We want them to do that, but we want to be able to control how they
divide and what they produce, because if it is a liver the patient
needs, you need to convince the cells that is what they ought to be
producing, and when they have done enough, they need to quit. They may
be very difficult to control. They may keep on dividing, and when you
put them in the body, they may form tumors.
Because of what embryonic stem cells do, the medical community and
indeed millions of Americans with relatives with devastating diseases
believe there are important applications from embryonic stem cells to
medicines. We need to provide that opportunity without harming the
embryo.
To this date the only way we have gotten these embryonic stem cell
lines started is by taking some of the cells from the inner cell mass,
which destroys the embryo. In 2001, the President was faced with a very
difficult decision. He needed to determine whether Federal funds could
be used in embryonic stem cell research when the only way to get
embryos at that time was to destroy the embryo.
When the President was making that difficult decision, the scientists
at NIH had an open house for Members of Congress and staff to come to
NIH and learn about embryonic stem cell research and the potential. I
went there, Mr. Speaker, and listened to their presentations. Because
in a former life I was privileged to be able to get a Ph.D., a doctor's
degree in human physiology, because I taught medical school, because I
had a course in advanced embryology, I knew a little bit about what
they were talking about.
As I sat there listening to the researchers at NIH explaining what
they were doing and the dreams and the hopes that they had for the
applications of embryonic stem cell research, and when I thought about
the dilemma that the President was in in trying to decide whether it
was okay to destroy these embryos to get a stem cell line that may come
up with some miraculous cures, I thought back to my studies and to a
course that I had in advanced embryology. And really you do not need to
have had that course to understand this, but it occurred to me nature
had been doing for a very long time what we needed to do, and that is
to take cells from the early embryo without hurting the embryo. Nature
had been doing that by producing identical twins. In identical twins,
half of the cells are taken away from the embryo, and each half goes on
to produce a perfectly normal baby. And one of those identical twins is
a clone. Think about that and decide how that relates to the dialogue
that we are having on cloning.
Well, there are two different times during the development of the
embryo, maybe more, but at least two different times that it can split
to produce identical twins. One is at the two-cell stage. Instead of
just dividing to make four cells, it splits, so there are now two one-
cell embryos, and each one goes on to divide and produce a baby. Or it
can wait until the inner cell mass stage, and in some embryos there are
two inner cell masses, and that can now split to form identical twins.
Sometimes this is not perfect, and they do not split totally, and we
have what we call Siamese twins. This is the origin when the split has
occurred probably at the inner cell mass stage, and it is not complete,
and they remain close enough that some parts of the body grow together.
We know that the embryo is capable of splitting at these two
different stages because of the way the babies present themselves at
birth. If they are both within the same amniotic sac, they probably
split at the two-cell stage. If each have their own amniotic sac, they
probably split later.
It occurred to me since nature many times takes half of the cells
away from the early embryo and they go on to produce two perfectly
normal babies, we ought to be able to take a cell or two from an early
embryo without hurting the early embryo. And I asked the scientists at
NIH, should we not be able to do it? They said we ought to be able to
do it, although we have not done it.
A little after that I was at an event when the President was there,
and I mentioned this possibility to the President. He asked Karl Rove
to follow up on it, and a few days later I got a call from Karl Rove
saying he had talked to the NIH; the NIH told him what I was proposing
was not doable.
I said Karl, either they did not understand your 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 in
it. Of course they can do this. He went back and asked them again, and
he came back and said he got the same answer, that they could not do
this, and so the President came down with his executive order.
A couple of years after that, not very many months ago, the people
from NIH were sitting in my office, and I asked them how could this
have happened. What apparently happened as so often happens, there was
a miscom- munication. What they told Karl Rove was they were not sure
they could produce an embryonic stem cell line from an embryo that
early because they had never done it, not that it was not doable. He
interpreted this as saying they could not take the cell, and,
therefore, the research could not be done.
I would like to spend just a moment looking at some of the reasons
why people are so concerned and why this was such an important decision
on the part of the President, and why Senator Frist's decision last
night has stirred up so much controversy. It is because there are a
very large number of diseases that have the potential of being cured
ultimately with the application of embryonic stem cell research.
Let me give us one example, and that is diabetes. Kids come in my
office with this hockey puck-like thing under their skin, which is an
insulin pump. They have to prick their skin to get a glucose level so
they can set the pump, and they are very brittle. It has to be pumped
in regularly. This is the most expensive disease in our country, and it
is potentially totally curable with stem cell applications. All we need
to do is produce some islets of Langerhans cells because these are the
cells that just happen to be embedded in the pancreas. There is no
reason why they need to be in the pancreas. They have nothing to do
with the function of the pancreas, because the pancreas is a big
digestive gland at the beginning of the small intestine that produces
enzymes that digest fats, carbohydrates and proteins. Embedded in the
tissue of the gland are what looked like these little islands to Dr.
Langerhans, and so we call them the islets of Langerhans. They produce
insulin.
Now, insulin does not cure diabetes, as any family who has diabetes
in the family knows; it simply delays the course of the disease. There
may ultimately be some problems with the eyes and circulation. You lose
some toes, they have to be amputated. If we could create islets of
Langerhans cells, which could be under the skin anywhere in the body,
anywhere that the blood can get to them so the circulation can pick up
the hormone that is produced, this should cure the disease.
And there are many others, particularly the autoimmune diseases, and
there are 63 autoimmune diseases. These are diseases where the body
gets confused what is really body. There is something very interesting
that happens with early embryos. Obviously we need to know what is us
so foreign things can be rejected. When you get inside your body, there
are no bacteria in there. That is a pristine world. We have a big army
of white cells in there that make sure that it is pristine. The white
cells are told by what we call T-cells as to what is you and what is
not you, so they attack what is not you. Sometimes, and in more people
than we would like to have it occur in, sometimes the body gets
confused as to what is really you.
I have a little problem, rheumatoid arthritis, which is an autoimmune
disease. The body starts attacking itself; and there are 63 of them,
and potentially all of them could be addressed with embryonic stem cell
research.
Alzheimer's disease, a very tragic disease. Central nerve injury, an
injury to the spinal cord, those cells do not grow back. There is a
potential you could put new cells in the spinal cord, and people in a
wheelchair could walk
[[Page H7607]]
again. There is that potential, and that is why embryonic stem cell
research is of such great interest, because of the enormous potential
that they ought to have because they are so totally undifferentiated
because they can produce any and every cell in the body.
I have been working with the White House, with the National
Institutes of Health, with the Conference of Catholic Bishops, and with
the prolife community in developing a bill, H.R. 3144, which would
permit research on not just the procedure that I recommended more than
4 years ago now, but several other procedures that are outlined in a
little book here called Alternative Sources of Human Pluripotent Stem
Cells, A White Paper, produced by the President's Council on Bioethics,
and they talk about four different kinds of research, four different
ways of procuring embryonic stem cells that might be ethically
acceptable to the prolife community.
The first of these is pluripotent. By pluripotent, they mean cells
that have the capability of producing all of the tissues of the embryo,
but not the decidua. That is a totipotent cell. Pluripotent stem cells
are derived from embryos that are essentially moribund, dead; the
equivalent, if you will, of an adult that is brain dead.
{time} 1430
It is perfectly ethical, most people believe, to take organs, that is
how we get organs for transplant from adults that are brain dead, so if
you now have an embryo which is obviously not going to develop, but it
still is alive enough that you might take cells from it to produce a
stem cell line, if you really knew that it was dead and could never
produce a baby, then ethically it would appear to many people to be
okay to take cells from that to establish a stem cell line. You might
have a little concern that an embryo that had sat there a day or two
and never divided because there was something wrong with it, that the
cell you took from it to produce a stem cell line might not produce
just the high-quality stem cell line that you might like for research,
but at least it is worth exploring, and it gets by the ethical
arguments.
The second one of their proposals, and I would like to look at the
next chart now as we do that. Let me just look at this chart for a
moment here with you. This comes from a white paper on the President's
Council on Bioethics. Let me look at the highlighted portion: ``It may
be some time before stem cells can be reliably derived from single
cells extracted from early embryos.'' That is the procedure that I was
talking about that occurred to me when I was out at NIH talking to the
investigators there. ``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''--Verlinsky is a Russian scientist
working in this country who says that he has done what NIH said they
were not sure they could do, and that is to produce an embryonic stem
cell line from one cell taken from an early embryo--``at least raises
the future possibility that pluripotent stem cells could be derived
from single blastomeres.'' A mere is a cell, and it is taken from the
blastula so it is a cell taken from the blastula. A blastomere.
``Removed from early human embryos without apparently harming them.''
And then the asterisk there. If you look down at the bottom of the
page, it says, ``A similar idea was proposed by Representative Roscoe
Bartlett of Maryland as far back as 2001.'' What they are referring to
is the recommendation that I made to the President that he relayed on
to Karl Rove. This is recognized in this fairly recently published
white paper, Alternative Sources of Human Pluripotent Stem Cells, a
white paper by the President's Council on Bioethics. This is one of
four different procedures. The first, you remember, was taking cells
from an embryo that is essentially moribund, it is going to die, and
like the person who is brain dead, why not get some benefit from it. We
do that with organ transplants all the time.
The third one is very interesting, and that is to produce pluripotent
stem cells derived from biological artifacts. There are two artifacts
that they are looking at to do this. One of those goes back to this
little embryo in the petri dish that we talked about. What they want to
do is go in that early embryo and turn off some of the genes. We know
how to do this. To turn off some of the genes so that it can never
produce a baby, but could go on dividing and produce a mass of cells.
They call this an artifact. If it is not going to be a baby, it is just
this mass of cells growing, maybe it is okay to take cells from it to
produce an embryonic stem cell line.
But some people might have a little concern, Mr. Speaker, that you
have gone in early and messed up what could have become a perfectly
normal baby, you have turned off some of the genes so it cannot, so now
you have created kind of a freak that you can take some cells from, and
since it is not going to be a baby, it is okay to take the cells from
that. But at least it is a way of getting embryonic stem cells without
destroying what at that moment is perfectly normal stem cells.
There is another possibility, and that is parthenogenesis. That is
the development without the union of sex cells. The fourth technique is
an interesting one and that we are trying to do all the time. That is
to take what is called the pluripotent stem cells via somatic cell
dedifferentiation. A somatic cell simply means a body cell. The soma is
the body. Take a body cell from anywhere in the body, skin, muscle,
lungs, anywhere, and dedifferentiate it, try to produce this cell in an
environment that it is confused as to what it is, that it kind of
thinks and behaves like it is an embryonic stem cell. If we can do
this, that is great, because ethically there should not be any problem
doing this. But this has not been done. There are big technical
challenges to doing this.
Now, this white paper gives a very good discussion of the proposal
that we made; that is, of getting cells via blastomere extraction,
sometimes called biopsy. You are going in and just taking out a cell or
two. They even talk about producing the repair kit, which would be
really advantageous to the baby through all of its life now. If it
needed a new liver, new islet of Langerhans cells, if it needed new
spinal cord cells, hopefully in the future we would be able to produce
those from this repair kit.
But when they get back for some strange reason, Mr. Speaker, it
almost looks to me like two different groups wrote the body of this
text where they talk about this technique and where they make the
recommendations, because in the recommendations they 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 risks on living
embryos destined to become children for the sake of getting stem cells
for research.
I agree. That is not the reason the stem cells are taken from this
baby. As a matter of fact, if the cells are taken with no thought that
they are stem cells, the cells will be taken by the parents to produce
a repair kit or to do a preimplantation genetic diagnosis for the baby,
and I think that most Americans do not have an ethical problem, Mr.
Speaker, with in vitro fertilization. I think that most Americans do
not have an ethical problem with deciding that your baby is not going
to have a genetic defect. I do not think that hardly any Americans
could ever have a problem with establishing a repair kit for your baby.
What is envisioned is that at the end of the day, the parents would
have made at least two ethical decisions, what I consider ethical and I
think what most people consider ethical; that is, to have their own
baby, the only way they can do it is in vitro, and to establish a
repair kit for their baby, and then all that needs to be done to get
another stem cell line is to ask them, Couldn't we have some surplus
cells from the repair kit that you have established.
There is a big discussion going on in our country now, Mr. Speaker,
about embryonic stem cells. They voted how many billions of dollars in
California to pursue embryonic stem cell research because a big percent
of our population believes that there could be a major medical
application there which would provide miraculous cures for many of our
diseases. And then we have a large number of people, the prolife
community, that have a big problem with taking these embryos, any one
of which
[[Page H7608]]
could become a baby, we have more than 100 of them, is what we call the
snowflake babies that have been adopted, implanted in the receptive
womb of a mother, and they become a baby; to take this human life, and
it is a life, and it is human, and destroy it so that you can produce a
stem cell line.
Most of this debate ignores the fact simply because the debaters do
not know that it is possible, Mr. Speaker, to get embryonic stem cell
lines without harming embryos.
I would like to go back again to the second chart I showed, which is
the path of the reproductive tract of a female, so that we can look at
this again together so that we understand clearly what we are talking
about here. We will imagine now that this is happening in the
laboratory and it is in a petri dish, in glass. In vitro is what we
call it. Because the parents could not have a baby any other way, they
decided to have in vitro fertilization, and they decided they would
like to at least do one thing, and that is to establish a repair kit
for their baby. They might also want to do a preimplantation genetic
diagnosis.
So now the physician in the clinic will wait until the cells divide
and produce several embryos. By the way, they do not all produce really
good-looking embryos, and so what they do is to fertilize more than one
egg, and they then watch the development of these embryos, and they
will take the best of them and generally more than one of them.
One of my colleagues, Congressman Rohrabacher from California, his
wife had three beautiful babies from in vitro fertilization. I do not
know how many the doctor implanted, but at least three of those that he
implanted grew, and she had triplets. I saw a recent picture of them in
their little life vests out in the surf in California.
There is a potential ethical argument in doing this even if we let
the parents make the decision they are going to do the in vitro
fertilization, if the parents make the decision that they are going to
establish a repair kit, and then all we ask for is a few cells from
that repair kit. You see, if the cell is taken from the eight-cell
stage, then you could make the argument that maybe the cell you took
could become another embryo. So then you start all over again with the
ethical argument. You now have another embryo. And so you now ethically
should not destroy that embryo with the hope that you are going to have
some applications to health care for somebody else.
There is, Mr. Speaker, one way to avoid this, and it is one of the
things that our research, H.R. 3144, would pursue, and that is waiting
a little later to take this cell. I am not sure for all the reasons
that they take the cell at the eight-cell stage, but that is the
convention. If you waited to take that cell from the inner cell mass
stage, which is a little later, a few days later, then the
differentiation has already occurred to the point that the cells in the
inner cell mass which can produce the whole baby, but they cannot
produce a baby by implantation because they have lost the ability to
produce decidua. So you have now removed that possible ethical
argument, although those who wrote the white paper on the Alternative
Sources of Human Pluripotent Stem Cells do not believe that you could
do this. But if there is any possibility that you could do that, then
for those whose sensitivities would be offended by this, if we could
demonstrate that you could take it from the inner cell mass stage, now
you have bypassed even that.
Our bill, H.R. 3144, is a bill that looks for the moment only at
animal experimentation, because we believe that before you go to
humans, you ought to know that what you are doing is going to work and
that it has worked. The best way to do that is to go to animals and
ultimately to what we call nonhuman primates; that is, the big apes
which genetically, by the way, are remarkably close to humans. It may
be embarrassing, Mr. Speaker, to look at the genetic complement of one
of the great apes and look at our genetic complement. There is not all
that much difference in us. Once we have demonstrated it there, then we
could have more certainty that it is going to work in humans.
What we do not need, Mr. Speaker, is for millions of Americans to
feel that their last best hope for a cure for their relative had been
removed when the President vetoes H.R. 810 and its Senate complement,
which he has said he would do, which I hope he does. I think it is the
ethical thing to do.
What we need, Mr. Speaker, is to have this bill on the President's
desk so that those millions of people out there who believe that there
is potentially a lot of applications in health care from embryonic stem
cells will know that the Federal Government believes with them that
this is possible; that we are going to support responsible, ethical
research, using cells taken from early embryos that certainly do not
kill the embryo, do not harm the embryo. As a matter of fact, if, Mr.
Speaker, we get those cells, the surplus cells from the repair kit,
then the parents have made two decisions which I think, and I believe
most Americans will believe, are ethical, one, to have their own baby,
the only way to do it is in vitro; secondly, to establish a repair kit
so that at any time during its life, their child is going to have the
potential for new tissues, new organs, new cells that is going to be
them, so there will be no rejection.
Mr. Speaker, what we saw last night I hope results in a very positive
eventuality. I hope that by the time H.R. 810 and its Senate complement
gets to the President's desk, that also on his desk is H.R. 3144, so
that the President can say, today I proudly sign a bill which provides
for research which has the potential of producing embryonic stem cells
for all the miraculous applications to health care that citizens all
across the country believe. Because in State after State now they are
voting in referenda to provide, sometimes in the legislature, sometimes
just a vote of all the people, to provide very large amounts of money
statewide because the Federal Government is not doing it, and they
believe there is a big potential there.
{time} 1445
I hope that in the not-too-distant future, Mr. Speaker, that we will
be using Federal funds to support responsible, ethical embryonic stem
cell research, and H.R. 3144 will do it.
____________________