[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 81 (Wednesday, June 21, 2006)]
[House]
[Pages H4383-H4389]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      EMBRYONIC STEM CELL RESEARCH

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Poe). 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, there is a present and growing 
interest in our country in the potential for the materials created from 
stem cells to produce quite miraculous cures. Indeed, we have been 
working with adult stem cells for more than 30 years, and there are a 
large number of applications in medicine.
  We have been working with embryonic stem cells for far less than 
that, but because of their primordial nature, the experts in the 
research field and the medical field believe that there ought to be 
more potential from embryonic stem cells than there are from adult stem 
cells.
  But the way we now create embryonic stem cell lines presents ethical 
problems for a large number of American citizens, indeed, I believe, 
more than half of them, because all embryonic stem cells lines now are 
produced by destroying embryos. But because of the potentially vast 
potential for application of embryonic stem cells to medical cures, 
there is an increasing interest in the possibility of ethically 
creating embryonic stem cell lines or embryonic cell-like lines of 
tissues. And that is what we are going to spend a few moments talking 
about this evening.
  I am joined on the floor this evening by Representative Osborne, who 
has a longstanding interest in this subject. And I would like to 
recognize him now and to commend him for his knowledge and interest in 
this subject. Congressman Osborne.
  Mr. OSBORNE. Thank you, Mr. Bartlett. I appreciate your expertise, 
your knowledge in this area. And my remarks will be relatively brief 
because you are the one that truly understands your bill and 
understands the research much better than I.
  But I would say, Mr. Speaker, that nearly all of us have been 
impacted, either directly or indirectly, by diseases

[[Page H4384]]

like juvenile diabetes, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, Lou Gehrig's disease 
and spinal injuries. And there has been a great clamor over the last 7 
years, since embryonic stem cells have been recognized as a possible 
source of cures for these diseases, that there should be public funding 
of embryonic stem cell research.
  The ethical dilemma, obviously, for those of us who are prolife, who 
believe in the sanctity of life, is that we would like to see research 
occur that is helpful, but we don't really want to see human embryos 
destroyed in the process. And I think that is what brings Mr. Bartlett 
and I to the floor together this afternoon, our common interest in some 
research of this type, but an aversion to the destruction of human 
embryos. And so I really applaud him for what he has done and for his 
bill and just make a few comments.
  I think the ethical dilemma really revolves around when does life 
begin. And for some people it is at 9 months. For some it is at birth. 
For some it is at 3 months, 6 months. But for a great many of us, it is 
at conception. And if that is your belief, then an embryo constitutes a 
human life, so what happens to that embryo is of great concern.
  And so the research that we are going to talk about this afternoon 
has to do with allowing research with human embryos that does not harm 
or destroy the embryo. And therein lies, I think, the interest that I 
have in this particular process.
  There have been a few studies done just recently that I would like to 
refer to. This came from the National Institute of Neurological 
Disorders. It is published by the National Institutes of Health. And 
this is the quote. I believe that this was posted June 21, just a day 
or two ago. ``For the first time, researchers have enticed transplants 
of embryonic stem cell-derived motor neurons in the spinal cord to 
connect with muscles and partially restore function in paralyzed 
animals. The study suggests that similar techniques may be useful in 
treating such disorders as spinal cord injury'' in humans. And, of 
course, this was done primarily with mice. But that is just recently, 
in the last couple of days, where paralyzed mice have actually had some 
of their motor functions and some of their paralysis reversed through a 
process that has not resulted from the destruction of human embryos.
  The second study I would like to mention was published on Monday, 
October 17, 2005, in the Washington Post. It said, ``Two teams of 
scientists provided the first definitive evidence yesterday that 
embryonic stem cells can be grown in laboratory dishes without harming 
healthy embryos, an advance that some scientists and philosophers 
believe could make the medically promising field more politically and 
ethically acceptable.''
  And I think this was pretty much the genesis of the gentleman's bill 
and his research. So, rather than taking further time from the expert, 
I am just going to offer my words of support, my appreciation for his 
knowledge in this area.
  He is, to my understanding, the only geneticist in the House of 
Representatives, the only one with the adequate scientific 
understanding to truly bring this forward. And so I applaud you for 
your research and your stance and for the promise that your bill holds 
for many of us.
  And as many of us know, the President has talked about vetoing any 
bill that would result in future destruction of human embryos. We 
believe this is an answer to that concern and a way around that veto.
  And so with that, Mr. Bartlett, I yield to you and thank you for your 
work.
  Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Thank you. I appreciate you mentioning that 
recent article on the application of stem cell therapy to these 
paralyzed mice and the quite miraculous response.
  It is kind of ironic and teleologically difficult to explain, to 
understand why the nerve tissue outside the central nervous system can 
heal itself. If you cut your hand or your leg, and you lose feeling in 
your finger or your foot, by and by that feeling will return as the 
nerves grow. If you cut a nerve in the central nervous system, it 
doesn't regrow, which is why there are so many paralyzed people from 
spinal cord injuries and from diseases like multiple sclerosis and so 
forth.
  Stem cell applications provide the hope that we might be able to grow 
nerve cells and implant them in these patients so that they could 
recover some activity. And this paper that Congressman Osborne referred 
to in mice gives us hope that that is a real possibility.
  Mr. Speaker, I have here in this chart a very abbreviated sequence in 
the fertilization and the development of the embryo. It begins here 
with what is called a zygote. A zygote is made up of the two germ cells 
which have united up here before this one is shown. And then it goes 
through several developments, through the morula stage and the blastula 
stage. The blastula is shown here. And finally, the gastrula. And these 
are sequence. And you will see more of this in the next chart.
  But when we get to the gastrula stage, we now have the production of 
what is called three germ layers. This cell that began up here as a 
single cell produced by the chromosomes that came from the ovum, the 
female sex cell, and the sperm, the male sex cell, have now divided 
again and again and again, and finally these cells begin a process 
which we call differentiation. They are now differentiating into what 
will ultimately become all the organ systems of the body.
  In this early differentiation, we have what we call the three stem 
cell lines. We have the ectoderm, which is the external layer; the 
mesoderm, meaning middle; and we have the endoderm. These we refer to 
as the three germ layers. And then, of course, we have also the quite 
unique germ cells themselves. In the female that will, of course, be 
the ovum from the ovary. In the male it will be the sperm from the 
testicle.

                              {time}  1630

  Now, in each of these three basic germ cell lines, we have a stem 
cell, which in the ectoderm, it will differentiate into your skin, it 
will differentiate into your nervous system, the central nervous 
system, the spinal cord and all the nerves in your body. The mesoderm, 
the stem cells there will differentiate into the major part of your 
body. All the muscle, the cardiac muscle, the skeletal muscle, all of 
the bones, and all of the blood develops from the mesoderm.
  The blood is particularly interesting because persisting even in the 
adult are stem cells for producing blood cells because we keep 
producing blood cells. They keep breaking down and are removed from the 
circulation by the liver and the kidney; so we keep producing new ones. 
So even in the adult, you can see these stem cells, which produce a 
great variety of blood cells. In the bone marrow, it produces the 
erythrocytes and the thrombocytes and what we call the 
polymorphonuclear leukocytes, which are part of the white cells. And 
then we have the entoderm. There is not much mass of entoderm in our 
body. That doesn't mean it is not important. The pancreas, the thyroid 
gland, and the lining of our intestinal system and the lungs and so 
forth all originate from entoderm.
  It is very interesting that these cells retain their original 
inheritance kind of even in the adult. When you are 50, 60 years old, 
if you get a cancer and that cancer metastasizes, if it is a cancer on 
mesodermal tissue, it will metastasize only to other tissues that 
develop from mesoderm. That is really quite interesting that they have 
retained that much of their original characteristics, of their original 
selectivity.
  The next chart shows in a little more detail the fertilization 
process and the development of the embryo. And I am spending a couple 
of minutes on this, Mr. Speaker, because I think it is important to 
understand what is being done in the scientific world and what the 
ethical problems are for those who believe that the embryo is a person 
in miniature with all of the genetic capabilities to produce a complete 
human person and therefore it ought not be destroyed.
  This is a reproductive tract of the female here, and it shows the 
vagina and the uterus, and then it shows the two fallopian tubes. And 
the little square here indicates what is shown in this big chart here. 
It is just one half of the reproductive system. Here the uterus is 
split in half. There would be another

[[Page H4385]]

mirror image of this on the other side. And it shows here that the 
ovary, they mature roughly one a month in a female, once every 28 days. 
And then the ovum erupts from the ovary, and it is almost always, not 
always but almost always, picked up by a kind of a funnel end of the 
fallopian tube, which is called the infundibulum.
  Once in a while it is not picked up and the ovum will go on out here 
in the body cavity, and the sperm, which are released, of course, down 
in the vagina. They go up into the uterus, and then they swim against 
the current, by the way, because there is some little cilia in here. 
This ovum has no motility on its own, and it slowly moves down the 
fallopian tube by cilia in the walls not shown here, which are beating 
and moving it down, and the sperm swim against that. And some of them 
will make it out the end of the fallopian tube clear out into body 
cavity, and if there is an ovum out there, they may fertilize it. And 
then the fertilized ovum will implant on some adjacent body tissue, and 
we call this an ectopic pregnancy. Of course, the body is not meant to 
develop a baby out there; so that needs to be interrupted by surgery or 
the mother may die.
  But as the little diagram here shows, here are the sperm coming up 
and they fertilize the egg way up into the fallopian tube several days 
before it will implant down in the uterus. There is quite a miracle 
that happens here. There are millions of those sperm, and as soon as 
one of them makes it through the wall of the ovum to fertilize it, 
there is immediate chemical change in the wall of the ovum and no other 
sperm can get through because it would be absolutely disastrous if 
another sperm got through. That would produce when we call polyploidy, 
and that would result in the death of the embryo. Now, polyploidy 
reacts very differently in the plant world because that is how we make 
giant flowers and super fruits and vegetables and so forth.
  We simply produce polyploidy, and that makes everything brighter and 
better and sweeter smelling. But in animals, humans and all other 
animals, this polyploidy would produce death.
  So now the egg is fertilized, and we call it a zygote. So now here is 
the zygote. It begins its trek down the fallopian tube, and it takes 
several days. Here we have day 4 and day 5 and day 6 and 7, and you see 
it is going up around day 7, 8, or 9 before it finally implants in the 
wall of the uterus. But as it goes down the fallopian tube here, it 
divides to produce two cells.
  Then it divides again to produce four cells and then eight cells, and 
we will come back to talk about this eight-cell stage because it has a 
special significance in one of the techniques that may be exploited to 
produce some ethically generated embryonic stem cell lines, and then it 
goes on to divide. Again, it goes through the morula stage and then it 
goes to the blastula stage and then the gastrula stage, and we saw that 
on the previous chart.
  I would like to note that it is about here at the inner-cell mass 
stage, about at this stage, that the embryo is generally taken, not, of 
course, from the reproductive tract because all of this can also be 
done in a petri dish in the laboratory. You simply superovulate the 
mother and she may produce a dozen or so eggs, and you wash those eggs 
out, and then you put them in a petri dish and expose them to the 
sperm, and they fertilize.
  And then they begin to develop, and they grow and develop into all of 
the different stages that we see here. And so in the petri dish when 
they have developed to the inner-cell mass stage, which, remember, is 
the stage where we saw that they were going to develop into the three 
germ lines, this is the stage at which they take the cells. They simply 
kill the embryo, and they take the cells from the embryo to produce an 
embryonic stem cell line.
  Several years ago the President issued an executive order that said 
that we could not use Federal money if we were getting our stem cell 
lines from destroying these embryos but we could use Federal money in 
continuing with research on stem cell lines that were then in 
existence. The President said, and some may have indicated that that 
was the case, that there were probably 60 or so stem cell lines in 
existence then. If there were, they have now dwindled to about 20, more 
or less, stem cell lines, all of which are contaminated with mouse 
feeder cells.
  I might spend just a moment to indicate what these feeder cells are. 
When we take these cells out of the inner-cell mass, these cells really 
do not like being alone or even nearly alone. They like company. And so 
they frequently put them in the company of other cells so that they can 
reproduce because, if separated, it is more difficult to get them to 
reproduce. So taking them from the fellowship they find in the embryo 
and putting them in a petri dish to tissue culture them, many of them 
will refuse to divide. But if you put them in the company of other 
cells, in this case the mouse feeder cells, then they divide. Well, 
this has now contaminated these present stem cell lines so that none of 
them can be used for therapy. It does not disqualify them for research; 
so some meaningful research is still going on.

  There are four different potential approaches to producing embryonic 
stem cells without harming embryos or embryonic stem cell-like cells 
that could produce tissue cultures. And we have a bill, H.R. 5526. This 
is a companion bill to the Santorum-Specter bill in the Senate. Mr. 
Speaker, as you know, the politics of this is that we have a bill that 
has been in the Senate for quite a while known as the Castle bill, Mike 
Castle from Delaware.
  What this bill does is to permit the use of Federal money to take 
some of those surplus embryos which are in our reproduction clinics. 
When a mother goes in to have in vitro fertilization, as I indicated, 
they will superovulate the mother with hormones. They get a number of 
eggs, they will fertilize them in a petri dish, and then they get a 
dozen, more or less, embryos. They then look at these embryos under a 
microscope, and they choose the best two or three and implant them in 
the mother's uterus because they do not all take. My daughter-in-law 
has just gone through a procedure, and at first, we thought that she 
had twins, and now it is just a single baby, for which we are very 
thankful.
  The fertilized eggs which are left which have now become embryos are 
frequently refrozen. The parents pay to refreeze them to keep them, 
because something may happen to this baby and maybe they will want a 
second child or a third child, and they will stay frozen for quite a 
while; so they put them in the freezer. But by and by, they will decide 
that they do not want more children; so they will no longer pay for 
keeping the eggs frozen in which case, the fertilized eggs, they are 
simply discarded. And what the Castle bill says is that parents donate 
these embryos that are going to discarded anyhow to medical research 
and to the development of stem cell lines that, hopefully, will provide 
miraculous cures of many diseases that Congressman Osborne mentioned, 
for which we now hold out high hopes.
  The problem that pro-life people have with this is if you are looking 
generically at 400,000 surplus embryos, and that is about what is out 
there, about 400,000, you may make the argument that if they are going 
to be discarded anyhow, why not get some medical good from them? But 
there are two problems that pro-life people have ethically with this. 
One is that before you decide to destroy the embryo, you are going to 
look at it under the microscope to make sure it is healthy because you 
are going to want to get cells from a healthy embryo.
  So it is not 400,000 embryos that you are concerned with now. It is 
one embryo under the microscope. And when you are looking at that 
embryo under the microscope, it could be the next Albert Einstein, it 
could be the next Beethoven. And, again, we are not dealing with the 
400,000 out there. We are dealing with the one under the microscope. 
That is the one for which we have responsibility, and how could you 
kill the next Einstein or Beethoven?
  And another concern that the pro-life community has is that if we 
permit the destruction of these surplus embryos, who knows, but what we 
may be producing more surplus embryos so we will have more embryos to 
use for establishing stem cell lines? So there is a real need, Mr. 
Speaker, to develop techniques to ethically get embryonic stem cell 
lines or embryonic stem cell-like lines that will have the potential of 
embryonic stem cells.
  Just a moment to talk about how embryonic stem cells are different

[[Page H4386]]

from adult stem cells. Adult stem cells have already gone through a lot 
of differentiation. They are either of ectodermal, mesodermal, or 
entodermal origin. They are already destined to become nerve tissue or 
muscle or blood or the lining of the gut or something like that. And it 
is true that we can sometimes kind of reverse that differentiation, and 
we will talk about that in a few moments. And it is also true that even 
without doing that, you can make some applications to the development 
of tissues for that specific part of the body. But because of their 
primordial nature, because of their ability, we call it pluripotency. 
They can produce any tissue in the body. Totipotency means that they 
cannot only produce every tissue in the body, but they can produce 
every tissue that the embryo needs so that it can develop into a full 
baby. See, the embryo is not just an embryo because about half of the 
tissues of the early embryo end up with what we call trophoblast or the 
amnion and corion which attaches the baby to the mother's wall, 
protects the baby in an enclosed, warm fluid environment while it 
develops during its 9 months.

                              {time}  1645

  These ethical concerns have resulted in a lot of study by a lot of 
people to see if there is a way of doing it, where we can get the 
potential from these embryonic stem cell lines, which any one line can 
produce any and every tissue in the body theoretically.
  I will tell you, Mr. Speaker, we are not there yet, because these 
embryonic stem cells, much like an energetic teenager, just want to 
divide. They want to do things. They want to grow.
  There are some who feel that their tendency to just grow and divide 
is going to be very hard to control and you are going to end up 
producing tumors and cancers and that sort of thing when you put them 
in the body. But there are a lot of knowledgeable, professional people 
out there who believe that we can control that, that there is 
incredible potential from these embryonic stem cell lines, so we are 
trying to get embryonic stem cell lines or embryonic-like stem cell 
lines that avoid these ethical confrontations.
  The next chart shows us three of the four that were looked at by a 
special commission that the President set up on bioethics. Several 
years ago they looked at the various possibilities out there and they 
looked at the pros and cons, and they have a little white paper on this 
subject which is worth the hour or so that it takes to read it because 
it goes through all of these techniques and it looks at the pros and 
the cons of these techniques.
  First, we have here kind of a recapitulation of some things that we 
have been talking about. This shows the development of the gammies. 
They go through a process of division, and they divide again and again. 
Most of those divisions are what we call mitotic divisions, where the 
chromosomes split and the daughter cells have as many chromosomes as 
the original cell.
  But once in that process there is a division which we call a meiotic 
division, called meiosis, and in that division the chromosomes split 
and half of them go to one cell and half to another cell, and that 
produces a gamete or a sex cell which has only half the requisite 
number of chromosomes, which we call the haploid number of chromosomes.
  Of course, the design now is that these two cells will come together 
in a process which we call fertilization, when the sperm will fertilize 
the egg, and then we have the single cell embryo, and then it divides 
and here we have the 3-day and the 5- to 7-day embryo, which we saw in 
more detail in previous charts.
  Mr. Speaker, we have heard a lot these days about cloning. Dolly the 
Sheep was the first cloned mammal, and this little sequence here shows 
how they do cloning.
  What they do in cloning is to take an egg cell, and this egg cell has 
a big cytoplasm, this is what is outside the nucleus, and it has the 
nucleus. The nucleus contains a lot of genetic material. It contains 
most of the genetic material that determines whether you are going to 
be a person or a frog, or whether you are going to be a male or a 
female.
  But out in the cytoplasm are other proteins, protein-like substances, 
that have a lot of genetic capability too. What they do is pretty much 
control what goes on in the nucleus. So we have these RNA, ribonucleic 
acid out there, and these factors now control what goes on in the 
nucleus.
  So if you take an egg and you take the nucleus out of the egg and 
then you take a donor cell, this is a somatic, which means body, take a 
cell from the body, and you now combine, you fuse these two cells, you 
take the cytoplasm from the egg nucleus from the donor cell, and you 
now have the nucleus from the donor cell in the environment of a 
cytoplasm from the egg and the factors in that cytoplasm now which 
control what happens inside the nucleus, with--everything is not 
detailed here. We kind of shocked this a little bit so the nucleus from 
the donor cell forgets it is the nucleus from a donor cell, so it now 
can be controlled by these control factors out in the cytoplasm.
  This is now called cloning. So now we have an organism produced that 
looks nothing like the egg from which you took the nucleus. It now 
looks like the adult from which you took the somatic cell. So this is 
what cloning is.
  By the way, we will have a chart a little later which shows this. 
Nature has been cloning for a very long time in a way, because every 
time we have a set of identical twins, one of them is a clone. I guess 
you could choose which one of the two you wanted to say was the clone. 
We will have a chart on that in a few minutes.
  The next chart here shows three of the four techniques that are 
outlined in this report put out by the President's Bioethics Council.
  Altered nuclear transfer. I showed the cloning one, because this is 
very much like cloning. As a matter of fact, the techniques you go 
through are the same laboratory techniques you go through with cloning.
  But what you do here is to knock out a gene for normal development, 
and you do that before you put the nucleus in the sex cell from which 
you have removed the nucleus. So you now have deactivated a gene which 
is necessary for the complete development of the embryo. That gene 
happens to control the development of what we call decidua, which is 
the amnion and the chorian.
  This cannot develop into a baby because it can't produce an amnion 
and a chorian, and so it is just a growth of tissues, all the kinds of 
tissues that are in a baby but not a baby, because you deactivated the 
gene necessary for the normal development.
  What you do later, then, is turn that gene back on. It can never 
begin a baby. You turn that gene back on so the cells are normal cells, 
and then you can take cells from that to establish an embryonic stem 
cell line.
  One can imagine, Mr. Speaker, the ethical objections which may be 
raised to this. But this is simply kind of a crippled child that you 
have produced here. We don't kill crippled children after they are out 
of the womb. Why should we kill crippled children produced in the 
laboratory?
  Mr. Speaker, there is almost no technique against which some ethical 
objection could not be levied. In life, we are always making choices. 
When you look at the potential good from embryonic stem cell research, 
there is a level of risk that one is willing to take.
  Every time I get in my car and drive down here to the Hill there is a 
risk involved. Not everybody who drives from Frederick down here makes 
it down. Every once in awhile there is a fatal accident on the way down 
here. But the value of what I am doing here I believe exceeds the risk 
that is involved in coming here, and so I come. It is that way with 
this nuclear transfer.
  The second one of these is embryo biopsy, and I will come back to 
that in a little more detail later, because this is one I have been 
personally involved with for a number of years now. I spoke to the 
President about this before he came out with his executive order and 
have been working with people at NIH. So I will reserve more discussion 
of this until we come to a couple of charts a little later.
  But let me just indicate that what one does here is to envision 
removing cells from an embryo without harming the embryo and then using 
the cell which you have removed to produce a tissue culture of 
embryonic stem cells. Then if you implant the cells remaining in a 
mother, they go on to produce

[[Page H4387]]

what appears to be a perfectly normal baby.

  When I first suggested this several years ago, I did not know in the 
meantime there were going to be laboratories which were doing precisely 
this. It started in England, and now there are more than 2,000 babies 
born worldwide where a cell is taken, generally from the eight cell 
stage. Generally they get two cells, and they have taken that cell to 
do a pre-implantation genetic diagnosis.
  This is to make sure the baby is not going to be mongoloid or have a 
genetic defect. If they find no defect from that single cell they have 
taken out, they implant the remaining cells in the mother, and more 
than 2,000 times now we have a perfectly normal baby, what appears to 
be a perfectly normal baby born.
  Mr. Speaker, I would be surprised if there was any effect. In a 
former life, I was privileged to get a doctorate in human physiology. I 
taught in medical school. I had a course in advanced embryology, and I 
knew that whenever we had identical twins, that half of the cells were 
taken away from the original embryo and each half became a perfectly 
normal baby.
  So I argued and asked the researchers at NIH 4 or 5 years ago, was 
this a rational argument? I argued that if you could take half the 
cells away from the embryo and each half produced a perfectly normal 
baby, certainly you could take one or two cells away from the embryo 
and the embryo wouldn't even know it.
  Now we have the potential for something which really is quite 
exciting, which we will come to a slide a little later and discuss that 
in more detail.
  The last one here of these three, this altered nuclear transfer here 
and the embryo biopsy and cells from dead embryos, I have several 
slides in a few moments that we will go over cells from a dead embryo.
  Many of these embryos are just not going to make it, which is why the 
clinician looks at them under the microscope before he implants them in 
the mother. They now have done a lot of observation and research to 
determine how early you can identify an embryo which is in effect dead. 
But like the person who is dead, you can still take organs from the 
person that are perfectly good for implanting in another person, and we 
do that all the time.
  So it occurred to the researchers in this area that maybe when the 
embryo was dead, and by that we mean it did not have the ability to 
further divide, it was not going to become a baby and you could clearly 
identify that state, that maybe the cells in the embryo, at least some 
of them, were still quite normal and quite viable. So this whole 
procedure now presumes that we can identify dead embryos that are not 
going to make it, but they still have life, good cells in them.
  So this procedure would be very analogous to taking organs from that 
young fellow who rides the motorcycle, my wife calls them 
``donorcycles,'' and he has an accident and he is brain dead, but his 
tissues are still quite good, so they take the tissues from this dead 
person and implant them. We do that all the time. So there was a 
thought, and research, observations, seem to verify that indeed there 
is the possibility of doing that.
  The next chart shows us a fourth technique, which is a very exciting 
one. If, in fact, we can do this, this holds enormous potential, 
because now we can avoid all of the rejection phenomena.
  You see, if you develop a tissue from a embryonic stem cell line or 
an adult stem cell line and you now put that tissue in a person, it is 
foreign to them and it will be rejected. So we have a lot of medicines 
we give which makes them very susceptible to infections and so forth. 
We have medicines we give them now so they won't reject this tissue.
  But in this reprogramming, you now could potentially take a cell from 
the patient and you could reprogram that cell. What they are doing here 
to reprogram is exploiting these very fascinating and powerful control 
factors which are out in the cytoplasm.
  Here we have an embryonic cell and it has a cytoplasm, and you can 
crush the cell and you can now put the nucleus of the donor cell in, or 
infuse it with this stuff from the embryonic stem cell, and it will now 
control the nucleus and de-differentiate it and take it back to its 
primordial state so it now behaves as if it were a embryonic stem cell.

                              {time}  1700

  The only possible ethical criticism of this is that where do you get 
these sex cells to begin with? Well, if you get them by superovulation 
of the mother, there is some medical risk in superovulation. There is 
also the possibility, though, that we could dedifferentiate by 
subjecting them to some sort of a chemical, which would have the same 
effect on them as these control factors in the cytoplasm here; it is 
referred to as cell soup, and there are these little polypeptides in 
there that, like polypeptides that are in a ribonucleic acid which can 
control what happens in the nucleus. But you may also be able to affect 
what they do by subjecting them to some sort of a chemical which would 
kind of reprogram them.
  And then the last thing here at the bottom simply looks at stem cells 
from mature organs. And the one that I mentioned, which is one 
frequently used, is from the bone marrow, because even in the adult, 
even today I still have stem cells in my bone marrow because my bone 
marrow is always making white blood cells and red blood cells and 
thrombocytes. They are the little cells that are responsible for the 
clotting of your blood.
  Next, I have a chart, and I think there are several of these that 
look in more detail at Dr. Landry. And Dr. Landry is the one who first 
made the suggestion. He has proceeded with some vigor to explore the 
potential here for getting cells, good cells, from a clinically dead 
embryo. And, of course, the first thing you had to do was to develop a 
criteria for embryonic death. You need a dead embryo that still has 
good cells. And, again, let me use the analogy of the dead person from 
the auto accident who still has good organs. So this is a dead embryo 
who still has good cells. And it says here that we need a diagnostic 
test for embryonic death, because if one researcher is going to use 
cells from an embryo that he says was dead, there has to be some 
verifiable basis for declaring that the embryo was dead so other people 
would understand. So obviously it would be dead if he kills it, but it 
needs to be dead before he takes the cells from it.
  Death is a question of medical fact, not law. We can't write a law 
that says what death is. And, indeed, clinical death now is not defined 
by law, it is defined by medical fact.
  And these embryo do die, and they watch them. They are not dividing. 
They watch them for several days. They do not divide, and ultimately 
they just deteriorate, and they are gone. So the argument is that if 
you can identify when, in fact, they will never go on to develop an 
embryo, that at that point they are dead as far as any ability to 
produce a baby is concerned, and if you now do not wait for the several 
extra days to which deterioration would occur, the point of death, like 
the point of death from an auto accident where you can get good organs, 
at the point of death of the embryo, and when it will no longer develop 
into a baby, you now can take cells from which you can just have the 
stem cell lines.
  The next chart shows a little more detail of this, and what it shows 
is that embryo 2 is dead. It shows that you can look at the embryo, and 
they look different, and it can be documented that, in fact, the 
embryos that are not going to go on to divide at a certain stage in 
their development look different. You can identify, you can say of a 
certainty this embryo will go on to divide, this embryo will not go on 
to divide. And so you can now make that determination. And when we have 
developed the techniques for this, and when we have determined that, in 
fact, we can develop stem cell lines from these, then we will have 
potentially a technique for getting embryonic stem cells without the 
destruction of an embryo because the embryo is already dead.
  The next chart just is more detail of this. We can look at that 
quickly.
  New criteria for embryonic death and natural history study of 
arrested embryos. They are arrested; that is, that the development 
stops at a certain stage. It won't continue beyond that. They observed 
444 nonviable in vitro fertilized embryos; 142 were arrested at

[[Page H4388]]

the stage of an immature morula, about day 5, and we saw it in one of 
the previous charts. And they determined that these embryos were not 
going to divide because they just kept looking at them, and they 
ultimately deteriorated.
  So if they, in fact, have good cells, and they have taken cells from 
these embryos, and then cells, in fact, are viable, and they can be 
cultured, and so with more research on this, this is a possibility for 
getting embryonic stem cell lines.
  The next chart shows what happens in twinning. And it was this 
knowledge about I guess it was 5 years ago now when before the 
President gave his Executive Order, there was an open house at NIH, and 
staff and members were invited out to talk with the researchers at NIH 
about the potential for embryonic stem cell research. And there were a 
lot of staff members there; I think I was the only Member there. And I 
remember thinking as we were talking about embryonic stem cell research 
that this is what happened. And it doesn't always happen at this stage, 
by the way, but this shows the development of twins splitting at the 
inner cell mass stage. The inner cell mass splits; now the embryo 
splits in half, and now you have two babies. This also could occur at 
the two-cell stage. It splits in half at the two-cell stage. And you 
know roughly when it split by how the babies present. In this case, the 
babies present in two separate amnions. If it is split here at the two-
cell stage, they present in a single amnion.
  But what this told me was that obviously you could take cells from an 
embryo and not hurt the embryo, because in this case half the cells are 
taken from the embryo. This half went on to produce a baby, and this 
half went on to produce a baby. So if you could take half the cells 
from the embryo, and each half produced a normal baby, then why 
couldn't you take a cell or two from the embryo without hurting the 
embryo? And I asked the researchers at NIH shouldn't that be a 
possibility? And they told me, yes, that should be a possibility.
  And I was in an event with the President and mentioned this 
conversation to him, and a couple of days later Karl Rove called and 
said that he had followed up on this at the President's request, and 
they couldn't do that. I said, ``Karl, either they didn't understand 
your question, or they are funning you, because these are the same 
people that can go inside of a cell and take out the nucleus and put 
another nucleus in the cell. And they are telling you they can't take a 
cell or two out of these big embryos? Of course they can.'' And a 
female sex cell is big. That ovum is a giant cell compared to the 
somatic cells that they are taking a nucleus out of.
  So he said, ``I will go ask them again.'' And so he went back and 
asked them again. He came back and said, ``Roscoe, they tell me they 
can't do that.'' So the President came down with his Executive Order 
which says that the only stem cell lines we can use Federal money to do 
research on are those that are now already in existence.
  It was a couple of years after that when NIH researchers were sitting 
in my office that I learned what had happened. Mr. Speaker, this is 
illustrative of what happens so many times in our society. When we 
think we are carrying on a dialogue, we are really carrying on 
simultaneous monologues, and there was just a misunderstanding.
  What they told him was that they weren't sure that they could develop 
a stem cell line from a single cell taken from an early embryo. And 
that was true. He interpreted it as saying that they couldn't take the 
cell from the early embryo. Well, what we wanted to do with our 
research was animal experimentation, which would determine whether or 
not you could develop a stem cell line from a single embryo. And, as 
luck would have it, Mr. Speaker, the medical community has kind of 
almost passed us by now, because in the 5 years since I first started 
exploring this with NIH and then the White House and then a number of 
meetings with NIH since then, as I mentioned, in England they have 
developed techniques for taking a cell from an early embryo, the H cell 
stage, in the laboratory, doing a preimplantation genetic diagnosis, 
making sure there was no genetic defect, and then implanting the 
remaining cells, the embryo, in the mother, and more than 2,000 times 
worldwide now we have what appears to be a perfectly normal baby born.
  I keep saying what appears to be because we haven't watched these 
babies for 60, 80, 90 years, however long they will live, to make sure 
there is no defect. But I would be enormously surprised, and so would 
the professional community, enormously surprised, if there are any 
defects. Because if there were, then every twin ought to have a big 
defect because they represent only half the cells from the original 
embryo.
  In our conversations with a number of people, we were talking with 
Richard Doerflinger, who represents the Council of Catholic Bishops. 
And I really want to credit him with making an incredible contribution 
to this dialogue, because what he said was, ``Roscoe, what you do with 
that first cell you take is not a preimplantation genetic diagnosis. 
What you do with that cell is to establish a repair kit.'' So that now 
any time during the life of this baby, 1 year, 10 years, 50 years, 80 
years old, when they have a medical problem that could benefit from the 
development of tissues from embryonic stem cell line, it can be 
developed from their embryonic stem cell line because you have got this 
repair kit available for them.
  What this did, Mr. Speaker, is to open up the possibility when we are 
using Federal funds of avoiding, I think, any ethical concern, because 
the parents will have already made two decisions: one, to do in vitro 
fertilization; and, secondly, to take a cell to establish a repair kit 
and maybe to do a preimplantation genetic diagnosis if they want to 
take a second cell. And frequently they get two cells rather than one 
from this early embryo, and it doesn't matter if you take one or two, 
the other cells go on to produce a perfectly normal baby.
  So if this is a potential for the future, the stem cell lines could 
be achieved by simply asking the parents to donate a few cells from 
their repair kit. So now the decisions made to get to the repair kit 
have been decisions that parents make in what they think is the best 
interest of their child. They want to have one, they can't have one 
naturally, so they do in vitro fertilization, and they want to make 
sure that the child has the protection of a repair kit.
  And, by the way, we kind of do that now when we freeze cord blood. 
Cord blood has nowhere near the potential of a cell taken from this 
early embryo, but it is that person, and for whatever you can get from 
it, at least there are going to be no rejection phenomena.
  The next chart shows a bit of one of the pages of the white paper on 
the President's Council on Bioethics, and I have highlighted here. It 
may be some time before stem cell lines can be reliably derived from 
single cells. Again, this was written now in about late 2001 or 2002, 
but since that time we have had two researchers, Verlinsky and Landry, 
both of whom claim that they have developed a stem cell line from a 
single cell. That was what NIH thought might be difficult to do, but 
there are now two researchers who say they have done that.
  They say it may be some time that stem cell lines can be reliably 
derived from single cells, extracted from early embryos, and in ways 
that do no harm to the embryo. Well, they have more than 2,000 babies 
born by extracting these cells. But, again, if we simply use surplus 
cells from a repair kit, we have avoided, I think, any meaningful 
ethical objection.
  But the initial success of the Verlinsky group's efforts, I mentioned 
Verlinsky and now Landry more recently, and note here an asterisk. And 
they say, ``A similar idea was proposed by Representative Roscoe 
Bartlett as far back as 2001.'' And you can see it has been for 5 years 
since I have been pursuing this possibility.
  The next chart and our last chart kind of is a summary, Mr. Speaker, 
of what we have been talking about. And what this does is to look at 
the classical development when you go to the eight-cell stage, and then 
it develops into a blastula, and you can now either implant that in the 
uterus, or you can kill it to get stem cell lines.

                              {time}  1715

  You can now either implant that in the uterus or you can kill it to 
get

[[Page H4389]]

stem cell lines. Ethically, that is not something that I am comfortable 
with. It is not something I think a majority of our people are 
comfortable with, or you can go through what we have just gone through, 
take a single cell from this blastom here and implant the remaining 
cells, let them develop, implant them and then develop a stem cell line 
from this single cell, then the altered nuclear transfer that we talked 
about.
  This kind of summarizes the potential from those two techniques, and 
again, what we have done to make this ethical is altered nuclear 
transfer. We have shut off one of the genes in the cytoplasm so that 
the nucleus now cannot be induced to make all of the tissue necessary 
to produce a baby. It produces all of the tissues necessary for baby, 
but not the tissue necessary for growth of the baby in the womb, the 
amnion and the chorion.
  The important thing, Mr. Speaker, is, and I want to be politically 
correct for just a moment here. It is not just that we want to do 
things that are politically popular. We certainly do not want to do 
things that are politically unpopular because we all like to get 
reelected and return here, but we want to do things which have medical 
meaning.
  The Senate, I believe, very shortly is going to vote on the Castle 
bill. The President has said that he will veto that. Many people, and 
they come to our offices, these children with diabetes and so forth, 
people who have relatives who have Parkinson's disease or any one of 
the wasting diseases of the nervous system that might be treated with 
this, and they are incensed we are not doing something about this and 
using their money to develop what they think is enormous potential from 
these stem cell lines.
  The President will veto because he is devoutly pro-life for which I 
respect him. He will veto the Castle bill. We need to have on the 
President's desk not just for political purposes, although I think that 
is important, but because of the enormous potential from embryonic stem 
cell lifelines, we need to have a bill on his desk that will permit the 
use, the ethical use, of Federal funds to produce these stem cell lines 
from which we might get enormous good.
  The miracles of medicine have increased lifelines. I just passed my 
80th birthday. I am wondering when I am going to enter mid-life. My 
grandfather would have never thought of entering mid-life after his 
80th year, but we have really miracles of medicine today, and this 
provides miracles greater than we have seen.
  Now we have enormous potential here, and I hope, Mr. Speaker, we have 
the political courage to do the right thing for the American people and 
get this bill, along with the Castle bill on the President's desk so 
that the President has a bill which promises the miracles, potential 
miracles of embryonic stem cell research ethically.

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