[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 89 (Tuesday, July 11, 2006)]
[House]
[Pages H5036-H5042]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      EMBRYONIC STEM CELL RESEARCH

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. WILSON of South Carolina). 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, we have appeared here on the 
floor several times to talk about a subject which is very important to 
a number of Americans, particularly those with some debilitating 
diseases that they believe might be cured with technology developed 
from embryonic stem cells.
  I have had the privilege of having several Members of the House to 
work with me in developing the legislation that we are going to talk 
about tonight. And one of those Members is Congressman Tom Osborne from 
Nebraska, who is here with us this evening. And I would like to yield 
to him.
  Mr. OSBORNE. Thank you very much, Mr. Bartlett. I really appreciate 
your leadership on this issue. And you are obviously the expert.
  Mr. Bartlett is a geneticist and understands the topic very well. I 
would just like to set the stage for some of the debate tonight.
  Many of us have been impacted directly or indirectly by diseases like 
juvenile diabetes, Alzheimer's, Lou Gehrig's disease, Parkinson's and 
so on. And so I think everyone understands the desire for people to 
find a cure. And for many people, the silver bullet is embryonic stem 
cell research. And they feel this holds great promise. It has been 
going on now for about 7 years. We have not seen great progress, but it 
is still early in the process. So, as a result, there are many people 
who are pushing very hard for embryonic stem cell research.
  On the other hand, many oppose embryonic stem cell research because 
they see the embryo as a living, viable human being; and therein lies 
the moral dilemma. On the one hand, people see the possibilities and on 
the other hand they see the destruction of life. And so is there a 
possible solution? Where do we come out on this?
  If you believe that life begins at conception and if you believe in 
the sanctity of life, the destruction of embryos for research purposes 
would be largely unacceptable. And so, Mr. Bartlett's legislation holds 
great interest to me, because we have found that there is a possible 
alternative.
  The President has said that he will veto H.R. 810, which is a stem 
cell research bill. And if it is passed by the Senate, and people 
predict that it will be passed, then it will probably be vetoed by the 
President. And at that point, it appears as though the House will 
sustain that veto and probably the Senate as well. So we are right back 
to square one.
  So is there an alternative? And that is why I am here tonight.
  As many people may be aware by now, there is still the potential for 
a morally acceptable stem cell research to be conducted with Federal 
funds through the Bartlett bill. And evidently there is a process at 
the present time whereby embryonic stem cells can be extracted, and it 
is still in its elemental stages, without destroying the embryo. So I 
have great interest in this because it does provide an answer to the 
dilemma that I have just outlined.
  And so, without a lot of further commentary from me, being somewhat 
of an amateur in the area, I would defer to Mr. Bartlett, because he 
truly understands this research, which I think can be the answer that 
so many of us are looking for.
  I personally am a very strong prolife individual, have voted 
consistently in that direction. And so I welcome this opportunity to 
look at a prolife solution to embryonic stem cell research.
  I appreciate the gentleman's work on this bill, appreciate his 
knowledge, his expertise, which is certainly unparalleled in the 
Congress.
  And with that, I just wanted to make those opening preparatory 
remarks and lend my support to this bill and this work that you are 
doing, and thank you for doing it.

                              {time}  1930

  This is all probably going to come to a head here in the next week or 
so; so this is a critical time. And what I think and others are trying 
to do is to create awareness and to make sure that people in the 
Congress understand the nature of the research that he is proposing.
  So I commend you for your work. I want to wish you the very best, and 
hopefully in the next week or 10 days, we will see some positive 
results. So thank you for your leadership.
  Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I thank 
the gentleman for his support, for his leadership on this, and for his 
kind words.
  I was fortunate in another life, before I came to the Congress, to 
have the privilege of working in this general area. I have a doctorate 
in human physiology, and I had the privilege of

[[Page H5037]]

teaching medical school for 5 years and doing biomedical research. And 
when I came to the Congress and learned of the interest in stem cells, 
with my background I saw some opportunities for applications here that 
may not have been apparent to others, and I have been pursuing this now 
for some 5 years with the White House and with the National Institutes 
of Health.
  We are here tonight, Mr. Speaker, because it is our understanding 
that within a few days, probably next week and maybe early next week, 
the Senate is going to be voting on three bills, two of them relevant 
to this, the third somewhat tangential to it.
  One of the bills they will be voting on is the bill that we passed 
here in the Congress here in the House some time ago. It is known as 
the Castle bill here generally, Castle-DeGette bill. This is the bill 
that the President says that if it gets to his desk, as Congressman 
Osborne indicated, he will veto it because this is a bill that would 
use surplus embryos from the fertility clinics, and they would be 
destroyed in the process of securing cells from them to produce these 
stem cell lines, although there is the anticipation, the hope, that a 
great deal of medical good might come from embryonic stem cell 
applications.
  There is a concern of many in our society, which I share, that it is 
not morally acceptable to destroy one life in the hopes that you will 
help another life. So I had hoped that there would be an alternative to 
this, that we could look forward to enjoying the potential benefits of 
embryonic stem cell applications without having to kill embryos.
  And that is what we are here to talk about this evening, because the 
second bill that the Senate will be voting on next week is a bill that 
is essentially identical to the one that we have been working on and 
developing now for these 5 years. The bill that we will vote on in the 
House, we hope, shortly after it is voted on in the Senate, will be a 
companion bill to the Senate bill and essentially the bill that we have 
been working on for these 5 years.
  I would first like to take a look at a chart here which shows, in 
very gross form, the developmental sequence and the origin of what we 
call stem cells so that we can get a little appreciation of what a stem 
cell is so that we can understand the difference between adult stem 
cells and embryonic stem cells and the potential that these hold.
  Here we have a very abbreviated development process. It begins with 
what is called the zygote. The zygote is produced by the union of two 
sex cells, which technically are called gametes. And the zygote then 
goes to a number of cell divisions. And, boy, did they skip a lot here 
because we have just one cell and here we have several hundred cells; 
so it is divided again and again before you get to this point. And this 
is the point of the inner cell mass. And in that inner cell mass which 
will become the embryo, we have the first differentiation of these very 
primordial cells here into three distinct cell types: one is the 
ectoderm and another is the mesoderm and the third one is the endoderm.
  There is a fourth cell type there, limited in number and location, 
and these are the germ cells. These will be the ova, produced in the 
female, and the sperm, produced in the male. What we have here depicted 
is the embryo implanted in the wall of the uterus. This is the uterus 
and this is the embryo and the so-called dissidua, the tissues that 
surround and support the embryo. Only this part of it here will become 
the baby. The rest of this will be the supporting tissues, the amnion 
and the corion, that support the baby.
  In each of these germ layers, and we call these germ layers because 
they are three layers, three types of cells from which all of the 
tissues and organs of the body will develop, the ectoderm will produce 
our skin and our nervous system, and the mesoderm will produce the 
great bulk of our bodies. It will produce all of the muscle cells, our 
heart, the blood system, the smooth muscle cells of our gut and so 
forth. All of these will be produced from the so-called mesoderm. The 
endoderm, much limited in quantity in the body but not in importance, 
our lungs, much of our lungs, the lining of our intestines, and so 
forth are produced from the endoderm.
  Every student in even a pretty elementary biology class will be 
familiar with one type of stem cell, and these are the stem cells that 
produce our blood cells because you can see those very readily in the 
adult. They are located in bone marrow, in the shafts of our ribs and 
so forth, and they produce our red blood cells, the little thrombocytes 
that produce the clotting of blood, and the polymorphonuclear 
leukocytes. These are the leukocytes with a funny shaped nucleus. And 
they are called stem cells because from a single cell type, this will 
differentiate into several types of blood cells, most of the blood 
cells. There are a couple of white blood cells that are produced in 
lymphatic tissue, but most of the blood cells are produced from these 
single stem cells.
  Most of the other tissues here are also produced from stem cells 
because it is a single cell, the ectodermal cell, the differentiations 
of these several types of cells.
  All of these types of cells are adult stem cells, and they have the 
limitation of already having differentiated. They already are 
differentiated so that under ordinary circumstances only certain 
tissues will ever be produced from them. If you can go into the body 
and take out an ectodermal stem cell, unless you are clever and make 
that cell believe that it is something that it is not, it will produce 
only tissues that relate to the ectoderm, cells of our nervous system 
and cells of our integument, or our skin.
  Similarly for the mesodermal cells, if you can get a stem cell even 
before it is a stem cell for blood, back here you can get a stem cell 
from which all of these mesodermal tissues will develop, but you could 
never get ectodermal tissue from that nor could you get entodermal 
tissue from that; so you are somewhat limited as to the types of 
tissues that you might develop from an adult stem cell.
  But if you could go back to the embryonic stem cell, and you may have 
to go back even before this stage of development, when the embryonic 
stem cells are undifferentiated, which means they haven't started to 
become a specific type of cell, you then could theoretically produce 
from those cells any and all of the tissues of the body. So there are a 
number of different diseases where the medical profession treating them 
and the loved ones of the families believe that there could be dramatic 
applications made from embryonic stem cells.
  Every year I look forward to the juvenile diabetic people coming 
through my office. These are such heroic little kids that I see. Some 
of them so brittle that they have an insulin pump and they have to 
puncture their fingers or their earlobe a dozen times a day or more to 
keep track of their insulin because they are so fragile, so brittle, 
they can go from very low glucose to very high glucose with life-
threatening changes.
  Then the people come through the office who have friends and 
relatives who have Parkinson's disease, who have Alzheimer's disease, 
and any of the autoimmune diseases where the body's defenses have been 
confused so that the body is attacking its own tissues. And it is 
believed that in all of these different kinds of diseases that 
embryonic stem cell applications might produce dramatic effects.
  I just returned from a family reunion. And my cousin's husband, who 
was a pathologist here in the Washington area, Washington Adventist 
Hospital in Shady Grove, for years, retired and went to Florida and 
very shortly came down with Parkinson's disease. I recognized him from 
his smile. Other than that, it would have been hard to recognize him 
because of the wasting of his body that has occurred with Parkinson's 
disease. And the mind, of course, is still very alert. It is just the 
mechanical part of the body that is deteriorating.
  And Dr. Teske, Johnny Teske, we were talking about stem cells, 
embryonic stem cells, and he says, ``Time is of the essence.'' And I 
kind of choked up a little when he said that because here is a person 
who really understands this. He is a pathologist. He knows what he has 
got, and he knows what his future is going to be, and what he was 
telling me is that if I am going to benefit from this, you have got to 
do it quickly.
  So I hope, Mr. Speaker, that we are able to move quickly on this in 
the

[[Page H5038]]

House. It is our understanding that the Senate will be moving quickly 
on it. I mentioned that several of our colleagues here have been 
working with us and helping on it. And one that I am very pleased has 
been helping us is someone who is really familiar with this subject 
because he is a physician who has delivered a lot of babies. He gets 
involved down the line from here after all of these tissues have been 
developed and we have that little baby at 9 months in the womb. And 
this is Dr. Gingrey from Georgia.
  I am very pleased that he has joined us and would like to yield to 
him.
  Mr. GINGREY. Mr. Speaker, I deeply appreciate the gentleman from 
Maryland for yielding. And I just want to say, as my good friend and 
our colleague Coach Osborne said at the outset, Roscoe Bartlett 
deserves a lot of credit for this bill, H.R. 5526. And it has not been 
easy. You heard him say, Mr. Speaker, that he has been working on this 
issue for over 5 years, has met with the Bioethics Commission, the 
President's Bioethics Commission, to discuss this issue, discuss this 
issue with the White House, understanding, as he said just a few 
moments ago, that while we want to search for that miraculous medical 
breakthrough, that cure, that hopefully we can obtain either from adult 
or umbilical cord blood stem cells or the even greater potential for 
utilizing embryonic stem cells to save human life, to save the people 
that he was just talking about, Mr. Speaker.
  And, indeed, I am sure you know this as well as the other Members 
that these folks do come by and talk to us on an annual basis, whether 
they are juvenile diabetics or Parkinson's, as he described, 
Alzheimer's. I think often of children born with something called spina 
bifida, where there is an open defect in the spine. One of these germ 
cell layers that Roscoe was just talking about, the ectoderm, something 
goes awry in the developmental process, in the fetal stage of 
development, and these children are born perfectly normal in every way 
except for this defect, which in almost every instance leaves them with 
a permanent, noncurable paralysis usually from the waist down.

                              {time}  1945

  That not only affects their lower extremities, but of course, it 
affects the function of bowel and bladder in these otherwise perfect, 
perfect children, and yet their lifespan is drastically shortened 
because of the complication of this birth defect.
  I have lain awake more than one night thinking about what might be 
done, whether it is a surgical technique or a medication. Obviously, it 
would be great if these birth defects never occurred, if we knew 
exactly what caused that birth defect, but we do not. We just do not, 
and so to be able to develop something, some way of helping these 
children and people with other diseases that the gentleman from 
Maryland has just described is a passion of mine as a physician.
  To come to this Congress, as I did 3\1/2\ years ago in the 108th, and 
to meet other Members of this body on both sides of the aisle, but in 
particular Representative Bartlett, and understand that he has a 
knowledge of this subject far beyond probably any physician Member, 
Roscoe Bartlett of course is a doctor. He is a Ph.D. He has taught 
embryology in medical school. Physiology, he is a physiologist, and the 
subject matter of which he is describing and talking about this 
evening, he has done so over the last several years, and it is amazing 
how he can put that, Mr. Speaker, in a simplistic terminology, with 
charts but with a very lucid explanation so that we, other Members on 
both sides of the aisle in both chambers, can understand and the 
general public who hopefully are watching can understand because the 
sound byte becomes reality.
  This issue revolves around the use of embryonic stem cells, embryonic 
stem cells to hopefully result in these medical cures, these miracles 
that we hope will be there in our lifetime.
  Mr. Speaker, we have a President that feels very strongly about that, 
that has great passion and compassion. But what he has said, and I 
heard him loud and clear shortly before I became a Member of this 
august body, when he made a decision not to destroy human life for the 
sake of hopefully some miraculous medical cure.
  You could almost compare it to what our military commanders do and 
the decisions that they make. I know that the Speaker tonight 
particularly understands that with his military service and that of his 
sons serving in the military, but you try as hard as you can to avoid 
collateral damage in the military. The last thing you want to do in 
going after the enemy and taking him out is to inadvertently destroy or 
injure the life of a civilian.
  Well, this is getting right down to the core of this matter of what 
Representative Bartlett is so concerned about. We want to be able to 
improve human life and relieve the suffering of our fellow brothers and 
sisters, but at the same time, we do not want to destroy a life in the 
process.
  That destruction of life, whether it is a little embryo from one of 
these infertility clinics or, indeed, whether at some point somebody 
extends that destruction of human life to a senior citizen at the other 
extreme who may have lost most of their, not all of their, but most of 
their mental capacity, I would hope, Mr. Speaker, that if we knew that 
we could obtain a cell from the brain of a senior citizen who is 
suffering from senility and use that as a stem cell to cure somebody 
else's disease but in the process kill that individual, no one would 
accept that, I would hope, I would think, I would pray, and I think 
not.
  So this is really what this is all about. Roscoe Bartlett knows and 
has finally convinced his colleagues, I think certainly in this body, 
but also in the other body, that there is a better way, that there is 
indeed a better way and that we can obtain these pluripotential stem 
cells, not totipotential because I know some would say if it is a 
totipotential, that it is an embryo in and of itself.
  But this bill has the precept of saying we can fund research that 
will allow the harvesting of stem cells without destroying human life, 
and anybody that suggests that the embryos that are so-called left over 
from the fertility clinics are throwaway embryos, are going to be 
flushed down the drain anyway and it is okay to churn them up and 
centrifuge out some stem cells and destroy that human life, that it 
does not matter, needs to talk to the parents of the snowflake babies, 
some of them 3 and 4 years old now, I think close to 100, who have been 
adopted from those parents that own those embryos, those so-called 
excess throwaway embryos.
  So there is a better way, and we do not need to get into this debate 
about who is pro-life and who is pro-choice and all of that. If we can 
do this in the Bartlett way, H.R. 5526 is the way to do it, and it is a 
companion bill to what Senator Santorum has introduced in the Senate. I 
am just thrilled to learn that Dr. Frist will allow that bill, as well 
as the Castle-DeGette bill and the Brownback bill to be brought to the 
floor of the Senate, it is my understanding next week, voted on. 
Possibly all three of those bills, Mr. Speaker, will pass, and then the 
President will have an opportunity, after we pass the companion bill to 
H.R. 5526, to do the right thing.
  Then I think the Members of this body will sustain if the President 
vetoes the Castle-DeGette bill, which, again, I am not criticizing the 
authors, but there is no question that it goes back and allows taxpayer 
dollars, mine, my constituents in the 11th of Georgia, Roscoe 
Bartlett's constituents, with their hard-earned money to pay for 
research that results in the destruction of human life, and we reject 
that.
  So I am thrilled that the 4 years of hard work that Representative 
Bartlett has put into this issue is finally going to come to fruition 
and we are going to get good results from utilizing these stem cells 
that are obtained.
  I know that he will begin in just a moment, as I conclude, to talk 
about the different techniques of how that can be done, and I think our 
colleagues can understand it because he explains it well. It is not 
rocket science. It is not something that is star wars, but it is real 
and it is the way to do it.
  So I am real happy to be here tonight to once again join my colleague 
who I have such great affection for, not just him personally but the 
issue that he has taken on and the hurdles that he has had to go 
through, and I commend him for that.

[[Page H5039]]

  Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman very 
much. Not only do these snowflake babies speak to us, the snowflake 
babies are the babies that were produced by the parents of the excess 
embryos, giving these embryos to a mother who could not have a baby. 
They were implanted in her womb, and we now have more than 100 of 
those. They were here, by the way, a year or so ago. A number of 
snowflake babies were here in the Congress and in the White House.
  But I think there is something else that speaks to us, too, and that 
is that before you would harvest the cells from one of these embryos by 
destroying the embryo, you would want to know that it was a healthy 
embryo, and you would have it under the microscope and you are looking 
at it. You want to make sure it is a healthy embryo because you want to 
have stem cell lines that will be really healthy.
  When you are looking at that embryo under there, it ought to occur to 
you that that could be the next Albert Einstein or the next Beethoven, 
and you are not now looking at 400,000 surplus embryos in the fertility 
clinics. You are looking at that one embryo under your microscope. That 
embryo ought to speak to you. It could be the next Albert Einstein. It 
could be the next Beethoven, and how could you kill the next Albert 
Einstein or the next Beethoven? Fortunately, as Dr. Gingrey said, there 
is a way of getting embryonic stem cells without destroying embryos.

  The President was not unmindful of the potential for embryonic stem 
cell research, and he really wanted the medical community to benefit 
from embryonic stem cell research. So, quite immediately after he 
issued his executive order saying that they could use Federal money 
only for research on those stem cell lines that had already been 
established, those stem cell lines now are running out, as we knew they 
would, and a few weeks, months ago, there were 21, 22 or so left, maybe 
fewer than that left now. We started out with maybe 60.
  Very shortly after the President issued his executive order, he set 
up a council on bioethics, and they issued a report. I have here a copy 
of that report, and they detailed and discussed at quite some length, 
it is very interesting reading, and I think even the layman could 
appreciate most of it. They discussed four different potential ways of 
getting embryonic stem cells as the equivalent of an embryonic stem 
cell without destroying or hurting an embryo.
  The second one of those that they talked about, you will see a little 
asterisk there, and you go to the bottom of the page, and you will see 
the notation that Congressman Bartlett suggested this technique before 
the bioethics committee met. A little later, I will indicate to you how 
I came to have my first discussion with the President on this and how 
we now made that 5-year journey from then to now.
  What I have here in this slide is a depiction of the reproductive 
tract of the female, and what we will be talking about is what goes on 
in a dish in the laboratory that I think is a whole lot easier to 
understand what is going on if we look at this process in this 
depiction of the mother's reproductive tract.
  Here in the corner here we see the total reproductive tract which has 
the vagina and the cervix and the uterus and the two fallopian tubes, 
and each fallopian tube ending in a funnel-like structure called 
infundibulum, and there is the ovary and the blow-up here is only one-
half of this reproductive tract. So there is a mirror image on the 
other half of it. This shows what happens in the fertilization and the 
early development of the embryo.
  Once a month ordinarily, an ovum ripens and is released from the 
ovary, and if sperm had been deposited in the reproductive tract, they 
then travel up the reproductive tract. The egg is fertilized very 
quickly, very soon after it is released from the ovary.
  Now, sometimes the egg is not picked up by the infundibulum, and it 
floats out into the body. Many of these sperm will make it clear 
through the reproductive tract and go out into the body where they will 
simply be absorbed later, but they may find the ovum out there and 
fertilize the ovum. Then the ovum will do what it does in the 
reproductive tract. It will divide again and again, and we will look at 
that in a moment.
  At the appropriate time, it will find someplace to implant, and since 
it is out here in the body cavity, it will implant on one of the body 
tissues, and we call this an ectopic pregnancy, and that pregnancy will 
threaten the life of the mother. The baby cannot develop fully there, 
and the baby will die and the mother, too, if this is not interrupted.

                              {time}  2000

  At other times, as the egg, fertilized egg goes down the reproductive 
track here, it may implant along the tube here. And we call that a 
tubal pregnancy. And that tube is nowhere near big enough to 
accommodate a baby growing. So the baby will die, and the mother 
possibly too if we do not interrupt that pregnancy.
  But most of the time, and nature is really quite a marvel, most of 
the time the egg is fertilized here high up in the fallopian tube and 
then it begins a several day journey. And here we have the days marked. 
Day 4, day 5 and day 6 and 7 and day 8 and 9. It is a bit more than a 
week after it is released from the ovum and fertilized, and day zero 
here begins the fertilization. It makes its way down the reproductive 
track.
  No motility of its own, it is moved along by little cilia, little 
hair-like projections on the wall of the oviduct, which move in 
wavelike fashion and move the ovum down. As it moves down, it divides. 
First into two cells, then four cells, and then into 8 cells, and we 
will come back to that 8-cell stage, because that is an important one.
  Then it goes on to divide further to a number of cells, and finally 
to the inner sell mass that we found on that first slide. And then it 
implants in the uterus.
  And the mother's uterus produces some tissue and the little embryo 
produces some tissues, we call these the decidua. And they develop the 
placenta and the amnion. They are filled with fluids and support the 
baby and protect it during its development.
  When eggs are taken from the laboratory, and all of this by the way 
can happen in the laboratory in a Petri dish, they simply take the egg 
from the mother, generally produced by hormone treatment that causes 
multiple ovulations, so that there are a number of eggs. There may be 
6, 8, 10 eggs are produced by the mother. They will fertilize those in 
a dish in the laboratory, a Petri dish, in vitro, that means in glass.
  This is in vivo, that means in life. The in vitro fertilization, they 
then will divide and the doctors watch them divide. And if they are 
going to harvest these for stem cells they generally wait to the inner 
cell mass stage down here and take them out. And the reason for that is 
that these cells do not like to be alone. And you have to be clever to 
get one of them to divide.
  So they take them when they have lots of company after there is a 
number of cells in the inner cell mass. They take these cells and 
destroy the embryo in the process.
  There is a technique used, first in laboratories in England, and then 
in this country, and I spent more than a half hour on the phone with 
two of the physicians in the one here in Virginia, where they go to the 
8-cell stage, and this is all in a Petri dish in a laboratory now.
  And they take a cell, and sometimes they get 2 cells from the 8-cell 
stage, and they do a preimplantation genetic diagnosis on that to make 
sure that the baby is not going to have some genetic deficiencies like 
Trisomy 21. You generally know it as Mongolism. And that is when just 
one of the chromosomes, there are three of them there. And if there are 
three of those chromosomes there, there are various degrees of Trisomy 
21, but the baby then will be affected by that.
  And you would like to have, most parents would like to have a normal 
baby. So they can do a preimplementation genetic diagnosis, and then 
they implant the remaining seven and sometimes six cells. And more than 
2,000 times now, what appears to be a perfectly normal baby has been 
produced from that. I will have a slide a little later to show this.
  But I would just like to note for now that that is no big surprise. 
In fact, the big surprise to me would be that the baby was not normal, 
because nature, for as long as we have had people here,

[[Page H5040]]

and happens in animals too, but nature has been doing exactly this, but 
they take not just one or two cells away, nature takes half the cells 
away. And from each half, nature grows a perfectly normal baby, and we 
call them identical twins.
  So if nature can take half of the cells away and each half develops 
into a perfectly normal baby, it ought to be that you can take a cell 
or two away and the embryo would not even know it. If it does not know 
that half of the cells are gone, if it goes on and develops into a 
perfectly normal baby, each half does, why should it be affected at all 
if you take only one or two cells?
  So the big surprise to me would have been if there was any effect of 
this on the baby. And it is that technique which had occurred to me 
earlier. But to kind of put this in perspective, I would like to look 
at the next slide. And this next slide, this next chart up depicts some 
of things that we have been talking about and some additional ones.
  This is the fertilization process. We saw that in that former slide. 
But we did not see there the early development of the gametes or the 
sex cells. And they develop in the seminiferous tubules in the male, 
and in the ova of the female, those cells divide and divide again.
  And most of these divisions are what we call mitotic divisions, that 
the chromosomes split so that the same number of chromosomes remain in 
the daughter cells. But in one of these processes there is a meiotic 
division called meiosis where the chromosomes do not divide, so that 
when the cells split, each daughter cell has only half as many 
chromosomes.
  You see, that is necessary because the chromosomes are going to be 
joined from the female and from the male, and you now need to end up 
with the right number of chromosomes, not twice as many chromosomes. 
Because if that happened, the embryo would certainly die.
  By the way, it is really interesting that in plants, when you have 
what is called polyploidy, that is what this is called when you have 
polyploidy, which is more than the diploid, which is the double, and 
there is a haploid number here, and there is a diploid number when the 
two haploids come together.
  In plants it just makes them bigger and prettier, and the flowers 
brighter colored and so forth. That works well for plants, but for 
humans and all other animals, by the way it is fatal.
  So this depicts the fertilization process and they combine to form 
the embryo, and then the embryo divides again and again. And we see 
there the same types of depictions that we saw previously.
  The second little sequence here shows cloning. And Dolly the sheep 
was the first clone that the public knew about anyway that was 
produced. In cloning what happens is, that you take an egg cell, and 
you take the nucleus from the egg cell. You remove the nucleus, so now 
you have an egg cell with no nucleus there. And then you take a nucleus 
from a donor cell. This is a general somatic. By soma, that means body, 
somatic cell. You take the nucleus from that cell, and you put it 
inside the egg cell.
  Now all of the genetic material is not in the nucleus. Most of the 
genetic material that determines who you are, whether you are male or 
female, tall or short, blond or brunette, going to be tall and thin or 
short and stout, most of that is in the nucleus. But in the cytoplasm 
here are a lot of control factors. Ribonucleic Acid, so called RNA and 
then messages are sent back and forth between the cytoplasm and the 
nucleus.

  And so there are a lot of control factors here in the cytoplasm that 
when this nucleus from a skin cell or whatever is put inside this egg 
cell, it is controlled by these control factors in the cytoplasm under 
appropriate circumstances, so that it now behaves as if it were an 
embryonic cell. And that is because of the control factors here.
  Of course, what the offspring is going to look like now is what the 
individual looked like from which the donor cell was taken. I was 
privileged to go to a little dairy in my district that is probably 
unique in all of the world. He happened to have the best Holstein cow 
in America, which probably means the best Holstein cow in the world, 
because we have some of the best cattle in the world.
  Her name was Zena. And a cloning company wanted to work with him. And 
so he cloned two daughters of Zena. And then Zena broke her back and 
she had to be put down. But he had Zena's daughters. It was very 
interesting. The daughters did not look exactly like Zena. Why 
shouldn't they? And that is because of the black and white pigment, the 
general distribution, whether they are mostly white or mostly black is 
controlled by the genes.
  But the actual pattern is kind of an accident of development. And so 
the two daughters had exactly the same genetic composition as their 
mother, looked somewhat different. They both had roughly the same 
amount of black and white, but it was distributed a little differently. 
And so you could see there the effects of the factors at work during 
the development of the embryo.
  The third little sequence down here shows us parthogenesis. 
Parthogenesis is when an offspring develops just from the ova. That can 
only happen if this meiotic division does not occur, because the ovum 
has to, and it says that here, induce the egg to keep all of its 
chromosomes. This is kind of easy to do with salamanders and frogs and 
so forth. There is a lot of parthenogenic embryonic studies that are 
done with these, with these animals.
  But now of course it is going to have exactly the same genetic makeup 
as the mother. I do not know if we ever have a documented case of this 
happening in humans. But you can certainly induce it in some of the 
lower animals.
  The next chart now shows us the four processes, the potential sources 
of stem cells that were described here in the white paper produced by 
the President's Council on Bioethics, called alternative sources of 
human pluripotent stem cells. Dr. Gingrey used the term pluripotent. I 
would like to note just for a moment what that means.
  The embryo itself, when it is first fertilized, is totipotent, it can 
produce any and all cells, including the decidua. These are the cells 
that will produce the amnion and corion to support the embryo. By the 
time it gets to several divisions, even the eight-cell stage, it has 
now become only pluripotent. A single cell will not be able to produce 
all of the tissues of the body.
  If it could produce everything, maybe produce all of the issues of 
the body, but not the decidua, if it could produce all of those, it 
would simply, as Dr. Gingrey mentioned, be another embryo and the 
ethical argument would start all over.
  But it is my understanding, and I was pleased to learn this, because 
I did not know before I got involved in this, I do not think that we 
knew until very recently with research, when the embryo went from 
totipotent to pluripotent, but you do not want totipotent cells, you 
want only pluripotent cells; that is why the name of this article.
  There are several different techniques, four of them, and three of 
them are shown here. The last one will be on the next slide. Altered 
nuclear transfer. This is an interesting one. You will see that it 
looks very much like the cloning.
  But what they do before they put the donor cell is they turn out, 
turn off some of the genes in the donor cell. Generally they are the 
genes that would produce the decidua. So you do not end up with an 
embryo, you end up with a mass of dividing cells that have all of the 
cell types the embryo would have, but they are not organized as an 
embryo.
  So the argument is made that since it is not an embryo, you can take 
the cells from it. And then you turn the gene back on, because in your 
stem cell line, you want to have a normal cell, so you turn the gene 
back on.
  There is another variant of this, which is interesting and might have 
less ethical arguments. Because the ethical argument here might be that 
you are simply producing a deformed fetus. If a fetus is born deformed, 
you do not take it and kill it, so why should you kill this? You have 
intentionally deformed it.
  Now the proponents of this will argue that it is really not a fetus 
because it has no chance of ever developing into a baby. But that 
argument kind of goes away if you use this technique.

[[Page H5041]]

  Because what they do here is to enhance the cells that produce the 
embryonic stem cell growth so that it cannot produce the whole baby.

                              {time}  2015

  You haven't disrupted, changed the embryonic makeup; you simply 
enhanced the activity of some of the cells. So this altered nuclear 
transfer oocyte-assisted reprogramming is what it is called. And 
obviously we need a lot of animal experimentation, which is what the 
bill provides for.
  This is the technique that I had suggested to the President. I met 
him at an event shortly after I went to NIH, and I talked to some of 
the doctors there. They had an open laboratory there and invited the 
staff out and Members out. I think I was probably the only Member that 
was there.
  But they were talking about the potential of embryonic stem cell 
research. They didn't know what position the President was going to 
take; and of course you can't get inside their head, but my feeling was 
that they believed that the President was going to permit the use of 
surplus embryos and use Federal money for that. He, of course, did not 
do that.
  But I asked them during this discussion, if in the development of 
identical twins you can take half the cells away and each half produces 
a perfectly normal baby, why shouldn't you be able to take one or two 
cells away to produce a stem cell line from, and then the rest of the 
embryo would produce a perfectly normal baby? And they said, yes, that 
ought to be possible.
  And this is just depicted here. You have taken a cell away and you 
developed it into an embryonic stem cell line. That is easier said than 
done, because these cells don't like to be alone. And now two doctors 
say they have done it; Verlinksy and Lanza both say that they have 
successfully developed a stem cell line from a single cell. But both of 
them did it creatively by giving this cell some company, and after 
developing a sufficient number of like cells, they then could take the 
company cells away, and they had a pure embryonic stem cell line.
  The last one here is a really interesting one, and that is the idea 
that you could take cells from an embryo which was clinically dead, 
like a person could be clinically dead but their organs are still good; 
that is how we do organ transplants. So maybe there is a time when an 
embryo is clinically dead, but the cells are still alive. It does not 
have the organizational capacity to produce an embryo, but yet the 
cells are still alive. There has been a lot of research on this, and, 
yes, that is a possibility.
  The argument might be, gee, what kind of confidence could you have? 
You have got a good stem cell line from an embryo that was dead? But 
the counterargument would be, and one of our colleagues has a lung 
transplant here in the House and one of my very good friends here had a 
double lung transplant and lived with it for a long number of years, 
and both of those came from people who were clinically dead.
  The next chart shows a really interesting one. And if this could be 
made to work, it is better than any of the others because you now would 
end up with embryonic stem cells that were a genetic match for the 
person that you were going to treat. And we won't take the time to go 
through these, but these are all techniques of trying to convince the 
donor cell, this is the donor, this is the guy with Parkinson's disease 
or the child with diabetes. You take the donor cell now and you use 
embryonic stem cell, the cytoplasm of the embryonic stem cell to 
confuse the donor cell nucleus so that it thinks it is an embryonic 
stem cell. And if you can do that, it is called de-differentiation, you 
have now taken the de-differentiated state, if you could do that, this 
would be the best of all worlds, because not only do you have a stem 
cell, you have a stem cell that is generically identical to the person 
you are going to treat so you don't have any rejection.
  Now, we don't know if this is going to work or not, and what this 
bill does is to authorize the NIH to expend Federal funds to explore 
all of these techniques.
  The next slide shows a phenomenon, and I would like to ask Dr. 
Gingrey to make a brief comment. We will be closing here in about 7 
minutes, but this is what led me to believe that you could take cells 
from an early embryo without hurting it, because nature does this all 
the time. It is called identical twinning. Sometimes they divide at the 
two-cell stage and sometimes as late as the inner-cell mass stage. And 
my understanding is that you can tell when the division occurred by how 
they present. If they present at birth in a common amnion, the division 
probably occurred at the two-cell stage. If they present in the uterus 
with two different amnions, the division probably occurred at the 
inner-cell mass stage. And I would like to ask Dr. Gingrey, in his many 
deliveries, if he has had a chance to verify if this was true.
  Mr. GINGREY. I thank the gentleman.
  Indeed, it is true, Mr. Speaker, what he is describing. In fact, I 
can relate some personal experience to that. I think a lot of my 
colleagues know my wife and I had our fifth grandchild, but our oldest 
grandchildren are identical twin girls; they are 8 years old, and they 
were actually born at 26 weeks. They only weighed one pound, 12 ounces. 
And, Mr. Speaker, normally that situation is fraught with a lot of 
problems, and we were, of course, very blessed that they did well.
  But what Representative Bartlett is talking about is exactly right. 
And, as he said, in human nature, you get this division, and you may be 
dividing at the eight-cell stage, you may be dividing at the four-cell 
stage or the 16-cell stage, and no harm is done. You are basically 
taking away 50 percent; it is almost like the wisdom of Solomon in 
dividing a child without harming either. And it is amazing what human 
nature can do.
  And the gentleman said earlier that preimplantation diagnoses biopsy 
of the embryos so that you can avoid reimplanting an embryo that has a 
genetic defect that is incompatible with life. And these processes are 
being done, the gentleman referred to maybe a couple hundred cases that 
he was familiar with, with absolutely no harm. So this is exactly the 
right track, and so I do agree with your statement.
  Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. I thank the gentleman very much. I had 
forgotten that he had identical twins and is very familiar with this, 
not just as a physician but as a father.
  I want to close with a note that a very fortuitous thing has 
happened, and let me put the next chart up that simply is a page from 
this White Paper that refers to this technique and that credits me with 
this proposal early in this process.
  After I suggested this to the President, a very interesting thing had 
happened after that with a dialogue between Karl Rove and the White 
House, and they were, in effect, carrying out simultaneous monologues 
and thought they were dialoguing. And that very frequently happens, one 
of our big problems in this world, which is why, I guess, we have a 
State Department, because sometimes people think they are dialoguing 
and they really are carrying on simultaneous monologues.
  But during this 5 years this technology has developed to the point 
that the British now are doing this preimplantation genetic diagnosis. 
And I am sure he won't mind if I mention his name. Richard Doerflinger 
made one of the greatest contributions to this dialogue of anybody when 
he suggested, ``Roscoe, the first thing that you need to do with that 
cell that you take from this eight-cell stage is to establish a repair 
kit for the baby.''

  Now, we are kind of trying to do that with freezing cord blood. That 
is the reason you freeze cord blood, because later you may need it. 
That, by the way, is not embryonic stem cell; those are the adult stem 
cells. The baby's is an adult when it is born. As a matter of fact, the 
day you are born, you start to die. You are an adult when you are born. 
The embryonic is when you are first starting to develop; it is not an 
embryo, it is a fetus at that time. And the tissues are really in terms 
of the genetic development; they are adult tissues.
  But if now the first thing that a parent does with that cell that is 
taken is to establish a repair kit and take a second cell, because the 
six cells that were implanted do just as well as the seven that were 
implanted, with the second cell, do a preimplantation genetic 
diagnosis, if they wish. But the critical thing is that we would get 
the stem

[[Page H5042]]

cell lines now from the surplus cells, from the repair kit.
  So now I think that all ethical arguments disappear, because the 
parents are making two decisions that we are not a part of; we don't 
even get involved. They make a decision to have in vitro fertilization; 
then they make the decision to establish a repair kit. And only after 
the repair kit is established do we ask for some surplus cells from the 
repair kit.
  I am very pleased that there is this possibility, because I 
understand, and I have a number of prolife friends who have decided 
that since these surplus embryos are going to be thrown away anyhow 
that you may as well try to get some medical benefit from them. That 
may be, for some, a compelling argument. And if I didn't believe that 
there was an alternative to that, it might be a more compelling 
argument.
  But since there is an alternative to that and we don't have to offend 
the sensibilities of a large number of people in the country, and I am 
one of them; I am a little different, I guess, because I am a scientist 
and understand these things a little from that perspective, too. But I 
am devoutly prolife.
  And I am just so pleased, Mr. Speaker, that we will have the 
opportunity shortly in the House as they are doing in the Senate to 
vote on a bill that can go to the President's desk, where he can sign 
the bill and say, I am really happy that we have here a bill that gives 
all of the promise of embryonic stem cell research without destroying 
or even hurting embryos.

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