[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 43 (Tuesday, March 13, 2007)]
[House]
[Pages H2478-H2483]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
EMBRYONIC STEM CELL RESEARCH
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 18, 2007, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Bartlett) is
recognized for 60 minutes.
Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Madam Speaker, I come to the floor this
evening to talk about embryonic stem cells. With all of the pressing
issues of global importance that our country and the Congress is
dealing with, you might ask, why are you going the talk about embryonic
stem cells this evening; why are you not talking about the potential
for global warming and what that might hold in store for our world.
{time} 1715
We might be talking about the pending energy crisis and the concept
of peak oil, and certainly we might be talking about the war in Iraq
and the funding resolution that will shortly come before the House. Or
we could be talking about a very interesting subject: the debt limit
ceiling and why we have to increase the debt limit ceiling and what is
that and how does it relate to the debt and the deficit and so forth?
We come to the floor this evening to talk about stem cells because a
stem cell bill will very shortly come up in the Senate, perhaps even
this week. Very probably if not this week, next week. But to put this
in context, we have got to go back to last year when there were two
embryonic stem cell bills that came before the House and the Senate.
One of those started in the House and was known as the Castle-DeGette
bill. This was a bill that would permit Federal funding for cells taken
from embryos that were surplus in the fertility clinics across the
country, and I understand there may be as many as 400,000 surplus
embryos that are now frozen in these fertility clinics. This would
result in the death of the embryo, and a meaningful percentage of our
population does not believe that it is appropriate to destroy one life
in the hopes that you might help another. So although this bill got a
positive vote in the House last year, it was nowhere near enough to
override a presidential veto.
There was a second bill that was introduced. I introduced that second
bill along with my friend Dr. Gingrey, and that bill garnered 273 votes
in the House. You might say that is enough to win, but it was brought
up under suspension, which means we need two-thirds majority, and that
day that would have been 286 votes; so we failed by 13 votes to get the
necessary majority, the two-thirds majority, to pass it.
Both of those bills were our bills, the Senate 2754 and the House
bill 5526. And along with the Castle-DeGette bill and the alternative
bill, which would not result in the destruction of embryos, our bill
got 100 percent of the Senators. That is, 100 Senators voting for the
bill. It is interesting that there were 63 Senators that voted for both
of these bills. They included Senator Arlen Specter, who introduced
both of these bills in the Senate; and it also included Senators Reid,
Harkin, Kennedy, Clinton, Obama, and Schumer. Those Senators voted for
all of these bills.
We have now passed, essentially, the Castle-DeGette bill again in the
House with 253 ayes and 174 noes, and that is nowhere near close to the
number that it would take to override a presidential veto. And in the
last Congress, the President vetoed the Castle-DeGette bill, and he has
promised to and certainly will veto it this time should it get to his
desk. This is the bill that the Senate will be voting on next week. So
that is why we are on the floor today talking about this bill. By the
way, our bill is 322, and it has been cosponsored so far by 34, truly
bipartisan support for which I am very pleased.
I thought to begin this discussion of embryonic stem cells we might
go back to the basic physiology of what we are talking about here. And
the first chart I have here shows half of the reproductive tract in a
woman. There is another half to this on the other side, a mirror image
of this. Most things in our body are mirror images. Things like the
liver are not and the stomach. We have two arms and two eyes, and the
lady has two ovaducts and two ovaries and so forth. And this shows the
stages of development of the embryo. And, of course, what we will be
talking about is not what happens in the body but what happens in a
petri dish in the laboratory. But the embryo goes through the same
stages of development in the petri dish in the laboratory as it does in
the ovaduct of the prospective mother.
Here we have the ovary, and it contains a very large number of
primary cells, which when they develop will become ova. And once a
month typically, every 4 weeks, typically, one of the ova matures and
the little follicle then ruptures and the ovum comes out. And it is
interesting that the ovary is not connected to the rest of the
reproductive tract of the female. But there is a funnel-like thing, and
we see only a part of the funnel here. This part and this part goes
clearly around it. And it is called the infundibulum, and this process
is called ovulation. The egg now is released from the mature follicle,
and it is usually picked up by the infundibulum and directed into the
ovaduct. On occasion it may not be and it may escape out into the body
cavity or the celium, which simply means the cavity. And these sperm,
millions of which were released in the uterus and they make their way
into the fallopian tubes, and some of those sperm actually get out into
the body cavity. And this egg that is not picked up by the infundibulum
may be out of the body cavity and it may be fertilized by the sperm
that gets there, and this is called an ectopic pregnancy. And it is
very bad news for the mother and the embryo, and it has to be
terminated with surgery. But usually, most of the time, the ovum is
picked up by the fallopian tube and it begins its way down the
fallopian tube.
Notice that fertilization takes place, and that is when the clock
starts running, called DZero. Fertilization takes place well up into
the ovaduct. And there is a several-day journey. You see them here,
one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, on down. And the
fertilized egg now is called a zygote, and it begins to divide. And
here you see it is at a two-cell stage, and a little later we will have
some charts that show what can happen at this two-cell stage and even
later. But frequently these two cells will simply separate until you
have two cells that look like the original one you started with here,
and that is what we called identical twins. Then they will make their
way down the fallopian tube together and implant in an interesting way
in the uterus as we will see later. And then the two cells divide and
develop into four cells and then the four cells into eight cells. And
we will come back and talk about this eight-cell stage because that is
the time at which some procedures are done in the petri dish which
promise that we can get true embryonic stem cells from embryos without
harming the embryo.
Well, the cell then goes on to divide beyond the eight-cell stage.
And you
[[Page H2479]]
now have a morula, a ball of cells which may be a fairly large number
of cells, maybe 100 or fewer cells. And then it goes on to divide into
a very large number of cells, and that is the gastrula stage. The
morula and the blastula and then on to the gastrula down here. The
gastrula stage develops into three germ layers.
The next chart shows a little more clearly what is happening. And
here it started with a zygote and it skipped all of the stages that we
talked about here, the two-cell, four-cell, eight-cell stage and so
forth. And it goes directly now down to the blastocyst and then on down
to the gastrula. And then the gastrula, we see the three germ layers
developing.
And notice that most of what we have here is not going to end up as
an embryo. What is going to end up as an embryo is this little bit of
material here, and the rest of it is going to end up as supporting
tissue, the amnion and the chorion and the fetal contribution to the
placenta and so forth. But at this stage, just about the time the egg
is implanting, as you saw, and by ``implanting'' we mean it connects
itself to the uterus, this cell is implanting at about the time that
the three germ layers are developed.
From these three germ layers will develop all of the tissues of the
body. These three germ layers are called the outer germ layer, or the
ectoderm; the middle germ layer, or the mesoderm; and the inner germ
layer, or the entoderm.
From the ectoderm develops our skin, the integumen, which is defined
as an organ. It is about the biggest organ in the body, actually, and a
very complex and interesting one. And then the brain and spinal cord
all of our nervous system develops from the ectoderm.
From the mesoderm develops most of the mass of our body, the muscles
and the bones and the blood. Here you see the blood, which is a tissue
that develops from the mesoderm. From the entoderm develops the lining
of the gut and the lining of the lungs and so forth, although the mass
of the entodermal tissue is nowhere near as large as the mesoderm and
the ectoderm. In some organs they play a very essential role.
It is interesting that when you have a cancer and it metastasizes, it
metastasizes usually only two tissues of common embryonic origin. What
that means is that if you have a cancer on mesodermal tissue, when
these cells break loose and float through the lymph system, it will
metastasize only to tissues that develop from mesoderm. So it is very
interesting that all through the life of the person, these tissues
retain some of the original characteristics of these three germ layers.
And the body cells, the T cells and so forth are programmed to know the
difference between these body tissues.
I mentioned T cells. I shouldn't do that without explaining a little
bit of what they are. Very early in our embryonic development, there
are some unique cells that will end up in the blood. Some unique cells
are developed, and they are now imprinted with who you are, and this is
very early in development. And it is their role all through your life
after that to keep track of who you are and identify any invader that
is not you. So if a virus or a bacterium or something like that gets
in, the T cells immediately detect that as being foreign and they now
alert the leukocytes, which are the white blood cells, which have
phagocytic, which means they can envelope and ingest. These organisms
have phagocytic activity, alert them that that is an enemy and you need
to take him out. And that is called our response system to infections
and so forth. And, by the way, if you have a little pus pocket, that is
the remains of thousands, maybe millions of these leukocytes that have
come to do battle for you, and they have died in the process. But not
to worry. Your bone marrow and lymph system are making a whole lot more
lymphocytes.
Sometimes these T cells get confused, and it is not really clear to
them what is you and what is not you. And sometimes they will falsely
identify some of your tissues as being foreign to you, and then the
leukocytes will come in and attack the other body defenses will come in
and attack these tissues.
{time} 1730
We refer to these diseases, and there are a whole long list of them,
as being autoimmune diseases. I have one of those diseases, and many,
many people have that. Some types of arthritis is an autoimmune
disease. You have the arthritis because your T cells have
inappropriately identified these joint tissues in your body as not
being used, so they are now being attacked by the body defenses.
I want to look at just one more slide and then call on a colleague of
mine, Dr. Gingrey, who has joined me in filing this bill.
This is a little illustration of what happens with monozygotic twins.
Mono means one, and you saw what the zygote was. That is the fertilized
ovum. Monozygotic twins, we call them identical twins. It begins with
the fertilized egg, the zygote, the two-cell stage, then it may develop
to two inner masses. Actually, the division can occur at the two-cell
stage. The division, we have some reason to believe it can occur as the
two inner cell mass stages. These will later develop into the three
germ layers we talked about.
You can differentiate when that division occurred by how the babies
present themselves at birth, whether they are in two amnions or in a
common amnion. They, of course, should always be in a common chorion.
The chorion is the big tough sac on the outside. The amnion is the
thinner sac on the inside filled with the fluid called the amniotic
fluid that protects the baby during its development.
I would like to note, by the way, that one of these two identical
twins is a clone. I didn't think the sky was going to fall when we
talked about cloning, because nature has been doing it for a very long
time. But sometimes we should let nature do things and not mimic or
interfere in what nature is doing, and I understand the concerns
relative to cloning. But it is just of interest to note that nature has
been doing this for a very long time.
Dr. Gingrey has joined us. Let me now yield to him.
Mr. GINGREY. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding. This
is going to be like two discussions, one from the professor and the
other one from maybe his first year master's program student. Although
I have a M.D., Dr. Bartlett, of course, is a Ph.D. physiologist, and as
he explains this, it is compelling, the evidence that he gives.
Sometimes I get a little lost in the science myself, but I think the
main thing to know about the bill that he has introduced, and
introduced in the last Congress and introduced again in the 110th this
year, H.R. 322 is an alternative way to obtain almost totally
potential, totipotential embryonic, almost embryonic stem cells,
without getting into this moral-ethical dilemma of the question of are
you for life at its earliest and its most advanced stages, are you pro-
life or pro-choice. This is a debate that will go on probably for long
after we are all gone and other people have taken our places on both
sides of the aisle.
But what I like about the Bartlett bill, H.R. 322, is it says, Mr.
President, we don't have to divide the country over this issue. It has
been divisive. The President made a very difficult decision back in I
think August of 2001 when there was this call for Federal funding for
stem cell research. Before that, there had been none, or none on
embryonic stem cell, let me say. There had been some research on adults
in bone marrow and cord blood and things like that, and I am sure Dr.
Bartlett has talked about that.
But the President has said, look, we will allow embryonic stem cell
funding by the John Q. Public taxpayer on these existing stem cell
lines that had been indeed obtained from a living human embryo, little
life in their earliest forms, that were obtained from these fertility
clinics that were considered extra or throwaway or whatever. So the
President, I forget the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of
research that the Federal Government has funded through the National
Institutes of Health and other agencies, but it is substantial, but he
did not want to fund any more research on new destruction of life.
So that is where we have been for these last few years, until Ms.
DeGette and Mr. Castle in the House passed their bill that would allow
the use of the little embryos from the fertility clinics.
[[Page H2480]]
So I want to commend Dr. Bartlett, because what he says is that maybe
it is true, maybe it is true that the embryonic stem cell in its
earliest form has more potential than the adult stem cells. The adult
stem cells are multipotent, but not pluripotent, and certainly not
totipotent. So what Dr. Bartlett has done in his bill is say, look,
there are other ways.
Madam Speaker, there is a doctor at Wake Forest University and just
recently he did some research and reported in a very respected medical
journal of being able to obtain cells from amniotic fluid as early as
10 to 12 weeks of a pregnancy.
Now, that is not a true embryonic cell, but it is getting pretty darn
close to it. It is getting darn close to it. I would be very interested
in hearing what Dr. Bartlett says about if you compare the potential of
those cells in amniotic fluid that you can obtain when a woman, let's
say for genetic diagnosis she is 10 to 12 weeks pregnant, she is over
the age of 35, she has concerned about the increased risk of Down
Syndrome, and she wants some assurance that that baby, her baby,
doesn't have Down Syndrome. So that is why the amniotic fluid is
obtained, to get some of those cells to know the exact genetic makeup
of that child.
But there are lots of extra cells that could be then used with the
patient's consent without harming anything, certainly without
destruction of any living embryo.
So this is why I as kind of a practical-minded former OB-GYN
physician, who has not researched, who never published a paper, who
didn't work at one of the great medical centers in this country, but I
did go to a wonderful medical school, the Medical College of Georgia in
Augusta, and I did my residency there in obstetrics and gynecology, and
then went out and practiced for 26 years and delivered a lot of babies,
and I feel I know of what I speak.
But what I want to do, and the purpose of me being here tonight and
sharing this time with Dr. Bartlett, is to say we don't have to fight
about this. We got lots of things we can fight about.
We are fighting about the conduct of the war right now. We have
people in this body that say it was the wrong thing, and then other
people say, no, no, it wasn't the wrong thing, but the thing is wrong,
and they are arguing about how we have conducted that. We will have and
are having a fair debate and difference of opinion.
But this is one that, because of what is in the Bartlett bill, H.R.
322, we don't really have to fight about it. We don't have to get ugly
about it. And most importantly, we don't have to destroy any human life
in getting these nearly totally potential, almost embryonic stem cells.
Of course, Dr. Bartlett will want to discuss further, I think, that
as part of his bill there are techniques that you actually can obtain
an embryonic stem cell without destroying the embryo, by doing a biopsy
technique.
So that is why I strongly support his bill. We all, everybody in this
House and in the other Chamber, the other body, our heart goes out to
the Michael J. Foxes of the world, the Christopher Reeves of the world
and the folks that are not famous that may be members of our own
family. I have heard my colleagues come down and speak in the well
compellingly about members of their own family. Our esteemed colleague
from Rhode Island, a wonderful Member of this body, who, as a
paraplegic, when he talks, people listen, obviously, on both sides of
the aisle.
So we want help. We want help ASAP. But I don't think we have to
divide our country, we don't have to divide ourselves, we don't have to
destroy any human life.
As I kind of sum up and close and turn it back over to the real
expert, I just want to say, Madam Speaker, that it is suggested there
are extra and there are so many, 400,000 or whatever, just sitting
around waiting to be utilized for their embryonic cells and they are
going to be thrown away. It is really not true, and we all know that.
We all know that many of the Snowflake Babies have been up here in
Washington, in some instances twins that were adopted as embryos and
implanted into a mom who couldn't have a baby before that, and in some
instances had more than one and had two. I have held them in my arms.
We call them the Snowflake Babies, but they are beautiful little
toddlers for a lot of infertile couples. So there are no extra babies.
There are no throwaways.
With that, I yield back to my colleague. I appreciate him giving me a
little time to join him and say hoorah for the work he is doing on H.R.
322.
Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Thank you very much. I am very appreciative
of the contribution that Dr. Gingrey is making. Being a physician and
having delivered a very large number of babies, he obviously brings a
level of authenticity and credibility to this discussion.
On this chart, we have another couple of sequences which shows--the
previous one we looked at showed the development of identical twins--
this one shows the production of paternal twins. The mother may slough
two eggs. As a matter of fact, with the in vitro fertilization, since
we aren't sure that any one of them is going to be potent to implant
properly, frequently the doctor will place several in the uterus and
more than one may implant. I have a good colleague here, Dana
Rohrabacher, whose wife had three babies. That is nice. That gets the
bottle feeding and diaper changing all over pretty quickly, doesn't it?
But this is what happens when the mother sloughs more than one egg
naturally. Both of these eggs will be fertilized, because there are
millions of sperm there, and they start to divide, and this is what is
going down that little C-shaped fallopian tube in the uterus that we
saw before.
Then at the blastula stage, it gets down to the uterus, and usually
they will be somewhat separated and they will implant some little
distance from each other, so when they present at birth the doctor will
know immediately they are fraternal twins, because they have separate
amniotic sacs and separate placentas, just two different babies, one
attached to one side of the uterus and the other perhaps attached to
the other side of the uterus.
But sometimes if they implant very close together in the uterus, they
will develop with a fused chorionic sac which may mimic the single
chorionic sac that is produced with identical twins. Then, of course,
you will know whether they are identical or not, whether they look
alike or not; and if you aren't really certain of that, you can do DNA
to determine if they are identical twins.
{time} 1745
Madam Speaker, President Bush appointed a council on bioethics to
look at this whole embryonic stem cell debate. When he came to office,
of course, money was being spent on a number of embryonic stem cell
lines, and all of those stem cell lines were produced by destroying
embryos, and the President was faced with a dilemma, was it right to
take one life because when you destroy an embryo you are taking a life,
to hopefully help another. His own personal ethics would not permit him
to do this, so he set up a council on bioethics to determine were there
techniques where one could get embryonic stem cells without killing
embryos or harming embryos.
This is from page 25 in this white paper. It said, ``Thus, apparently
normal children have been born following removal of one or two
blastomeres from the six to eight cell embryo. However, long-term
studies to determine whether this procedure produces subtle or later
developing injury in children born following PGD,'' preimplantation
genetic diagnosis, ``have been recommended and are sorely needed.''
Well, maybe we need those studies, but I think nature through the
years has conducted a very large number of studies for us. I want to
show you this identical twin slide because in identical twins, half the
cells of the embryo are taken away, and each half produces a perfectly
normal child as far as we can tell, and it has been going on for
roughly 8,000 years of recorded history. No one has ever suggested
there is anything deficient in an identical twin.
As a matter of fact, when President Clinton appointed a commission to
look at this, it was an identical twin who chaired the commission, and
I asked him when he was on the Hill here if he felt less a person
because he was only half the original embryo. Of course, that is a
silly question because he certainly doesn't feel any less a person. But
that is what many people
[[Page H2481]]
would have you believe. That somehow taking a cell or two from this
early embryo, if you take two cells from an eight-cell embryo, the
result will be three-fourths of a person because you took a fourth of
his cells away. Well, no identical twin feels half a person because the
other half of that original embryo produced his or her identical twin.
So one would be enormously surprised if this had any effect because,
as I say, in 8,000 years of recorded history with millions and millions
of identical twins produced, no one has ever hinted that there is any
deficiency in an identical twin because they shared the cells from an
original embryo with their mate.
It may be some time before stem cell lines can be reliably derived
from single cells. These are the single cells that are taken out up
here, extracted from early embryos, and in ways that do no harm to the
embryo.
Now medicine has marched on, and as I will explain, we have the
evidence that we can do this. The initial success of the Verlinksy
group efforts raises the future possibility that pluripotent stem
cells, which means the pluri is many. It is not totipotent. Totipotent
is totally potent. That is the cell can produce anything and
everything, including another embryo.
When I first started exploring this potential, I had the nagging
concern that the single cell I took from that early embryo would be
totipotent and what I was dealing with was just another embryo, in
other words I was king of making identical twins. But I am very pleased
that no one out there believes that the cells taken from the 8-cell
stage are totipotent.
What this means is you shouldn't be able to get an identical twin
from something beyond the 8-cell stage, and clearly you can, so there
are some things going on here that we may not be totally familiar with.
But there are a lot of things going on in the body that we can't
explain.
As an example, if you remove part of your liver, and there are very
few organs in the body that have this potential, but the liver will now
regenerate what you have taken out. The question I have always asked
myself, as long ago as 50 years ago when I first had these courses, no,
60 years ago now when I first had these courses, how did those cells in
the liver know, millions of them, how did they know enough was enough,
that the liver was now reconstituted to its original size so they could
quit dividing. I have asked that question of current physiologists, and
no one knows the answer to that.
And if you have a bone broken, in the healing process you have a
callus developing on that bone. There is a thickening of the bone, and
then gradually that is taken away and the bone is returned pretty much
to its original shape. How do those cells know they have taken enough
away? Or how do they know that they have developed enough of a callus
to strengthen the bone until it is well calcified, until it is strong
enough.
What we are going to be talking about is this and a number of other
techniques that are included in the legislation that I talked about,
H.R. 322, and the one that was passed in the last Congress.
The next slide shows some of the techniques that were reported by the
President's Council on Bioethics as potentially offering the hope that
we could get embryonic stem cells from an embryo without killing the
embryo.
Our first depiction here is normal fertilization. The cells divide
and grow in the mother. One of the last divisions is what we call a
meiotic division. The usual division is a mitotic division. Before the
mitotic division, the chromosomes divide so when the cells separate,
each cell has the normal number of chromosomes called the diploid
number, and the single unit of chromosomes is called the haploid
number.
Well, obviously if you are going to have a human being who has the
normal number of chromosomes, you have to end up with half as many of
those chromosomes in the egg and half as many in the sperm, and that is
accomplished by a process known as miosis. So in the egg and in the
sperm cell, there are only the haploid number of chromosomes, only half
the full complement of chromosomes, and they now join in the egg. There
is quite a miraculous process that occurs there. There may be millions
of sperms trying to fertilize the egg, but essentially instantaneously
when one cell makes it into the egg, then the covering of the egg
becomes absolutely impervious to any other sperm. If that wasn't true,
you would end up with two sperm getting in, and then you would have
triploid, or three, and that would be fatal for humans. Trisomy 21, for
instance, is what happens to a human when just one of those
chromosomes, mongolism, when only one of those chromosomes is three in
nature, and sometimes that happens in the division of the cells, and
that is called trisomy 21 or mongolism.
It is very interesting in plants that many replications of the
chromosome, or polyploid, is a very beneficial effect. The flowers get
bigger with better colors, and that is one of the things that plant
breeders do is use a chemical to produce polyploid, bigger and better
plants, and some that aren't any good but you can just discard them.
That is how we have gotten many of miracle crops, by polyploid.
The second depiction here is of cloning. In cloning, you take an egg
cell and you take the nucleus out of the egg cell so now you have an
egg cell without a nucleus. And then you have a donor cell, and you can
get the nucleus from this donor cell into the egg two different ways.
One, you can fuse the two and the nucleus will then migrate to the egg;
or you can simply take the nucleus out of the donor cell and put it in
the egg.
Now all of the controlling material in the egg is not in the nucleus.
There are a number of cytoplasmic factors that control what the genes,
what the chromosomes and the nucleus does. So this goes on to what
appears to be a fairly normal birth.
In parthenogenesis, that is an interesting one, in parthenogenesis,
miosis does not occur and the egg retains its diploid number of
chromosomes and the egg goes on and divides. And some animals, by the
way, reproduce by parthenogenesis. That rarely happens in humans. Some
animals reproduce almost exclusively by parthenogenesis.
The next slide is another depiction of some of these same techniques,
and it goes just a little further. Here we have the classical
development and embryonic stem cell derivation. What they do here is
when you get to this blastocyst area, you have two choices. One, you
either implant it or freeze it to keep it for implantation later; or
you destroy it and get your embryonic stem cells. This is classic
technique for getting embryonic stem cells. This was the technique that
the President had ethical concerns about which is why he issued his
executive order which said that Federal money could be used to support
research using the embryonic stem cell lines in existence at that time,
what, 60 or more, now down to 20 or 22, and we knew that they would
eventually run out, and now we are faced with a crisis because what do
we do, these stem cell lines are running out. There is a big hope in
the medical community that we can get some fairly dramatic cures from
embryonic stem cells.
Here are embryonic stem cells from a single blastomere. This is what
we have been talking about. You take a single blastomere cell from the
embryo, and you can implant what is remaining. They have done that more
than 2,000 times. They have done what is called a PGD. It started in
England. There are a number of those labs in our country, and the
parents would like to know whether or not their baby is going to have a
genetic defect.
So they take a single cell out and they do a genetic diagnosis. If
there is no genetic defect, they implant the remaining cells in the
mother, and more than 2,000 times now we have had what appears to be a
perfectly normal baby. Indeed, the big surprise would be if it wasn't a
perfectly normal baby because in nature in producing normal identical
twins, half the cells are taken away and nobody argues that identical
twins are not normal people.
Then the process of nuclear transfer, and one of the techniques that
is suggested here is a modification of that, modification of that
cloning, and this is altered nuclear transfer. This is the
modification.
In this one they make sure that you are not going to have a clone
because they deactivate one of the genes. CDX2 I think it is called
there. They deactivate one of the genes so that it will
[[Page H2482]]
simply develop into a cell mass with no organization. You can now get
from that cell mass the cells that you wish, but there is no
organization and it is not an embryo. You can see some obvious
objections to this. You are just producing a freak and why would you
want to do that to a perfectly normal zygote that you started with.
The next chart shows this altered nuclear transfer in a little more
detail. We have seen this one before. Altered nuclear transfer is where
you knock out the gene for normal development so when you have taken
the nucleus from the egg and replaced that with a nucleus from the
donor cell, you now have knocked out the gene in this nucleus for
normal development, so you are simply going to get a growth of cells.
It is not going to be an embryo, and there obviously some ethical
questions about this, but this is being debated.
This is an oocyte-assisted reprogramming. What this says is that in
the oocyte, and I mentioned the factors that are out in the cytoplasm,
and if you intensify those and let them work, they will assist in this
and it increases the genes for embryonic stem cell growth without
producing an organized embryo.
And this is the technique which I suggested, embryo biopsy. I went to
NIH way before the President issued his executive order, and having had
a course in advanced embryology nearly 50 years ago, and recognizing
what identical twins were, it occurred to me you ought to be able to
take a cell from the early embryo without hurting the embryo.
{time} 1800
I asked the NIH researchers when they had an open house out there one
day while the President was making up his mind, and they invited
Members of Congress and staff to come out. I do not remember any other
Members of Congress. There was a lot of staff there.
I asked them should this not be possible? They said, well, it
certainly should be possible. In fact, you know, it is certainly easier
just to take the embryo and disaggregate, they call it. That means stir
it all up. Disaggregate it and take your embryonic stem cells from what
grows from that.
There is another interesting proposal of how to get embryonic stem
cells without killing embryos. If you deal with in vitro fertilization,
you produce a number of embryos and you have eight of them that you
have thawed out and you are going to look at them to see which ones
look strong enough to be fertilized to place in the woman.
There are some of these embryos that will not make it. They appear to
be alive, but they will not go on and divide. So, in just a little
while, they are going to decompose and die, and the proponents of this
technique argue that they are a bit like the brain-dead person, that
is, an individual that is not going to make it but the parts. We take
body parts from brain-dead people for transplant. So they argue you
ought to be able to get good cells from an embryo that is not going to
divide any further. I have several slides, and I did not bring all of
them, which show the criteria which are fairly reproducible and
verifiable that the embryo is, in fact, dead--because you would not
want somebody to say, gee, I think that embryo is going to die so I am
going to take it because I would like to get a embryonic stem cell line
from that embryo.
The next slide slow shows a bit of an expansion on this. Embryonic
stem cell assisted reprogramming, and the acronyms, particularly DOD
and much of the other professional societies have lots of acronyms. I
guess that is so they appear more erudite and you cannot figure out
what they are saying.
Differentiation using cell proteins, this is the assisted development
I mentioned because this cell suite, this is from the cytoplasm, and
this contains factors that controls what happens in the nucleus. They
turn on genes and turn off genes and so forth during the development of
the embryo. You can modify that.
Differentiation, a new term, should not use these terms without
describing what they are. When you start out with the cell mass and the
developing embryo, so forth, those cells are undifferentiated, they are
all the same. They then begin the differentiation process where you
have an ectoderm, a mesoderm, and an intaderm. Then it goes on to
differentiate from that. You can get bone from mesoderm. You can get
muscle from mesoderm. You can get blood cells from mesoderm. So the
differentiation goes on from that.
Then there are postnatal tissues, and these are the tissues from
which we can get adult stem cells. It might be worth just a moment to
mention the dialogue that is going on between the enthusiasts for adult
stem cells and the proponents of embryonic stem cell research.
Most of the medical applications have been made from adult stem
cells, and that is because we have been working with adult stem cells
for more than 3 decades. It just takes a while for something to go from
the laboratory to the hospital, and we have had that time for the adult
stem cells. We have not had that time for embryonic stem cells because
we have been working on them for only a few years.
Now, this permits some people who are very zealous for protection of
the embryo to say, gee, we really should not be looking at embryonic
stem cell research because all of the contributions so far have been
from adult stem cells and so, therefore, why would you want to go this
route because presumably all the applications in the future are also
going to come from adult stem cells.
That may be true but I will tell you that there is nobody that I know
of in the professional community who believes that that ought to be
true. These embryonic stem cells may be like the rambunctious teenager.
They can be somewhat uncontrollable, and in some of the early
experiments, they have gone on to produce cancers and growths and so
forth, and who knows what the ultimate will be.
But I will tell you, and you know from what you see in the papers and
hear on television and so forth that there are a number of people who
believe that diseases like Parkinson's disease and diabetes and spinal
cord injuries and so forth could maybe be cured with the application of
embryonic stem cell research and medical developments.
It is true that theoretically, philosophically, there ought to be
more applications from embryonic stem cells just because of what they
are. They are pluripotent cells. They can make any and every cell in
the body. We have some adult stem cells, and we generally get them from
the bone marrow, the blood, and there are stem cells with a variety of
blood cells that are produced and you can sometimes trick them into
believing they are not what they are so they can also make some other
tissues.
The next slide shows the little schematic on the dead embryo, and
what this shows is that you can tell--and these are reproducible and
verifiable--you can tell that an embryo is probably--well, not
probably--is not going to make it, and then the argument is that you
ought to be able to take cells from that embryo ethically. Of course,
the other argument would be if the embryo is about to die, why would I
want a stem cell line from cells that are suspect.
Clearly, clearly, if we can make the altered nuclear transfer work,
where you can take the donor cell which is a cell from the patient, if
you can make embryonic stem cells from that, that is the route we want
to go because then the organ you are making, whatever you are making
for that person, is going to be them, and you can implant it in them.
There is not going to be any rejection. If it comes from any other
source, you are going to have a rejection phenomena, but we have
developed clinical techniques for handling that. There are lots of
people with organ transplants, and they lead productive, comfortable
lives for quite a number of years.
When I first started this discussion, we conferenced with a lot of
individuals, and one of those was a representative of the Conference of
Catholic Bishops. Sometimes in life, you see something or somebody says
something, you say to yourself, gee, why did I not think of that; it is
so obvious and so right and so productive. That happened in this
dialogue.
We were talking about taking cells from the early embryo that would
not hurt the embryo, but then you get the idea that, gee, it might. You
can make
[[Page H2483]]
the argument and certainly should not because you can take half the
cells away in identical twins and obviously it has not hurt the embryo
at all, so why should taking a cell out of the embryo make any, yeah, I
know, but it just might. So you need to do some work with that to make
sure it does not hurt the embryos. There is always an outside chance
that the person lives to be 90 and they determine some defect that was
as a result of taking the cell out earlier.
So the suggestion was made by Mr. Dortlinger that, gee, the first
thing you do with that cell you take out is to make a repair kit. Wow,
why did I not think about that? It is obviously such a right thing to
do. What you do to that cell now is to make your replacement, which by
the way is what parents are hoping to sort of do when they freeze
umbilical cord blood. Now, those are not embryonic stem cells in
umbilical cord blood. They are adult. So when the baby is born it is an
adult. As a matter of fact, the day you are born is the day you start
to die. Things start to go downhill from the day you are born. So these
are adult stem cells, but they have characteristics that may be more
amenable to alterations, to modifications than adult stem cells taken
from a 50-year-old.
By the way, there has been a new technique which some heralded, now
we do not need to think about embryonic stem cells because you can take
amniotic fluid, and as the baby is growing from the earliest stages on,
but it has to be in amnion before you can get these cells in the
amniotic fluid. You can get some embryonic stem cells there, and so a
big push was made, gee, let us stop talking about embryonic stem cell
research because now we have got these stem cells from amniotic fluid.
But the person who discovered that made the observation that this was
complementary to embryonic stem cells and should not be considered in
place of embryonic stem cells. It is certainly a good place to get
cells that are more easily reprogrammed to believe that they are not
what they are at that stage of development, but he said that it should
be considered complementary to embryonic stem cells and not in place of
stem cells.
Well, the Senate is going to vote on this in a few days now; that is,
they are going to vote on the Castle-DeGette bill. It will certainly
pass, and I think they are voting on exactly the same bill. So it does
not even need to go to conference. It will then go to the President,
and the President will do what he did in the last Congress. He will
veto the bill.
So here we will be with only a few embryonic stem cell lines running
out. They are all contaminated with mouse feeder cells, and so they may
or may not be amenable to actual therapy, but in any event, these stem
cell lines do run out. With the enormous potential that many people
believe embryonic stem cells have, we will be in a situation where
there is only a few embryonic stem cell lines which are running out and
a public out there which is demanding and they come to our office. One
of those compelling things are these kids with this big thing in their
body like a hockey puck which is pushing insulin because they have
juvenile diabetes, and they are very brittle and they have to trickle
that in little by little during the day to maintain the status quo.
So here we will be with embryonic stem cell lines running out, with a
cry from the public and the professional part of the public that we
need to move on with this. My hope is that when the President has
vetoed this bill, the Castle-DeGette bill, he will, he did last time
and he will again, that then they pass our bill which was passed 100-0
in the Senate last year, by 273 votes in this House. In fact, they got
more votes than the one that is being sent on to the President from
this House. So, hopefully, that bill will come up next and can move to
the President's desk, and he will certainly sign that bill and we can
get on with ethical embryonic stem cell research.
Mr. Speaker, I would hope that all of our listeners out there who
have a Representative that they believe may not be supportive of this,
would they please contact that Representative and urge them to support
this bill. It will provide ethical embryonic stem cell research.
Neither I nor any of the others know what the ultimate result of this
will be, but I will tell you the potential for clinical cures and
application because of embryonic stem cells being what they are has to
be greater than adult stem cells.
Mr. Speaker, let us hope that we can move this clock very quickly
because there are a lot of people out there that need this kind of
help.
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