[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 8]
[House]
[Pages 11447-11453]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                      EMBRYONIC STEM CELL RESEARCH

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 4, 2005, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Bartlett) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, we want to spend some moments 
this evening talking about a subject which is a very high priority for 
a lot of Americans, including a number of us here in the Congress, and 
that has to do with embryonic stem cell research. I want to start out 
by telling you what the essence of a bill that we have dropped is. We 
filed this bill a couple of days ago. And then I will come back to this 
later on, to a more detailed discussion of it.
  What I have here, Mr. Speaker, is a little depiction of what happens 
in the human body. This shows one-half of the reproductive tract of a 
female. This would be replicated, mirror image, on the other side, 
because here we are seeing only one ovary and one Fallopian tube and 
one-half of the uterus; and what this depicts, Mr. Speaker, is the 
sequence of events in the fertilization and the growth and the ultimate 
implantation of the embryo, this whole trip, not an unhazardous trip 
for the embryo, because not all of them make that trip successfully.
  In fact, probably about as many as two-thirds of those that are 
fertilized here never are implanted down in the uterus. But this is a 
sequence of events which takes 10 days, perhaps, to make the trip down 
to finally be implanted in the uterus.
  Fertilization, as is noted here, occurs very far up in the Fallopian 
tube, and then there is a single cell called a zygote, and that splits 
to form two cells. They split to form four cells and eight cells. And 
we are going to come back and talk about those eight cells because that 
is the focus of a lot of attention in today's world, particularly in 
infertility clinics where they are doing in vitro fertilization.
  Let us imagine now that that sequence of events is not occurring in 
the uterus and the fallopian tube of the mother, but it is occurring in 
a petri dish in the laboratory. For some reason, the mother cannot 
become pregnant, and so they, with the use of hormones, take eggs, 
generally more than one, from the mother, and they take sperm, of which 
there are millions, from the male, and they expose these eggs to sperm, 
and they are fertilized. And so the doctor has a number, generally 
several, of these fertilized embryos. And he looks under a microscope

[[Page 11448]]

and determines the embryos which look the strongest, and then he 
implants them in the mother.
  Because not every embryo takes when it is implanted in the mother, he 
will usually implant more than one. One of my good friends here in the 
Congress, the gentleman from California (Mr. Rohrabacher), his wife had 
three babies because all of the embryos that were implanted took. And 
so now they are the very happy parents of triplets that were born.
  Well, at this eight-cell stage, in clinics, it started in England a 
couple of years ago; it has now spread to this country. At the eight-
cell stage, the doctors are able, with a very fine pipette, to remove a 
cell or two from that embryo, and they then do a genetic diagnosis on 
that cell. It is called a preimplantation genetic diagnosis because 
they are doing it before they implant the embryo in the uterus. The 
parents want to make sure that their baby is not going to have a 
genetic defect. If there is no genetic defect, they put the egg, minus 
a cell or two, in the uterus. And more than 600 times in the clinic in 
England, and well more than 1,000 times worldwide, we have had a 
perfectly normal baby born.
  Now, the hope is that ultimately, but that is not what our bill is. I 
will come to that in a moment. The hope is, ultimately you could take 
that cell and do two other things with it, that cell or two that you 
have removed. One of the other things that you would do with it is to 
establish a repair kit for your baby.
  We are now attempting to sort of do that when we are freezing 
umbilical cord blood, Mr. Speaker, and I know you have heard of that, 
with the hope that the stem cells, they are not really a true embryonic 
stem cell because they are already differentiated somewhat, that is, 
they have already decided ultimately what they are going to be, at 
least to some measure, that the baby can get, or the adult later on can 
get, some help from that.
  We hope that we will be able to develop a repair kit from the cell 
that is taken. If that is true, then you could take some of the cells 
from the repair kit to produce a new stem cell line.
  And as you know, Mr. Speaker, we are now down to 22 stem cell lines 
of humans that we can use Federal money working with. They are all 
contaminated with mouse ``feeder'' cells, and so there is a need in the 
medical research community for additional stem cell lines.
  There is, Mr. Speaker, the hint of a moral ethical problem here, and 
that is that maybe the cell that I take out of this eight-cell-stage 
embryo could, under proper circumstances, become another embryo and, 
therefore, another baby. There is some cause to reflect on that, Mr. 
Speaker, because nature, on occasion, at some point between the two-
cell stage and the inner cell mass, which is clear down here, will 
split the embryo and then end up with two embryos, and obviously, half 
of the cells went to each embryo and those half cells, each one, 
develops into a perfectly normal identical twin.
  But if we could take the cell for preimplantation genetic diagnosis, 
if we could take that cell from the inner cell mass, then it is already 
differentiated, so that it cannot produce decidua.
  Now the decidua, Mr. Speaker, is the amnion, chorion. These are 
elements of the placenta. And already the cells that are the inner cell 
mass, which will become the baby, have lost the ability to produce the 
decidua, so there would be no concern that the cells you took could 
produce another embryo and, if implanted, another baby.
  Our bill looks only at animal experimentation because we need to 
determine several things. First of all, we need to determine, can you, 
in fact, from these single cells? By the way, one of the additional 
advantages of the inner cell mass is that there are a lot of cells 
there. So you could potentially take much more than one cell, which 
would give you an enhanced capability of producing a stem cell line and 
a repair kit, because these cells do not like being alone. And what we 
want to do is have animal experimentation on nonhuman primates, which 
are the great apes, which are 99.99 percent genetically identical to 
humans. That may reflect something on who you think you are, but the 
truth is that the gene differences between the great apes and humans is 
very, very small.
  If, in fact, we can do these things with cells taken from embryos and 
cells taken from nonhuman primates, then we will have increased 
confidence that it will be safe in humans, that we can, in fact, 
develop the repair kit and the stem cell line that we would like to 
develop.
  Let me take just a moment, and then I am going to recognize my 
friend, the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey). Let me take just a 
moment to talk about what stem cells are.
  There are fundamentally two types of stem cells. There are adult stem 
cells and there are embryonic stem cells. Here we show the growth of 
the embryo, and as you notice, there are fewer stages here than that 
previous chart we had, because they have skipped the morula and they go 
to the blastula, and then they skip the gastrula, well, here is the 
gastrula, and then they go on to the three derm layers.
  These cells start differentiating. They first differentiate into the 
inner cell mass and the tissues which will become the decidua, and then 
the inner cell mass differentiates into three types of cells, the 
ectoderm and the mesoderm and the endoderm. And at the bottom here it 
shows the kinds of tissues that will develop from those.
  From ectoderm will develop your skin and your nervous system, the 
brain and spinal cord and all the nerves that run to and fro in the 
body.
  From the mesoderm, that is in the middle. From the mesoderm the 
middle layer will develop most of what you are, all of your muscle, all 
of your bone, all of your heart and so forth, the smooth muscle of your 
gut.
  And then we have small but important contributions of the endoderm. 
And this is some of the glands in the body and the lining of the 
digestive system and the lining of the lungs and so forth.
  Now, adult stem cells, and a good example of those is a stem cell 
that produces red blood cells here, that cell produces more than that. 
It is in the bone marrow and it produces red blood cells. It produces 
the thrombocytes for clotting. It produces the polymorphonuclear 
leukocytes, that is some of the white cells.
  Now, maybe you can take that stem cell, which is not totally 
differentiated, and you can put it in an environment where it will be 
confused as to what it really is, so that it might be able to produce 
for you something else. And that is what we do, at least partially, 
with adult stem cells.
  The embryonic stem cell is a cell taken from the embryo no later than 
the blastocyst, which has the inner cell mass, because only then will 
it be purely embryonic.
  In the morula, the eight-cell stage we talked about, it is totally 
undifferentiated. Conceivably, it might produce an embryo. The 
President's Commission on Bioethics does not think so, but conceivably, 
it might. But if you take that cell or cells from the inner cell mass, 
it certainly will not, because it is already differentiated to the 
point that these cells in the inner cell mass will become the baby, and 
these cells in the trophoblast will become the decidua, the amnion and 
chorion, the placenta.
  Mr. Speaker, now I would like to yield to my good friend, the 
gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey).
  Mr. GINGREY. Mr. Speaker, I want to, first of all, thank the 
gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Bartlett). And I want to tell my 
colleagues, Mr. Speaker, how enthused I am to be an original cosponsor 
on H.R. 2574, the Respect for Life Embryonic Stem Cell Act of 2005.

                              {time}  1715

  I think that the gentleman has an excellent idea of solving this 
moral, ethical problem that we spent so much time talking about on the 
floor of this great body yesterday in the passage of those two pieces 
of legislation, the one, of course, to expand the opportunity for 
obtaining umbilical cord blood with up to 150,000 umbilical cord banks 
that would communicate with each other in regard to trying to match the 
stem

[[Page 11449]]

cells obtained in that blood to the specific recipient who is suffering 
from one of these terrible diseases that we have heard so much about. I 
am talking about things like juvenile type I diabetes. I am talking 
about spinal cord injuries, Alzheimer's, leukemia.
  That was the one bill. And, of course, also in that bill would expand 
the banking ability of bone marrow where adult stem cells are 
plentiful. That bill I think passed this body with maybe one dissenting 
vote out of 435. That does not happen very often that you get such a 
unanimous support.
  The other bill, of course, the Castle/DeGette bill, is the one that 
caused a great controversy, consternation. Not partisan concern, 
because we had Members, both Republican and Democratic Members, for and 
opposed to that bill. Indeed, the authors were the gentleman from 
Delaware (Mr. Castle), a Republican Member, and the co-author, the 
gentlewoman from Colorado (Ms. DeGette), a Democrat; so it was a very, 
I think, in some ways it was a good thing even though I was very, very 
much opposed to the bill and disappointed to be on the losing side. 
There were 194 of us, though, who felt very strongly that we did not 
want to go in that direction of destroying embryos, even though the 
proponents, Mr. Speaker, used the term, hey, these are throwaway 
babies.
  I even heard somebody say in their time in the well, Mr. Speaker, 
that these embryos, these frozen embryos were just going to be flushed 
down the toilet. Well, as we know, my colleagues know this week we had, 
I do not know how many of the hundred snowflake babies, the babies that 
infertile couples have adopted, the frozen embryos with the permission 
of the natural parents and carried these precious children to term. I 
think 22 of them were roaming around Capitol Hill yesterday and had an 
opportunity to be over at the White House with President Bush. You ask 
one of those moms or dads if those were throwaway babies. Indeed, they 
were not. They were precious lives. And I am just so thankful that that 
opportunity is there.
  I will say this, if my colleague from Maryland will permit me to 
digress just a little bit on this subject, reproductive 
endocrinologists are superspecialist OB/GYNs. Their work involves 
primarily infertility. And they are wonderful doctors. They are so well 
trained and it is amazing the things that they can do with infertile 
couples, whether the infertility is a female problem with a sparsity or 
lack of sufficient number of eggs or whether it is a male infertility 
where the sperm count is extremely low, and maybe like in 25 percent of 
the cases you just do not know. But the success rates that they achieve 
is remarkable.
  One of the most exciting things that they do and have been doing now 
for, gosh, 15, almost 20, years is in vitro fertilization. But when 
they first started that technology of actually stimulating a woman's 
ovaries to produce multiple eggs, not without some risks because when 
you do that with injections, the ovaries swell, they get quite large, 
and of course there is some danger there, as all of us in the medical 
profession, especially the OB/GYNs know, Mr. Speaker. But they do. It 
is called hyperstimulation when it gets to the dangerous stage. But 
even before that, it is superstimulation so that they can obtain 
multiple eggs.
  So then there is this fertilization in the petri dish, whether it is 
the husband's sperm or the donor sperm if the husband is azospermic, 
has no sperm. So you are getting really so many of these fertilized 
eggs, many more than you can safely put back into the uterus. And that 
has created, really in a way, somewhat of a dilemma with these so-
called throwaway frozen embryos, some 100,000 of them.
  I think I want to hopefully sometime soon talk to my colleagues in 
that specialty of reproductive endocrinology and say, first of all, 
there should be a limit to the number of embryos that can actually be 
implanted in a woman's uterus, and you should never put more in than 
they can safely conceive.
  What has been done in this country and others is if all of the sudden 
six or eight are implanted with the hopes that two or three or maybe 
just one will take and be a successful pregnancy, in those situations 
where lo and behold five or more take, then what is typically 
recommended is something called ``pregnancy reduction'' where the 
doctor is able to go in actually at a certain stage with a needle and 
destroy two or three or four sort of indiscriminately. Not knowing 
whether you were getting the boys or the girls or an equal mix of the 
same or the most intelligent or the least intelligent, the one that 
will grow up to be a doctor or the one that will grow up to be a 
lawyer. Pretty unethical in my estimation, Mr. Speaker, a pretty 
unethical procedure to be doing or recommending to a couple. And I 
think that we need to get away from that.
  We need to be a little more careful and only implant a total number 
so that if every one of them took, that it would be safe for them to 
carry to near term so that all of those children would survive. And 
also in getting into the situation that maybe, Mr. Speaker, couples 
need more counseling when they go to their reproductive endocri-
nologist and they sign up for IVF, in vitro fertilization, maybe they 
need a little more counseling as to, well, how many children do you 
hope to have. And if they say, well, only two; I would certainly not 
want to have more than two children, then I think it is unethical to do 
this egg retrieval process and get 10 or 12 eggs and fertilize all of 
them and then freeze the extras when the couple had absolutely no 
intention of ever having a family of six or eight or 10 children.
  Now, some people do. We have a Member on our side of the aisle, the 
gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Renzi), who has 12 precious children, and 
he is still a young man. But it is an amazing thing that we have really 
created this problem ourselves by not regulating this specialty.
  So I have digressed a little bit and I hope the gentleman from 
Maryland (Mr. Bartlett) will understand. I wanted to make that point 
because I think it is very important. But what the gentleman 
recommended here, this is not some mad scientific proposal. Not at all. 
The gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Bartlett) is one of the most 
thoughtful Members of this body, Mr. Speaker, and I think colleagues on 
both sides of the aisle recognize that.
  He is serving in his seventh term. He is not a rookie. He is a very, 
very bright Ph.D., physiologist, who taught in medical school. He has 
taken advanced course work in embryology, so he does understand, Mr. 
Speaker. He is thinking about what can we do to solve this problem 
where we in this country do not have to fight about this moral, ethical 
divide. He does not want us to have to cross that divide and we do not 
have to.
  So I really commend the gentleman, and this bill I have great support 
for because we need some studies and we need Federal funding of those 
studies and we are not destroying a human life in the process. So his 
allowing me to come and spend a few minutes here to be with him to 
discuss this is most appreciated on my part.
  I plan to stay here for a little while and if the gentleman would 
like for me to comment further, I would be glad to do so.
  Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman so much. 
I am honored he has come, and I really appreciate your articulate 
description of the situation we are in in the country where I think 
that a vast majority of Americans believe that there is considerable 
potential from embryonic stem cell research. And yet we have this big 
divide in our country where a lot of our citizens in this country and a 
lot of our Members here in the Congress have real problems taking a 
life, the life of one of these early embryos.
  By the way, this has in it the blueprint for a completely unique 
individual. There are now 6\1/2\ billion people in the world and no two 
alike. And so each of these embryos created in the laboratory has in it 
a completely unique genetic blueprint. It is not that we know which of 
these embryos is going to be implanted because they are frozen, could 
be implanted in the future. But one thing we do know, one

[[Page 11450]]

thing we do know is that if you take the embryo and destroy it, that 
that potential life is gone.
  Now you may argue, you may argue that you really ought to opt for the 
greater good and there could be enormous potential from embryonic stem 
cell research. If that were the only argument, Mr. Speaker, I would 
engage in that argument, but it is not because we do not have to kill 
embryos. You do not have to hurt embryos to get stem cell lines.
  I have here a piece today from Roll Call which is kind of an inside 
paper here on the Hill. And it is quoting from freshman Senator Tom 
Coburn. He is a freshman there because fairly recently he was here in 
the House. He came in 2 years after I came in. He is a doctor. He has 
delivered a lot of babies in Oklahoma. And I called him the other day 
and he said, I will carry this bill in the Senate.
  This is what he is quoted as saying in Roll Call just today: ``Coburn 
said, It is possible to harvest stem cells without destroying embryos 
and would focus his efforts on amending the bill,'' that is the bill 
that will be going through the Senate, ``amending the bill to promote 
this procedure.''
  I also want to note in this week's edition of Time magazine, the 
first story, a pretty big story on stem cells, ``Why Bush's Ban Could 
Be Reversed.'' Now, we voted yesterday to reverse that ban. It needs to 
be voted in the Senate, and then it needs to go to conference and then 
it needs to go to the President's desk and the President has assured 
the world that he will veto this because of his respect for life.
  I hope that the bill we are discussing tonight reaches the 
President's desk at the same time as the bill we voted on yesterday so 
the President has before him the option of signing a bill which opens 
up all of the promises of embryonic stem cell medical application and 
still preserves life.
  I want to emphasize again, Mr. Speaker, that our bill deals only with 
the animal experimentation because we want to know that in fact it is 
efficacious and safe to do the procedures that will need to be done if 
we are going to reach the potential for medical application of 
embryonic stem cells.
  I would like to for just a moment talk about the general potential 
from stem cells, whether they are embryonic or whether they are adult 
stem cells.

                              {time}  1730

  There are two basic kinds of diseases in the body. There are diseases 
from tissue or organ deficiencies, and there are diseases from 
pathogens. Mostly what we are talking about are diseases from tissue or 
organ deficiencies, although if there is a pathogen that destroys an 
organ or a tissue and it might be replaced through embryonic or adult 
stem cell application, that would be included also. But there are a 
large number of diseases that represent tissue or organ deficiencies, 
which appear to hold promise for stem cell medical application.
  My colleague mentioned Type 1 diabetes. This is really a very tragic 
disease. It represents the largest cost of any disease in our country. 
I see diabetics come through my office and the most heart-wrenching are 
those little children, juvenile diabetes, sometimes very virulent. They 
have to sample, several times a day, their blood.
  Thank God, we have improved techniques which require just a fraction 
of a drop of blood. And they have, many of them, embedded in their side 
a little hockey-puck-size pump that pumps insulin. But they have to 
sample their blood to know what the sugar level is so they know how to 
set the pump, so it is pumping the right dose of insulin. This they 
have to do 24 hours a day. And some of them are so brittle that they 
have to wake up at night to do this.
  When they come to your office with diseases like this, or like 
multiple sclerosis, or like lateral sclerosis that my grandmother died 
from, then your heart really goes out to these people. I remember my 
grandmother's death. I was a teenager. They had misdiagnosed it for 
quite a while, because this is Lou Gehrig's disease, and it was not all 
that common. When they finally figured out what it was, there was 
nothing that could be done for it. We hope in the future, with stem 
cell application, there will be something that can be done for it.
  My grandmother went from falling now and then to degenerating slowly, 
until just before she died the only motion she had was blinking her 
eyes. And that was the only way she could communicate with us. One 
blink for ``yes,'' two blinks for ``no.''
  So from a personal perspective, and I suspect many families are like 
my family, that they have a relative, if not a relative, a friend who 
has one of these many diseases, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, lateral 
sclerosis, or Alzheimer's disease.
  And, Mr. Speaker, there are a whole host. I have here 63 different 
autoimmune diseases. These are diseases where the body gets confused as 
to what is really body. You see, very early in our embryonic 
development there are certain miracle cells in our body called T-cells 
that are imprinted with who we are. And that is very essential, because 
in the future there are going to be a lot of foreign invaders, mainly 
bacteria and particularly viruses, that would like to occupy us and 
live there comfortably without being rejected; and that, of course, 
would be hazardous and frequently fatal. So these T-cells are imprinted 
with who we are so that they reject everything that is not us.
  Well, in many people, and there are 63 diseases here that are listed, 
in many people these immune reactions get confused, and so we have what 
are called autoimmune diseases where the body starts attacking its own 
tissues. Well, the body marshals its resources and many times it has 
overcome this deficiency, but by that time, the tissues are decimated. 
So we have the potential that we could provide enormous medical help in 
a great number of diseases.
  There is another potential, which is much debated and explored, and 
that is the potential difference between adult stem cells and embryonic 
stem cells. And there are many people who will tell you that adult stem 
cells have the most potential because they have presently the most 
medical applications, 58 as compared to zero for embryonic stem cells. 
The reason for that, Mr. Speaker, or at least one reason, is that we 
have been working with adult stem cells for over 3 decades and just 
over 6 years with embryonic stem cells. And so there has not really 
been time for medical applications.
  But all of the professionals in the area will tell you that, 
theoretically, because of what embryonic stem cells are, embryonic stem 
cells way back here in early development of the embryo, that they 
retain, or they have the ability to make any and every tissue in the 
body. So, theoretically, they ought to have the most potential.
  You will hear, Mr. Speaker, debates on this issue, and it is well to 
remember that from a teleological perspective, the embryonic stem cells 
ought to have more application than adult stem cells, which is why all 
the clamor, why the $3 billion in California voted by the voters for 
embryonic stem cell research, because the professionals and most people 
who think about it believe that there is more potential from embryonic 
stem cells. There may not be, but that is why we need to do the 
research so that we know what is feasible here.
  I just want to spend a moment, Mr. Speaker, going over my personal 
involvement with this field. As was mentioned by my good friend, the 
gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey), I was privileged in a former life 
to work in a scientific medical environment. I taught medical school 
for 4 years, I taught postgraduate medicine at the School of Aviation 
Medicine in Pensacola, Florida. I had the opportunity, while studying 
for my doctorate, to take a course in advanced embryology. And so when 
I went to NIH in 2001 with a group from the Hill here, most of them 
staff members, quite a large number as I remember, for a briefing at 
NIH on the potential for embryonic stem cell applications, and this was 
in 2001 before the President came down with his executive order that we 
could not kill any more embryos; that there

[[Page 11451]]

were 60 cell lines, maybe not quite 60, but 60 cell lines in existence 
and that Federal money could be spent only on those, we knew then that 
these cell lines would eventually run out.
  Now they are down to 22 and all of them contaminated with mouse 
``feeder'' cells, so there is now a need, if this research is going to 
continue with Federal funding, there is a need for additional stem cell 
lines. That is why the bill yesterday and why the bill that we are 
talking about today.
  Because I remembered my embryology, and the next chart here will show 
what happens with ordinary twinning with fraternal twins, in fraternal 
twins there are two eggs, and those two eggs may implant in the uterus 
far apart, in which case the babies will present in separate amnions, 
or they may implant in the uterus close together so that they will 
present with a single chorion, I guess it is.
  The next chart shows what happens in identical twinning. In identical 
twinning, early in the development of the embryo, and you will remember 
the first chart we looked at that went from one cell to two to four to 
eight, then 16 and on to the inner-cell mass stage, and the embryo can 
divide at either the two-cell stage or clear up to the inner-cell mass 
stage. And the little chart here shows two inner-cell masses.
  The cell at which it divides determines how the babies will present. 
Here you see you have two babies in the same chorion and they mimic the 
two babies that were fraternal twins that happened to implant in the 
uterus close together. Well, I knew, Mr. Speaker, that in both of these 
cases half of the cells were taken away from the developing embryo 
either at the two-cell stage or anything in between clear up to the 
inner-cell mass, and there are a lot of stages in between here. And 
when you took half the cells away, the half you took away made a 
perfectly normal baby, and the half that was left made a perfectly 
normal baby: identical twins.
  So it was reasonable to me that you ought to be able to take a cell 
or two or three or so away and the cells that were left ought to 
produce a perfectly normal baby. And I asked NIH researchers, is this 
theoretically possible? They said, yes, it is theoretically possible.
  A few days later I happened to be at an event with the President, and 
I knew he was struggling with this decision. So I mentioned to him my 
visit to NIH and the possibility that this could be done. The President 
handed the follow-up to this to Karl Rove, and so Karl Rove went to 
NIH.
  Now, I did not know he was involved until he called me and he said, 
Roscoe, they tell me at NIH they cannot do this. I said, Karl, either 
they did not understand the question or there is some confusion, 
because these are the same people that can take a nucleus out of a 
single cell and put another nucleus in it. That is what people do in 
cloning, and this is now done widely since that Dolly sheep up there in 
Scotland.
  In fact, I went to a farm in Maryland that has two cloned cows, and 
it may be unique in all the world. They have a heifer there, born to a 
cloned cow, fertilized by a cloned bull.
  So I knew that it was possible to go in and do this. But they told 
him again, no, they could not do it. So the President came out with his 
executive order saying we could use only the stem cell lines in 
existence.
  Subsequent to that, a couple years later, in my office talking about 
this with NIH, they admitted that there was some confusion that 
permitted Mr. Rove to believe something that they had not said. What 
they told him was that they were not sure that we could make a stem 
cell line from such an early embryo, at the eight-cell stage. We make 
them all the time, by the way, from the inner-cell mass. That is the 
stage at which they do this. That is true. That is why I wanted then 
and want now to do the animal experimentation to determine whether this 
is true or not.
  I have here a letter, and I submitted this for the Record the last 
time we spoke about this, so I will not do it again, but this is a 
letter from Dr. Battey, who is the NIH spokesman, the point person for 
embryonic stem cell work. It is a large, 3-page letter in which he 
discusses a number of the things that we are discussing here this 
evening, Mr. Speaker.
  There are several statements in his letter which indicate the 
probability that what we want to do in fact can be done, which could 
have enormous potential applications for good to the people that have 
diseases that could be cured, well, maybe not cured, but where 
defective tissues and organs could be replaced.
  We were talking about diabetes, Mr. Speaker. That has a really high 
potential application. The problem in the diabetic is that the cells of 
Langerhans, these are little island cells. They are called the islands 
of Langerhans for the gentleman who first described them. They happen 
to be located in the pancreas. They do not need to be there. They have 
nothing to do with what the pancreas does.
  The pancreas secretes a large number of enzymes in the intestine that 
help digest all three classes of food in the intestine: fats, 
carbohydrates, and protein. The islands of Langerhans, if we could make 
them from stem cells and they could be placed in people, anywhere, 
their earlobe, their groin, under the skin in their side, anywhere, 
they would then secrete the insulin that is so essential.
  And by the way, it is more than just insulin, because giving insulin 
to a diabetic prolongs their life and helps a great deal, but it does 
not cure the disease. There still would be potential eye problems and 
potential circulation problems. Many people, Mr. Speaker, have friends 
and relatives that have diabetes and they see this progression.
  What we want to do in our bill is to provide an opportunity to 
explore in nonhuman primates the potential for making a repair kit so 
that that individuals, through all of their life, would have the 
possibility of applications with completely genetically compatible 
material. And then with surplus cells from the repair kit, we could 
establish new embryonic stem cell lines. But our research aims only at 
the animal experiments which would determine the efficacy and the 
safety of doing this.
  There is debate, and you, Mr. Speaker, heard the debate yesterday. 
That was a really good illustration of something my wife notes 
frequently, that during those debates everything has been said, but 
they go on and on because everybody has not said it. We heard yesterday 
people from both sides repeating. And since repetition is the soul of 
learning, I am sure the message from both sides got through.
  And what was that message? From the side that voted for the Castle 
bill, the message was that we have 400,000 frozen embryos out there. 
They are not all going to be used; some will die because they are 
frozen too long.

                              {time}  1745

  Ultimately, some will be discarded so why should we not get some 
potential medical benefit since they are going to be discarded?
  The argument on the other side, and I am on the other side because I 
have a true reverence for life, the argument on the other side is that 
for any one of those 400,000 embryos, you do not know that is not the 
embryo that could be adopted in the snowflake operation and become a 
much longed for and loved child.
  At the end of the day, if you have taken one of these embryos and 
destroyed it in your pursuit of embryonic stem cell research, you have 
destroyed the potential life of a unique individual with a genetic 
blueprint unlike any other individual on the planet, another Albert 
Einstein, another Ronald Reagan. I think the reverence for life argues 
very strongly in favor of the President's position that he will veto 
the bill.
  I hope that my bill can get to his desk at the same time because this 
is a bill that is reverent of life, and everything that is done is done 
for the benefit of the embryo. The parents cannot conceive normally, so 
they have in vitro fertilization. They would like to know, since they 
have the ability to know, that their baby is not going to have a 
genetic defect. So what happens to the embryo with the genetic defect?

[[Page 11452]]

  Mr. Speaker, I hope it is refrozen and made available for adoption. 
There are many people in the world that get genuine fulfillment in 
adopting children that are handicapped. That is why they adopt crack 
cocaine babies or babies with AIDS. I would not want to preclude that 
this baby with a genetic defect might not be wanted by another family. 
If the family decides that they want to ensure that their baby is going 
to have a high quality of life and does pre-implantation genetic 
diagnosis, if the potential is there, and our research in animals will 
help determine that, if the potential is there, they will certainly go 
on to develop a repair kit so their baby will have more than just a 
potential of frozen cord blood. And then once they have established the 
repair kit, hopefully if it is needed, they will donate a few cells so 
we can start another stem cell line to do the research and the medical 
applications that are necessary to determine the full potential of 
embryonic stem cells in medicine.
  Mr. Speaker, I want to spend a few moments on a white paper produced 
by the President's Council on Bioethics called ``Alternative Sources of 
Plurip-
otent Stem Cells.'' What it really means is you can go into this early 
embryo that I talked about, and let me put that up on the board. This 
is from page 25 in their paper. The highlighted part says it may be 
some time before stem cell lines can be reliably derived from single 
cells. If we go to the cell mass stage, we may be able to get several 
cells since there are a lot of them there. And, of course, our chances 
will be enhanced with single cells extracted from early embryos and in 
ways that do no harm to the embryo.
  So they are saying this is possible. But the initial success of the 
Verlinsky Group's effort, and this is a group that says they have done 
this, that needs to be corroborated by other scientists, and our 
research would determine whether or not that is feasible through animal 
experimentation; but it raises the future possibility that pluripotent 
stem cells could be derived from single blastomeres removed from early 
human embryos without apparently harming them.
  They do a really good job of talking about the potential 
opportunities, and I want to note the asterisk; and a similar idea was 
proposed by the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Bartlett) as far back as 
2001. This was a suggestion that I made to the people at NIH and then 
to the President, and that was well before the President came down with 
his executive order on the stem cell lines that could be used for 
further experimentation with Federal money.
  They do a really good job in the body of this text. They talk about 
all of the potential benefits. They talk about developing the repair 
kit and taking cells in the repair kit to produce the stem cell line. 
And they said here at the beginning of it that all of this may be 
possible. But then it almost looks to me like somebody else wrote their 
recommendation section because going to the back to the recommendation 
section, they said the second proposal, blastomere extraction from 
living embryos, we find this proposal to be ethically unacceptable in 
humans owing to the reasons given. We would not impose risk on living 
embryos destined to become children for the sake of getting stem cells 
for research.
  Mr. Speaker, that is not what they said in the first part of it. They 
said they were getting the stem cells to do preimplantation genetic 
diagnosis and getting the stem cells to develop a repair kit. I, too, 
have some concern about getting cells if the only reason for getting 
the cells is for research, but that is not the reason that the parents 
decide to do preimplantation genetic diagnosis; they do that because 
they want to have a baby that does not have a genetic defect.
  That is not the reason that they have the cells cultured to produce a 
repair kit, because they want their baby to have the potential miracle 
of embryonic stem cells for the rest of their life. It is only at that 
time, after successful animal experimentation, as outlined in our bill, 
it is only at that time you would ask the parents, if you have surplus 
cells from your repair kit, might we start a stem cell line with them.
  So although they do a very good job of discussing in the body of the 
text, please go back to the body of the text and read what they said 
there because they really short circuit the whole thing in their 
recommendations because the presumption in the recommendation is that 
we are taking the cells only for research. That was never the 
presumption, that we were taking the cells only for research.
  In closing, I would like to look again, and this is a different 
chart, but it shows the same sequence of events, come back to what we 
are proposing so there is no misunderstanding of what we are proposing.
  Again, I will go through what happens in normal fertilization, and 
then you have to imagine this is not occurring in the body of the 
mother, but it is occurring in a petri dish in a laboratory, in a 
fertility clinic.
  This is the ovary and this is the funnel end called the infundibulum 
and this is the fallopian tube, and we come down to the uterus. This is 
half of the uterus, and there is a mirror image on this on the other 
side. It takes about 10 days until the egg implants in the uterus.
  This is occurring now in the petri dish. We know at the 8-cell stage 
here that you can take a cell or two out, they have done it more than a 
thousand times, and get a perfectly normal baby after taking that cell 
or two out for preimplantation genetic diagnosis.
  There is the possibility, although the authors of the ``Alternative 
Sources of Pluripotent Stem Cells'' argue that it is probably not 
possible, but there is a faint possibility, perhaps, if you put this in 
the proper environment you might have another embryo. Therefore, you 
start the ethical argument all over again.
  But if you can wait, and I believe you can, if you wait until the 
inner cell mass to take that cell, now you have completely avoided that 
argument because at the inner cell mass there has already been enough 
differentiation that the cells in the inner cell mass will become the 
baby, but they can only become the baby if there are the cells in the 
trophoblast which will produce the decidua which is the amnion and the 
chorion, and they have not yet done this because there is no reason to 
do this. The inner cell mass stage is the stage at which the embryos 
are ordinarily taken to produce stem cell lines.
  Again, our bill deals only with animal experimentation in nonhuman 
primates, and those are the great apes which I emphasized previously 
were genetically very similar, and they are widely used in research 
that would affect humans to determine the efficacy and the safety of 
those procedures on humans.
  I would like to return for just a moment to the fundamentals of this 
debate: Christopher Reeves, Ronald Reagan, ever so many people out 
there that have diseases that one can imagine could be cured with 
applications of stem cell research. The real challenge is to be able to 
do that without what I think is a morally unacceptable procedure of 
destroying another potential human being in doing that. I know that 
there are 400,000 embryos out there. I know that not all of them will 
probably be implanted; but for any one of those embryos, Mr. Speaker, 
it could be implanted. It could be tomorrow's Albert Einstein; it could 
be tomorrow's Ronald Reagan.
  Mr. Speaker, I do not want to be in the position of making the 
decision that it is okay to take this potential baby, it is a life, to 
take this potential baby and destroy it because in doing so I might 
help some other people. We do not have to do that because as Dr. Coburn 
said in the Senate and as this letter from NIH says, it is completely 
feasible that we can reach these objectives by taking cells from an 
early embryo for the benefit of the embryo. Let me stress again that 
these cells would be taken at the parents' request to benefit their 
baby, to do a preimplantation genetic diagnosis to develop a repair 
kit.
  Mr. Speaker, it would be wonderful if the 6.5 million people in the 
world today had repair kits. How much human suffering could be 
alleviated by that. The parents would have made

[[Page 11453]]

these three decisions: in vitro fertilization because they cannot have 
a baby otherwise; to do a preimplantation genetic diagnosis because 
they want a baby that is going to have the highest possible quality of 
life; and to develop a repair kit. It is only at that time that we 
would ask them if you have surplus cells from your repair kit, might we 
not start another stem cell line with them.
  Mr. Speaker, again, I want to emphasize that our bill is just 
preparatory to all of this because it deals with none of this. It deals 
only with the animal experimentation that would determine the efficacy 
of developing repair kits and stem cell lines from this early embryo.
  I hope my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, I have now 
cosponsors on both sides of the aisle, hopefully we will have a large 
number of cosponsors because this bill meets both the objectives and 
the objections of any Member who is concerned with the potential for 
embryonic stem cell application to medicine.

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