[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 153 (2007), Part 5]
[House]
[Pages 6172-6178]
[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 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

[[Page 6173]]

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 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.

[[Page 6174]]

  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.
  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

[[Page 6175]]

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 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

[[Page 6176]]

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 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

[[Page 6177]]

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 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.

[[Page 6178]]

  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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