Respect for Life Embryonic Stem Cell Act of 2005

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 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. 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 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.

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 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

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.

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 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 endocrinologist 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.