Alternative Pluripotent Stem Cell Therapies Enhancement Act

Mr. Speaker, there is a present and growing interest in our country in the potential for the materials created from stem cells to produce quite miraculous cures. Indeed, we have been working with adult stem cells for more than 30 years, and there are a large number of applications in medicine.

We have been working with embryonic stem cells for far less than that, but because of their primordial nature, the experts in the research field and the medical field believe that there ought to be more potential from embryonic stem cells than there are from adult stem cells.

But the way we now create embryonic stem cell lines presents ethical problems for a large number of American citizens, indeed, I believe, more than half of them, because all embryonic stem cells lines now are produced by destroying embryos. But because of the potentially vast potential for application of embryonic stem cells to medical cures, there is an increasing interest in the possibility of ethically creating embryonic stem cell lines or embryonic cell-like lines of tissues. And that is what we are going to spend a few moments talking about this evening.

I am joined on the floor this evening by Representative Osborne, who has a longstanding interest in this subject. And I would like to recognize him now and to commend him for his knowledge and interest in this subject. Congressman Osborne.

Thank you. I appreciate you mentioning that recent article on the application of stem cell therapy to these paralyzed mice and the quite miraculous response.

It is kind of ironic and teleologically difficult to explain, to understand why the nerve tissue outside the central nervous system can heal itself. If you cut your hand or your leg, and you lose feeling in your finger or your foot, by and by that feeling will return as the nerves grow. If you cut a nerve in the central nervous system, it doesn't regrow, which is why there are so many paralyzed people from spinal cord injuries and from diseases like multiple sclerosis and so forth.

Stem cell applications provide the hope that we might be able to grow nerve cells and implant them in these patients so that they could recover some activity. And this paper that Congressman Osborne referred to in mice gives us hope that that is a real possibility.

Mr. Speaker, I have here in this chart a very abbreviated sequence in the fertilization and the development of the embryo. It begins here with what is called a zygote. A zygote is made up of the two germ cells which have united up here before this one is shown. And then it goes through several developments, through the morula stage and the blastula stage. The blastula is shown here. And finally, the gastrula. And these are sequence. And you will see more of this in the next chart.

But when we get to the gastrula stage, we now have the production of what is called three germ layers. This cell that began up here as a single cell produced by the chromosomes that came from the ovum, the female sex cell, and the sperm, the male sex cell, have now divided again and again and again, and finally these cells begin a process which we call differentiation. They are now differentiating into what will ultimately become all the organ systems of the body.

In this early differentiation, we have what we call the three stem cell lines. We have the ectoderm, which is the external layer; the mesoderm, meaning middle; and we have the endoderm. These we refer to as the three germ layers. And then, of course, we have also the quite unique germ cells themselves. In the female that will, of course, be the ovum from the ovary. In the male it will be the sperm from the testicle.

Now, in each of these three basic germ cell lines, we have a stem cell, which in the ectoderm, it will differentiate into your skin, it will differentiate into your nervous system, the central nervous system, the spinal cord and all the nerves in your body. The mesoderm, the stem cells there will differentiate into the major part of your body. All the muscle, the cardiac muscle, the skeletal muscle, all of the bones, and all of the blood develops from the mesoderm.

The blood is particularly interesting because persisting even in the adult are stem cells for producing blood cells because we keep producing blood cells. They keep breaking down and are removed from the circulation by the liver and the kidney; so we keep producing new ones. So even in the adult, you can see these stem cells, which produce a great variety of blood cells. In the bone marrow, it produces the erythrocytes and the thrombocytes and what we call the polymorphonuclear leukocytes, which are part of the white cells. And then we have the entoderm. There is not much mass of entoderm in our body. That doesn't mean it is not important. The pancreas, the thyroid gland, and the lining of our intestinal system and the lungs and so forth all originate from entoderm.

It is very interesting that these cells retain their original inheritance kind of even in the adult. When you are 50, 60 years old, if you get a cancer and that cancer metastasizes, if it is a cancer on mesodermal tissue, it will metastasize only to other tissues that develop from mesoderm. That is really quite interesting that they have retained that much of their original characteristics, of their original selectivity.

The next chart shows in a little more detail the fertilization process and the development of the embryo. And I am spending a couple of minutes on this, Mr. Speaker, because I think it is important to understand what is being done in the scientific world and what the ethical problems are for those who believe that the embryo is a person in miniature with all of the genetic capabilities to produce a complete human person and therefore it ought not be destroyed.

This is a reproductive tract of the female here, and it shows the vagina and the uterus, and then it shows the two fallopian tubes. And the little square here indicates what is shown in this big chart here. It is just one half of the reproductive system. Here the uterus is split in half. There would be another

mirror image of this on the other side. And it shows here that the ovary, they mature roughly one a month in a female, once every 28 days. And then the ovum erupts from the ovary, and it is almost always, not always but almost always, picked up by a kind of a funnel end of the fallopian tube, which is called the infundibulum.

Once in a while it is not picked up and the ovum will go on out here in the body cavity, and the sperm, which are released, of course, down in the vagina. They go up into the uterus, and then they swim against the current, by the way, because there is some little cilia in here. This ovum has no motility on its own, and it slowly moves down the fallopian tube by cilia in the walls not shown here, which are beating and moving it down, and the sperm swim against that. And some of them will make it out the end of the fallopian tube clear out into body cavity, and if there is an ovum out there, they may fertilize it. And then the fertilized ovum will implant on some adjacent body tissue, and we call this an ectopic pregnancy. Of course, the body is not meant to develop a baby out there; so that needs to be interrupted by surgery or the mother may die.

But as the little diagram here shows, here are the sperm coming up and they fertilize the egg way up into the fallopian tube several days before it will implant down in the uterus. There is quite a miracle that happens here. There are millions of those sperm, and as soon as one of them makes it through the wall of the ovum to fertilize it, there is immediate chemical change in the wall of the ovum and no other sperm can get through because it would be absolutely disastrous if another sperm got through. That would produce when we call polyploidy, and that would result in the death of the embryo. Now, polyploidy reacts very differently in the plant world because that is how we make giant flowers and super fruits and vegetables and so forth.

We simply produce polyploidy, and that makes everything brighter and better and sweeter smelling. But in animals, humans and all other animals, this polyploidy would produce death.

So now the egg is fertilized, and we call it a zygote. So now here is the zygote. It begins its trek down the fallopian tube, and it takes several days. Here we have day 4 and day 5 and day 6 and 7, and you see it is going up around day 7, 8, or 9 before it finally implants in the wall of the uterus. But as it goes down the fallopian tube here, it divides to produce two cells.

Then it divides again to produce four cells and then eight cells, and we will come back to talk about this eight-cell stage because it has a special significance in one of the techniques that may be exploited to produce some ethically generated embryonic stem cell lines, and then it goes on to divide. Again, it goes through the morula stage and then it goes to the blastula stage and then the gastrula stage, and we saw that on the previous chart.

I would like to note that it is about here at the inner-cell mass stage, about at this stage, that the embryo is generally taken, not, of course, from the reproductive tract because all of this can also be done in a petri dish in the laboratory. You simply superovulate the mother and she may produce a dozen or so eggs, and you wash those eggs out, and then you put them in a petri dish and expose them to the sperm, and they fertilize.

And then they begin to develop, and they grow and develop into all of the different stages that we see here. And so in the petri dish when they have developed to the inner-cell mass stage, which, remember, is the stage where we saw that they were going to develop into the three germ lines, this is the stage at which they take the cells. They simply kill the embryo, and they take the cells from the embryo to produce an embryonic stem cell line.

Several years ago the President issued an executive order that said that we could not use Federal money if we were getting our stem cell lines from destroying these embryos but we could use Federal money in continuing with research on stem cell lines that were then in existence. The President said, and some may have indicated that that was the case, that there were probably 60 or so stem cell lines in existence then. If there were, they have now dwindled to about 20, more or less, stem cell lines, all of which are contaminated with mouse feeder cells.

I might spend just a moment to indicate what these feeder cells are. When we take these cells out of the inner-cell mass, these cells really do not like being alone or even nearly alone. They like company. And so they frequently put them in the company of other cells so that they can reproduce because, if separated, it is more difficult to get them to reproduce. So taking them from the fellowship they find in the embryo and putting them in a petri dish to tissue culture them, many of them will refuse to divide. But if you put them in the company of other cells, in this case the mouse feeder cells, then they divide. Well, this has now contaminated these present stem cell lines so that none of them can be used for therapy. It does not disqualify them for research; so some meaningful research is still going on.

There are four different potential approaches to producing embryonic stem cells without harming embryos or embryonic stem cell-like cells that could produce tissue cultures. And we have a bill, H.R. 5526. This is a companion bill to the Santorum-Specter bill in the Senate. Mr. Speaker, as you know, the politics of this is that we have a bill that has been in the Senate for quite a while known as the Castle bill, Mike Castle from Delaware.

What this bill does is to permit the use of Federal money to take some of those surplus embryos which are in our reproduction clinics. When a mother goes in to have in vitro fertilization, as I indicated, they will superovulate the mother with hormones. They get a number of eggs, they will fertilize them in a petri dish, and then they get a dozen, more or less, embryos. They then look at these embryos under a microscope, and they choose the best two or three and implant them in the mother's uterus because they do not all take. My daughter-in-law has just gone through a procedure, and at first, we thought that she had twins, and now it is just a single baby, for which we are very thankful.

The fertilized eggs which are left which have now become embryos are frequently refrozen. The parents pay to refreeze them to keep them, because something may happen to this baby and maybe they will want a second child or a third child, and they will stay frozen for quite a while; so they put them in the freezer. But by and by, they will decide that they do not want more children; so they will no longer pay for keeping the eggs frozen in which case, the fertilized eggs, they are simply discarded. And what the Castle bill says is that parents donate these embryos that are going to discarded anyhow to medical research and to the development of stem cell lines that, hopefully, will provide miraculous cures of many diseases that Congressman Osborne mentioned, for which we now hold out high hopes.

The problem that pro-life people have with this is if you are looking generically at 400,000 surplus embryos, and that is about what is out there, about 400,000, you may make the argument that if they are going to be discarded anyhow, why not get some medical good from them? But there are two problems that pro-life people have ethically with this. One is that before you decide to destroy the embryo, you are going to look at it under the microscope to make sure it is healthy because you are going to want to get cells from a healthy embryo.

So it is not 400,000 embryos that you are concerned with now. It is one embryo under the microscope. And when you are looking at that embryo under the microscope, it could be the next Albert Einstein, it could be the next Beethoven. And, again, we are not dealing with the 400,000 out there. We are dealing with the one under the microscope. That is the one for which we have responsibility, and how could you kill the next Einstein or Beethoven?

And another concern that the pro-life community has is that if we permit the destruction of these surplus embryos, who knows, but what we may be producing more surplus embryos so we will have more embryos to use for establishing stem cell lines? So there is a real need, Mr. Speaker, to develop techniques to ethically get embryonic stem cell lines or embryonic stem cell-like lines that will have the potential of embryonic stem cells.

Just a moment to talk about how embryonic stem cells are different

from adult stem cells. Adult stem cells have already gone through a lot of differentiation. They are either of ectodermal, mesodermal, or entodermal origin. They are already destined to become nerve tissue or muscle or blood or the lining of the gut or something like that. And it is true that we can sometimes kind of reverse that differentiation, and we will talk about that in a few moments. And it is also true that even without doing that, you can make some applications to the development of tissues for that specific part of the body. But because of their primordial nature, because of their ability, we call it pluripotency. They can produce any tissue in the body. Totipotency means that they cannot only produce every tissue in the body, but they can produce every tissue that the embryo needs so that it can develop into a full baby. See, the embryo is not just an embryo because about half of the tissues of the early embryo end up with what we call trophoblast or the amnion and corion which attaches the baby to the mother's wall, protects the baby in an enclosed, warm fluid environment while it develops during its 9 months.

These ethical concerns have resulted in a lot of study by a lot of people to see if there is a way of doing it, where we can get the potential from these embryonic stem cell lines, which any one line can produce any and every tissue in the body theoretically.

I will tell you, Mr. Speaker, we are not there yet, because these embryonic stem cells, much like an energetic teenager, just want to divide. They want to do things. They want to grow.

There are some who feel that their tendency to just grow and divide is going to be very hard to control and you are going to end up producing tumors and cancers and that sort of thing when you put them in the body. But there are a lot of knowledgeable, professional people out there who believe that we can control that, that there is incredible potential from these embryonic stem cell lines, so we are trying to get embryonic stem cell lines or embryonic-like stem cell lines that avoid these ethical confrontations.

The next chart shows us three of the four that were looked at by a special commission that the President set up on bioethics. Several years ago they looked at the various possibilities out there and they looked at the pros and cons, and they have a little white paper on this subject which is worth the hour or so that it takes to read it because it goes through all of these techniques and it looks at the pros and the cons of these techniques.

First, we have here kind of a recapitulation of some things that we have been talking about. This shows the development of the gammies. They go through a process of division, and they divide again and again. Most of those divisions are what we call mitotic divisions, where the chromosomes split and the daughter cells have as many chromosomes as the original cell.

But once in that process there is a division which we call a meiotic division, called meiosis, and in that division the chromosomes split and half of them go to one cell and half to another cell, and that produces a gamete or a sex cell which has only half the requisite number of chromosomes, which we call the haploid number of chromosomes.

Of course, the design now is that these two cells will come together in a process which we call fertilization, when the sperm will fertilize the egg, and then we have the single cell embryo, and then it divides and here we have the 3-day and the 5- to 7-day embryo, which we saw in more detail in previous charts.

Mr. Speaker, we have heard a lot these days about cloning. Dolly the Sheep was the first cloned mammal, and this little sequence here shows how they do cloning.

What they do in cloning is to take an egg cell, and this egg cell has a big cytoplasm, this is what is outside the nucleus, and it has the nucleus. The nucleus contains a lot of genetic material. It contains most of the genetic material that determines whether you are going to be a person or a frog, or whether you are going to be a male or a female.

But out in the cytoplasm are other proteins, protein-like substances, that have a lot of genetic capability too. What they do is pretty much control what goes on in the nucleus. So we have these RNA, ribonucleic acid out there, and these factors now control what goes on in the nucleus.

So if you take an egg and you take the nucleus out of the egg and then you take a donor cell, this is a somatic, which means body, take a cell from the body, and you now combine, you fuse these two cells, you take the cytoplasm from the egg nucleus from the donor cell, and you now have the nucleus from the donor cell in the environment of a cytoplasm from the egg and the factors in that cytoplasm now which control what happens inside the nucleus, with--everything is not detailed here. We kind of shocked this a little bit so the nucleus from the donor cell forgets it is the nucleus from a donor cell, so it now can be controlled by these control factors out in the cytoplasm.

This is now called cloning. So now we have an organism produced that looks nothing like the egg from which you took the nucleus. It now looks like the adult from which you took the somatic cell. So this is what cloning is.

By the way, we will have a chart a little later which shows this. Nature has been cloning for a very long time in a way, because every time we have a set of identical twins, one of them is a clone. I guess you could choose which one of the two you wanted to say was the clone. We will have a chart on that in a few minutes.

The next chart here shows three of the four techniques that are outlined in this report put out by the President's Bioethics Council.

Altered nuclear transfer. I showed the cloning one, because this is very much like cloning. As a matter of fact, the techniques you go through are the same laboratory techniques you go through with cloning.

But what you do here is to knock out a gene for normal development, and you do that before you put the nucleus in the sex cell from which you have removed the nucleus. So you now have deactivated a gene which is necessary for the complete development of the embryo. That gene happens to control the development of what we call decidua, which is the amnion and the chorian.

This cannot develop into a baby because it can't produce an amnion and a chorian, and so it is just a growth of tissues, all the kinds of tissues that are in a baby but not a baby, because you deactivated the gene necessary for the normal development.

What you do later, then, is turn that gene back on. It can never begin a baby. You turn that gene back on so the cells are normal cells, and then you can take cells from that to establish an embryonic stem cell line.

One can imagine, Mr. Speaker, the ethical objections which may be raised to this. But this is simply kind of a crippled child that you have produced here. We don't kill crippled children after they are out of the womb. Why should we kill crippled children produced in the laboratory?

Mr. Speaker, there is almost no technique against which some ethical objection could not be levied. In life, we are always making choices. When you look at the potential good from embryonic stem cell research, there is a level of risk that one is willing to take.

Every time I get in my car and drive down here to the Hill there is a risk involved. Not everybody who drives from Frederick down here makes it down. Every once in awhile there is a fatal accident on the way down here. But the value of what I am doing here I believe exceeds the risk that is involved in coming here, and so I come. It is that way with this nuclear transfer.

The second one of these is embryo biopsy, and I will come back to that in a little more detail later, because this is one I have been personally involved with for a number of years now. I spoke to the President about this before he came out with his executive order and have been working with people at NIH. So I will reserve more discussion of this until we come to a couple of charts a little later.

But let me just indicate that what one does here is to envision removing cells from an embryo without harming the embryo and then using the cell which you have removed to produce a tissue culture of embryonic stem cells. Then if you implant the cells remaining in a mother, they go on to produce

what appears to be a perfectly normal baby.

When I first suggested this several years ago, I did not know in the meantime there were going to be laboratories which were doing precisely this. It started in England, and now there are more than 2,000 babies born worldwide where a cell is taken, generally from the eight cell stage. Generally they get two cells, and they have taken that cell to do a pre-implantation genetic diagnosis.

This is to make sure the baby is not going to be mongoloid or have a genetic defect. If they find no defect from that single cell they have taken out, they implant the remaining cells in the mother, and more than 2,000 times now we have a perfectly normal baby, what appears to be a perfectly normal baby born.

Mr. Speaker, I would be surprised if there was any effect. In a former life, I was privileged to get a doctorate in human physiology. I taught in medical school. I had a course in advanced embryology, and I knew that whenever we had identical twins, that half of the cells were taken away from the original embryo and each half became a perfectly normal baby.

So I argued and asked the researchers at NIH 4 or 5 years ago, was this a rational argument? I argued that if you could take half the cells away from the embryo and each half produced a perfectly normal baby, certainly you could take one or two cells away from the embryo and the embryo wouldn't even know it.

Now we have the potential for something which really is quite exciting, which we will come to a slide a little later and discuss that in more detail.

The last one here of these three, this altered nuclear transfer here and the embryo biopsy and cells from dead embryos, I have several slides in a few moments that we will go over cells from a dead embryo.

Many of these embryos are just not going to make it, which is why the clinician looks at them under the microscope before he implants them in the mother. They now have done a lot of observation and research to determine how early you can identify an embryo which is in effect dead. But like the person who is dead, you can still take organs from the person that are perfectly good for implanting in another person, and we do that all the time.

So it occurred to the researchers in this area that maybe when the embryo was dead, and by that we mean it did not have the ability to further divide, it was not going to become a baby and you could clearly identify that state, that maybe the cells in the embryo, at least some of them, were still quite normal and quite viable. So this whole procedure now presumes that we can identify dead embryos that are not going to make it, but they still have life, good cells in them.

So this procedure would be very analogous to taking organs from that young fellow who rides the motorcycle, my wife calls them ``donorcycles,'' and he has an accident and he is brain dead, but his tissues are still quite good, so they take the tissues from this dead person and implant them. We do that all the time. So there was a thought, and research, observations, seem to verify that indeed there is the possibility of doing that.

The next chart shows us a fourth technique, which is a very exciting one. If, in fact, we can do this, this holds enormous potential, because now we can avoid all of the rejection phenomena.

You see, if you develop a tissue from a embryonic stem cell line or an adult stem cell line and you now put that tissue in a person, it is foreign to them and it will be rejected. So we have a lot of medicines we give which makes them very susceptible to infections and so forth. We have medicines we give them now so they won't reject this tissue.

But in this reprogramming, you now could potentially take a cell from the patient and you could reprogram that cell. What they are doing here to reprogram is exploiting these very fascinating and powerful control factors which are out in the cytoplasm.

Here we have an embryonic cell and it has a cytoplasm, and you can crush the cell and you can now put the nucleus of the donor cell in, or infuse it with this stuff from the embryonic stem cell, and it will now control the nucleus and de-differentiate it and take it back to its primordial state so it now behaves as if it were a embryonic stem cell.

The only possible ethical criticism of this is that where do you get these sex cells to begin with? Well, if you get them by superovulation of the mother, there is some medical risk in superovulation. There is also the possibility, though, that we could dedifferentiate by subjecting them to some sort of a chemical, which would have the same effect on them as these control factors in the cytoplasm here; it is referred to as cell soup, and there are these little polypeptides in there that, like polypeptides that are in a ribonucleic acid which can control what happens in the nucleus. But you may also be able to affect what they do by subjecting them to some sort of a chemical which would kind of reprogram them.

And then the last thing here at the bottom simply looks at stem cells from mature organs. And the one that I mentioned, which is one frequently used, is from the bone marrow, because even in the adult, even today I still have stem cells in my bone marrow because my bone marrow is always making white blood cells and red blood cells and thrombocytes. They are the little cells that are responsible for the clotting of your blood.

Next, I have a chart, and I think there are several of these that look in more detail at Dr. Landry. And Dr. Landry is the one who first made the suggestion. He has proceeded with some vigor to explore the potential here for getting cells, good cells, from a clinically dead embryo. And, of course, the first thing you had to do was to develop a criteria for embryonic death. You need a dead embryo that still has good cells. And, again, let me use the analogy of the dead person from the auto accident who still has good organs. So this is a dead embryo who still has good cells. And it says here that we need a diagnostic test for embryonic death, because if one researcher is going to use cells from an embryo that he says was dead, there has to be some verifiable basis for declaring that the embryo was dead so other people would understand. So obviously it would be dead if he kills it, but it needs to be dead before he takes the cells from it.

Death is a question of medical fact, not law. We can't write a law that says what death is. And, indeed, clinical death now is not defined by law, it is defined by medical fact.

And these embryo do die, and they watch them. They are not dividing. They watch them for several days. They do not divide, and ultimately they just deteriorate, and they are gone. So the argument is that if you can identify when, in fact, they will never go on to develop an embryo, that at that point they are dead as far as any ability to produce a baby is concerned, and if you now do not wait for the several extra days to which deterioration would occur, the point of death, like the point of death from an auto accident where you can get good organs, at the point of death of the embryo, and when it will no longer develop into a baby, you now can take cells from which you can just have the stem cell lines.

The next chart shows a little more detail of this, and what it shows is that embryo 2 is dead. It shows that you can look at the embryo, and they look different, and it can be documented that, in fact, the embryos that are not going to go on to divide at a certain stage in their development look different. You can identify, you can say of a certainty this embryo will go on to divide, this embryo will not go on to divide. And so you can now make that determination. And when we have developed the techniques for this, and when we have determined that, in fact, we can develop stem cell lines from these, then we will have potentially a technique for getting embryonic stem cells without the destruction of an embryo because the embryo is already dead.

The next chart just is more detail of this. We can look at that quickly.

New criteria for embryonic death and natural history study of arrested embryos. They are arrested; that is, that the development stops at a certain stage. It won't continue beyond that. They observed 444 nonviable in vitro fertilized embryos; 142 were arrested at

the stage of an immature morula, about day 5, and we saw it in one of the previous charts. And they determined that these embryos were not going to divide because they just kept looking at them, and they ultimately deteriorated.

So if they, in fact, have good cells, and they have taken cells from these embryos, and then cells, in fact, are viable, and they can be cultured, and so with more research on this, this is a possibility for getting embryonic stem cell lines.

The next chart shows what happens in twinning. And it was this knowledge about I guess it was 5 years ago now when before the President gave his Executive Order, there was an open house at NIH, and staff and members were invited out to talk with the researchers at NIH about the potential for embryonic stem cell research. And there were a lot of staff members there; I think I was the only Member there. And I remember thinking as we were talking about embryonic stem cell research that this is what happened. And it doesn't always happen at this stage, by the way, but this shows the development of twins splitting at the inner cell mass stage. The inner cell mass splits; now the embryo splits in half, and now you have two babies. This also could occur at the two-cell stage. It splits in half at the two-cell stage. And you know roughly when it split by how the babies present. In this case, the babies present in two separate amnions. If it is split here at the two- cell stage, they present in a single amnion.

But what this told me was that obviously you could take cells from an embryo and not hurt the embryo, because in this case half the cells are taken from the embryo. This half went on to produce a baby, and this half went on to produce a baby. So if you could take half the cells from the embryo, and each half produced a normal baby, then why couldn't you take a cell or two from the embryo without hurting the embryo? And I asked the researchers at NIH shouldn't that be a possibility? And they told me, yes, that should be a possibility.

And I was in an event with the President and mentioned this conversation to him, and a couple of days later Karl Rove called and said that he had followed up on this at the President's request, and they couldn't do that. I said, ``Karl, either they didn't understand your question, or they are funning you, because these are the same people that can go inside of a cell and take out the nucleus and put another nucleus in the cell. And they are telling you they can't take a cell or two out of these big embryos? Of course they can.'' And a female sex cell is big. That ovum is a giant cell compared to the somatic cells that they are taking a nucleus out of.

So he said, ``I will go ask them again.'' And so he went back and asked them again. He came back and said, ``Roscoe, they tell me they can't do that.'' So the President came down with his Executive Order which says that the only stem cell lines we can use Federal money to do research on are those that are now already in existence.

It was a couple of years after that when NIH researchers were sitting in my office that I learned what had happened. Mr. Speaker, this is illustrative of what happens so many times in our society. When we think we are carrying on a dialogue, we are really carrying on simultaneous monologues, and there was just a misunderstanding.

What they told him was that they weren't sure that they could develop a stem cell line from a single cell taken from an early embryo. And that was true. He interpreted it as saying that they couldn't take the cell from the early embryo. Well, what we wanted to do with our research was animal experimentation, which would determine whether or not you could develop a stem cell line from a single embryo. And, as luck would have it, Mr. Speaker, the medical community has kind of almost passed us by now, because in the 5 years since I first started exploring this with NIH and then the White House and then a number of meetings with NIH since then, as I mentioned, in England they have developed techniques for taking a cell from an early embryo, the H cell stage, in the laboratory, doing a preimplantation genetic diagnosis, making sure there was no genetic defect, and then implanting the remaining cells, the embryo, in the mother, and more than 2,000 times worldwide now we have what appears to be a perfectly normal baby born.

I keep saying what appears to be because we haven't watched these babies for 60, 80, 90 years, however long they will live, to make sure there is no defect. But I would be enormously surprised, and so would the professional community, enormously surprised, if there are any defects. Because if there were, then every twin ought to have a big defect because they represent only half the cells from the original embryo.

In our conversations with a number of people, we were talking with Richard Doerflinger, who represents the Council of Catholic Bishops. And I really want to credit him with making an incredible contribution to this dialogue, because what he said was, ``Roscoe, what you do with that first cell you take is not a preimplantation genetic diagnosis. What you do with that cell is to establish a repair kit.'' So that now any time during the life of this baby, 1 year, 10 years, 50 years, 80 years old, when they have a medical problem that could benefit from the development of tissues from embryonic stem cell line, it can be developed from their embryonic stem cell line because you have got this repair kit available for them.

What this did, Mr. Speaker, is to open up the possibility when we are using Federal funds of avoiding, I think, any ethical concern, because the parents will have already made two decisions: one, to do in vitro fertilization; and, secondly, to take a cell to establish a repair kit and maybe to do a preimplantation genetic diagnosis if they want to take a second cell. And frequently they get two cells rather than one from this early embryo, and it doesn't matter if you take one or two, the other cells go on to produce a perfectly normal baby.

So if this is a potential for the future, the stem cell lines could be achieved by simply asking the parents to donate a few cells from their repair kit. So now the decisions made to get to the repair kit have been decisions that parents make in what they think is the best interest of their child. They want to have one, they can't have one naturally, so they do in vitro fertilization, and they want to make sure that the child has the protection of a repair kit.

And, by the way, we kind of do that now when we freeze cord blood. Cord blood has nowhere near the potential of a cell taken from this early embryo, but it is that person, and for whatever you can get from it, at least there are going to be no rejection phenomena.

The next chart shows a bit of one of the pages of the white paper on the President's Council on Bioethics, and I have highlighted here. It may be some time before stem cell lines can be reliably derived from single cells. Again, this was written now in about late 2001 or 2002, but since that time we have had two researchers, Verlinsky and Landry, both of whom claim that they have developed a stem cell line from a single cell. That was what NIH thought might be difficult to do, but there are now two researchers who say they have done that.

They say it may be some time that stem cell lines can be reliably derived from single cells, extracted from early embryos, and in ways that do no harm to the embryo. Well, they have more than 2,000 babies born by extracting these cells. But, again, if we simply use surplus cells from a repair kit, we have avoided, I think, any meaningful ethical objection.

But the initial success of the Verlinsky group's efforts, I mentioned Verlinsky and now Landry more recently, and note here an asterisk. And they say, ``A similar idea was proposed by Representative Roscoe Bartlett as far back as 2001.'' And you can see it has been for 5 years since I have been pursuing this possibility.

The next chart and our last chart kind of is a summary, Mr. Speaker, of what we have been talking about. And what this does is to look at the classical development when you go to the eight-cell stage, and then it develops into a blastula, and you can now either implant that in the uterus, or you can kill it to get stem cell lines.

You can now either implant that in the uterus or you can kill it to get

stem cell lines. Ethically, that is not something that I am comfortable with. It is not something I think a majority of our people are comfortable with, or you can go through what we have just gone through, take a single cell from this blastom here and implant the remaining cells, let them develop, implant them and then develop a stem cell line from this single cell, then the altered nuclear transfer that we talked about.

This kind of summarizes the potential from those two techniques, and again, what we have done to make this ethical is altered nuclear transfer. We have shut off one of the genes in the cytoplasm so that the nucleus now cannot be induced to make all of the tissue necessary to produce a baby. It produces all of the tissues necessary for baby, but not the tissue necessary for growth of the baby in the womb, the amnion and the chorion.

The important thing, Mr. Speaker, is, and I want to be politically correct for just a moment here. It is not just that we want to do things that are politically popular. We certainly do not want to do things that are politically unpopular because we all like to get reelected and return here, but we want to do things which have medical meaning.

The Senate, I believe, very shortly is going to vote on the Castle bill. The President has said that he will veto that. Many people, and they come to our offices, these children with diabetes and so forth, people who have relatives who have Parkinson's disease or any one of the wasting diseases of the nervous system that might be treated with this, and they are incensed we are not doing something about this and using their money to develop what they think is enormous potential from these stem cell lines.

The President will veto because he is devoutly pro-life for which I respect him. He will veto the Castle bill. We need to have on the President's desk not just for political purposes, although I think that is important, but because of the enormous potential from embryonic stem cell lifelines, we need to have a bill on his desk that will permit the use, the ethical use, of Federal funds to produce these stem cell lines from which we might get enormous good.

The miracles of medicine have increased lifelines. I just passed my 80th birthday. I am wondering when I am going to enter mid-life. My grandfather would have never thought of entering mid-life after his 80th year, but we have really miracles of medicine today, and this provides miracles greater than we have seen.

Now we have enormous potential here, and I hope, Mr. Speaker, we have the political courage to do the right thing for the American people and get this bill, along with the Castle bill on the President's desk so that the President has a bill which promises the miracles, potential miracles of embryonic stem cell research ethically.

Mr. Speaker, we have appeared here on the floor several times to talk about a subject which is very important to a number of Americans, particularly those with some debilitating diseases that they believe might be cured with technology developed from embryonic stem cells.

I have had the privilege of having several Members of the House to work with me in developing the legislation that we are going to talk about tonight. And one of those Members is Congressman Tom Osborne from Nebraska, who is here with us this evening. And I would like to yield to him.

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman for his support, for his leadership on this, and for his kind words.

I was fortunate in another life, before I came to the Congress, to have the privilege of working in this general area. I have a doctorate in human physiology, and I had the privilege of

teaching medical school for 5 years and doing biomedical research. And when I came to the Congress and learned of the interest in stem cells, with my background I saw some opportunities for applications here that may not have been apparent to others, and I have been pursuing this now for some 5 years with the White House and with the National Institutes of Health.

We are here tonight, Mr. Speaker, because it is our understanding that within a few days, probably next week and maybe early next week, the Senate is going to be voting on three bills, two of them relevant to this, the third somewhat tangential to it.

One of the bills they will be voting on is the bill that we passed here in the Congress here in the House some time ago. It is known as the Castle bill here generally, Castle-DeGette bill. This is the bill that the President says that if it gets to his desk, as Congressman Osborne indicated, he will veto it because this is a bill that would use surplus embryos from the fertility clinics, and they would be destroyed in the process of securing cells from them to produce these stem cell lines, although there is the anticipation, the hope, that a great deal of medical good might come from embryonic stem cell applications.

There is a concern of many in our society, which I share, that it is not morally acceptable to destroy one life in the hopes that you will help another life. So I had hoped that there would be an alternative to this, that we could look forward to enjoying the potential benefits of embryonic stem cell applications without having to kill embryos.

And that is what we are here to talk about this evening, because the second bill that the Senate will be voting on next week is a bill that is essentially identical to the one that we have been working on and developing now for these 5 years. The bill that we will vote on in the House, we hope, shortly after it is voted on in the Senate, will be a companion bill to the Senate bill and essentially the bill that we have been working on for these 5 years.

I would first like to take a look at a chart here which shows, in very gross form, the developmental sequence and the origin of what we call stem cells so that we can get a little appreciation of what a stem cell is so that we can understand the difference between adult stem cells and embryonic stem cells and the potential that these hold.

Here we have a very abbreviated development process. It begins with what is called the zygote. The zygote is produced by the union of two sex cells, which technically are called gametes. And the zygote then goes to a number of cell divisions. And, boy, did they skip a lot here because we have just one cell and here we have several hundred cells; so it is divided again and again before you get to this point. And this is the point of the inner cell mass. And in that inner cell mass which will become the embryo, we have the first differentiation of these very primordial cells here into three distinct cell types: one is the ectoderm and another is the mesoderm and the third one is the endoderm.

There is a fourth cell type there, limited in number and location, and these are the germ cells. These will be the ova, produced in the female, and the sperm, produced in the male. What we have here depicted is the embryo implanted in the wall of the uterus. This is the uterus and this is the embryo and the so-called dissidua, the tissues that surround and support the embryo. Only this part of it here will become the baby. The rest of this will be the supporting tissues, the amnion and the corion, that support the baby.

In each of these germ layers, and we call these germ layers because they are three layers, three types of cells from which all of the tissues and organs of the body will develop, the ectoderm will produce our skin and our nervous system, and the mesoderm will produce the great bulk of our bodies. It will produce all of the muscle cells, our heart, the blood system, the smooth muscle cells of our gut and so forth. All of these will be produced from the so-called mesoderm. The endoderm, much limited in quantity in the body but not in importance, our lungs, much of our lungs, the lining of our intestines, and so forth are produced from the endoderm.

Every student in even a pretty elementary biology class will be familiar with one type of stem cell, and these are the stem cells that produce our blood cells because you can see those very readily in the adult. They are located in bone marrow, in the shafts of our ribs and so forth, and they produce our red blood cells, the little thrombocytes that produce the clotting of blood, and the polymorphonuclear leukocytes. These are the leukocytes with a funny shaped nucleus. And they are called stem cells because from a single cell type, this will differentiate into several types of blood cells, most of the blood cells. There are a couple of white blood cells that are produced in lymphatic tissue, but most of the blood cells are produced from these single stem cells.

Most of the other tissues here are also produced from stem cells because it is a single cell, the ectodermal cell, the differentiations of these several types of cells.

All of these types of cells are adult stem cells, and they have the limitation of already having differentiated. They already are differentiated so that under ordinary circumstances only certain tissues will ever be produced from them. If you can go into the body and take out an ectodermal stem cell, unless you are clever and make that cell believe that it is something that it is not, it will produce only tissues that relate to the ectoderm, cells of our nervous system and cells of our integument, or our skin.

Similarly for the mesodermal cells, if you can get a stem cell even before it is a stem cell for blood, back here you can get a stem cell from which all of these mesodermal tissues will develop, but you could never get ectodermal tissue from that nor could you get entodermal tissue from that; so you are somewhat limited as to the types of tissues that you might develop from an adult stem cell.

But if you could go back to the embryonic stem cell, and you may have to go back even before this stage of development, when the embryonic stem cells are undifferentiated, which means they haven't started to become a specific type of cell, you then could theoretically produce from those cells any and all of the tissues of the body. So there are a number of different diseases where the medical profession treating them and the loved ones of the families believe that there could be dramatic applications made from embryonic stem cells.

Every year I look forward to the juvenile diabetic people coming through my office. These are such heroic little kids that I see. Some of them so brittle that they have an insulin pump and they have to puncture their fingers or their earlobe a dozen times a day or more to keep track of their insulin because they are so fragile, so brittle, they can go from very low glucose to very high glucose with life- threatening changes.

Then the people come through the office who have friends and relatives who have Parkinson's disease, who have Alzheimer's disease, and any of the autoimmune diseases where the body's defenses have been confused so that the body is attacking its own tissues. And it is believed that in all of these different kinds of diseases that embryonic stem cell applications might produce dramatic effects.

I just returned from a family reunion. And my cousin's husband, who was a pathologist here in the Washington area, Washington Adventist Hospital in Shady Grove, for years, retired and went to Florida and very shortly came down with Parkinson's disease. I recognized him from his smile. Other than that, it would have been hard to recognize him because of the wasting of his body that has occurred with Parkinson's disease. And the mind, of course, is still very alert. It is just the mechanical part of the body that is deteriorating.

And Dr. Teske, Johnny Teske, we were talking about stem cells, embryonic stem cells, and he says, ``Time is of the essence.'' And I kind of choked up a little when he said that because here is a person who really understands this. He is a pathologist. He knows what he has got, and he knows what his future is going to be, and what he was telling me is that if I am going to benefit from this, you have got to do it quickly.

So I hope, Mr. Speaker, that we are able to move quickly on this in the

House. It is our understanding that the Senate will be moving quickly on it. I mentioned that several of our colleagues here have been working with us and helping on it. And one that I am very pleased has been helping us is someone who is really familiar with this subject because he is a physician who has delivered a lot of babies. He gets involved down the line from here after all of these tissues have been developed and we have that little baby at 9 months in the womb. And this is Dr. Gingrey from Georgia.

I am very pleased that he has joined us and would like to yield to him.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman very much. Not only do these snowflake babies speak to us, the snowflake babies are the babies that were produced by the parents of the excess embryos, giving these embryos to a mother who could not have a baby. They were implanted in her womb, and we now have more than 100 of those. They were here, by the way, a year or so ago. A number of snowflake babies were here in the Congress and in the White House.

But I think there is something else that speaks to us, too, and that is that before you would harvest the cells from one of these embryos by destroying the embryo, you would want to know that it was a healthy embryo, and you would have it under the microscope and you are looking at it. You want to make sure it is a healthy embryo because you want to have stem cell lines that will be really healthy.

When you are looking at that embryo under there, it ought to occur to you that that could be the next Albert Einstein or the next Beethoven, and you are not now looking at 400,000 surplus embryos in the fertility clinics. You are looking at that one embryo under your microscope. That embryo ought to speak to you. It could be the next Albert Einstein. It could be the next Beethoven, and how could you kill the next Albert Einstein or the next Beethoven? Fortunately, as Dr. Gingrey said, there is a way of getting embryonic stem cells without destroying embryos.

The President was not unmindful of the potential for embryonic stem cell research, and he really wanted the medical community to benefit from embryonic stem cell research. So, quite immediately after he issued his executive order saying that they could use Federal money only for research on those stem cell lines that had already been established, those stem cell lines now are running out, as we knew they would, and a few weeks, months ago, there were 21, 22 or so left, maybe fewer than that left now. We started out with maybe 60.

Very shortly after the President issued his executive order, he set up a council on bioethics, and they issued a report. I have here a copy of that report, and they detailed and discussed at quite some length, it is very interesting reading, and I think even the layman could appreciate most of it. They discussed four different potential ways of getting embryonic stem cells as the equivalent of an embryonic stem cell without destroying or hurting an embryo.

The second one of those that they talked about, you will see a little asterisk there, and you go to the bottom of the page, and you will see the notation that Congressman Bartlett suggested this technique before the bioethics committee met. A little later, I will indicate to you how I came to have my first discussion with the President on this and how we now made that 5-year journey from then to now.

What I have here in this slide is a depiction of the reproductive tract of the female, and what we will be talking about is what goes on in a dish in the laboratory that I think is a whole lot easier to understand what is going on if we look at this process in this depiction of the mother's reproductive tract.

Here in the corner here we see the total reproductive tract which has the vagina and the cervix and the uterus and the two fallopian tubes, and each fallopian tube ending in a funnel-like structure called infundibulum, and there is the ovary and the blow-up here is only one- half of this reproductive tract. So there is a mirror image on the other half of it. This shows what happens in the fertilization and the early development of the embryo.

Once a month ordinarily, an ovum ripens and is released from the ovary, and if sperm had been deposited in the reproductive tract, they then travel up the reproductive tract. The egg is fertilized very quickly, very soon after it is released from the ovary.

Now, sometimes the egg is not picked up by the infundibulum, and it floats out into the body. Many of these sperm will make it clear through the reproductive tract and go out into the body where they will simply be absorbed later, but they may find the ovum out there and fertilize the ovum. Then the ovum will do what it does in the reproductive tract. It will divide again and again, and we will look at that in a moment.

At the appropriate time, it will find someplace to implant, and since it is out here in the body cavity, it will implant on one of the body tissues, and we call this an ectopic pregnancy, and that pregnancy will threaten the life of the mother. The baby cannot develop fully there, and the baby will die and the mother, too, if this is not interrupted.

At other times, as the egg, fertilized egg goes down the reproductive track here, it may implant along the tube here. And we call that a tubal pregnancy. And that tube is nowhere near big enough to accommodate a baby growing. So the baby will die, and the mother possibly too if we do not interrupt that pregnancy.

But most of the time, and nature is really quite a marvel, most of the time the egg is fertilized here high up in the fallopian tube and then it begins a several day journey. And here we have the days marked. Day 4, day 5 and day 6 and 7 and day 8 and 9. It is a bit more than a week after it is released from the ovum and fertilized, and day zero here begins the fertilization. It makes its way down the reproductive track.

No motility of its own, it is moved along by little cilia, little hair-like projections on the wall of the oviduct, which move in wavelike fashion and move the ovum down. As it moves down, it divides. First into two cells, then four cells, and then into 8 cells, and we will come back to that 8-cell stage, because that is an important one.

Then it goes on to divide further to a number of cells, and finally to the inner sell mass that we found on that first slide. And then it implants in the uterus.

And the mother's uterus produces some tissue and the little embryo produces some tissues, we call these the decidua. And they develop the placenta and the amnion. They are filled with fluids and support the baby and protect it during its development.

When eggs are taken from the laboratory, and all of this by the way can happen in the laboratory in a Petri dish, they simply take the egg from the mother, generally produced by hormone treatment that causes multiple ovulations, so that there are a number of eggs. There may be 6, 8, 10 eggs are produced by the mother. They will fertilize those in a dish in the laboratory, a Petri dish, in vitro, that means in glass.

This is in vivo, that means in life. The in vitro fertilization, they then will divide and the doctors watch them divide. And if they are going to harvest these for stem cells they generally wait to the inner cell mass stage down here and take them out. And the reason for that is that these cells do not like to be alone. And you have to be clever to get one of them to divide.

So they take them when they have lots of company after there is a number of cells in the inner cell mass. They take these cells and destroy the embryo in the process.

There is a technique used, first in laboratories in England, and then in this country, and I spent more than a half hour on the phone with two of the physicians in the one here in Virginia, where they go to the 8-cell stage, and this is all in a Petri dish in a laboratory now.

And they take a cell, and sometimes they get 2 cells from the 8-cell stage, and they do a preimplantation genetic diagnosis on that to make sure that the baby is not going to have some genetic deficiencies like Trisomy 21. You generally know it as Mongolism. And that is when just one of the chromosomes, there are three of them there. And if there are three of those chromosomes there, there are various degrees of Trisomy 21, but the baby then will be affected by that.

And you would like to have, most parents would like to have a normal baby. So they can do a preimplementation genetic diagnosis, and then they implant the remaining seven and sometimes six cells. And more than 2,000 times now, what appears to be a perfectly normal baby has been produced from that. I will have a slide a little later to show this.

But I would just like to note for now that that is no big surprise. In fact, the big surprise to me would be that the baby was not normal, because nature, for as long as we have had people here,

and happens in animals too, but nature has been doing exactly this, but they take not just one or two cells away, nature takes half the cells away. And from each half, nature grows a perfectly normal baby, and we call them identical twins.

So if nature can take half of the cells away and each half develops into a perfectly normal baby, it ought to be that you can take a cell or two away and the embryo would not even know it. If it does not know that half of the cells are gone, if it goes on and develops into a perfectly normal baby, each half does, why should it be affected at all if you take only one or two cells?

So the big surprise to me would have been if there was any effect of this on the baby. And it is that technique which had occurred to me earlier. But to kind of put this in perspective, I would like to look at the next slide. And this next slide, this next chart up depicts some of things that we have been talking about and some additional ones.

This is the fertilization process. We saw that in that former slide. But we did not see there the early development of the gametes or the sex cells. And they develop in the seminiferous tubules in the male, and in the ova of the female, those cells divide and divide again.

And most of these divisions are what we call mitotic divisions, that the chromosomes split so that the same number of chromosomes remain in the daughter cells. But in one of these processes there is a meiotic division called meiosis where the chromosomes do not divide, so that when the cells split, each daughter cell has only half as many chromosomes.

You see, that is necessary because the chromosomes are going to be joined from the female and from the male, and you now need to end up with the right number of chromosomes, not twice as many chromosomes. Because if that happened, the embryo would certainly die.

By the way, it is really interesting that in plants, when you have what is called polyploidy, that is what this is called when you have polyploidy, which is more than the diploid, which is the double, and there is a haploid number here, and there is a diploid number when the two haploids come together.

In plants it just makes them bigger and prettier, and the flowers brighter colored and so forth. That works well for plants, but for humans and all other animals, by the way it is fatal.

So this depicts the fertilization process and they combine to form the embryo, and then the embryo divides again and again. And we see there the same types of depictions that we saw previously.

The second little sequence here shows cloning. And Dolly the sheep was the first clone that the public knew about anyway that was produced. In cloning what happens is, that you take an egg cell, and you take the nucleus from the egg cell. You remove the nucleus, so now you have an egg cell with no nucleus there. And then you take a nucleus from a donor cell. This is a general somatic. By soma, that means body, somatic cell. You take the nucleus from that cell, and you put it inside the egg cell.

Now all of the genetic material is not in the nucleus. Most of the genetic material that determines who you are, whether you are male or female, tall or short, blond or brunette, going to be tall and thin or short and stout, most of that is in the nucleus. But in the cytoplasm here are a lot of control factors. Ribonucleic Acid, so called RNA and then messages are sent back and forth between the cytoplasm and the nucleus.

And so there are a lot of control factors here in the cytoplasm that when this nucleus from a skin cell or whatever is put inside this egg cell, it is controlled by these control factors in the cytoplasm under appropriate circumstances, so that it now behaves as if it were an embryonic cell. And that is because of the control factors here.

Of course, what the offspring is going to look like now is what the individual looked like from which the donor cell was taken. I was privileged to go to a little dairy in my district that is probably unique in all of the world. He happened to have the best Holstein cow in America, which probably means the best Holstein cow in the world, because we have some of the best cattle in the world.

Her name was Zena. And a cloning company wanted to work with him. And so he cloned two daughters of Zena. And then Zena broke her back and she had to be put down. But he had Zena's daughters. It was very interesting. The daughters did not look exactly like Zena. Why shouldn't they? And that is because of the black and white pigment, the general distribution, whether they are mostly white or mostly black is controlled by the genes.

But the actual pattern is kind of an accident of development. And so the two daughters had exactly the same genetic composition as their mother, looked somewhat different. They both had roughly the same amount of black and white, but it was distributed a little differently. And so you could see there the effects of the factors at work during the development of the embryo.

The third little sequence down here shows us parthogenesis. Parthogenesis is when an offspring develops just from the ova. That can only happen if this meiotic division does not occur, because the ovum has to, and it says that here, induce the egg to keep all of its chromosomes. This is kind of easy to do with salamanders and frogs and so forth. There is a lot of parthenogenic embryonic studies that are done with these, with these animals.

But now of course it is going to have exactly the same genetic makeup as the mother. I do not know if we ever have a documented case of this happening in humans. But you can certainly induce it in some of the lower animals.

The next chart now shows us the four processes, the potential sources of stem cells that were described here in the white paper produced by the President's Council on Bioethics, called alternative sources of human pluripotent stem cells. Dr. Gingrey used the term pluripotent. I would like to note just for a moment what that means.

The embryo itself, when it is first fertilized, is totipotent, it can produce any and all cells, including the decidua. These are the cells that will produce the amnion and corion to support the embryo. By the time it gets to several divisions, even the eight-cell stage, it has now become only pluripotent. A single cell will not be able to produce all of the tissues of the body.

If it could produce everything, maybe produce all of the issues of the body, but not the decidua, if it could produce all of those, it would simply, as Dr. Gingrey mentioned, be another embryo and the ethical argument would start all over.

But it is my understanding, and I was pleased to learn this, because I did not know before I got involved in this, I do not think that we knew until very recently with research, when the embryo went from totipotent to pluripotent, but you do not want totipotent cells, you want only pluripotent cells; that is why the name of this article.

There are several different techniques, four of them, and three of them are shown here. The last one will be on the next slide. Altered nuclear transfer. This is an interesting one. You will see that it looks very much like the cloning.

But what they do before they put the donor cell is they turn out, turn off some of the genes in the donor cell. Generally they are the genes that would produce the decidua. So you do not end up with an embryo, you end up with a mass of dividing cells that have all of the cell types the embryo would have, but they are not organized as an embryo.

So the argument is made that since it is not an embryo, you can take the cells from it. And then you turn the gene back on, because in your stem cell line, you want to have a normal cell, so you turn the gene back on.

There is another variant of this, which is interesting and might have less ethical arguments. Because the ethical argument here might be that you are simply producing a deformed fetus. If a fetus is born deformed, you do not take it and kill it, so why should you kill this? You have intentionally deformed it.

Now the proponents of this will argue that it is really not a fetus because it has no chance of ever developing into a baby. But that argument kind of goes away if you use this technique.

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

You haven't disrupted, changed the embryonic makeup; you simply enhanced the activity of some of the cells. So this altered nuclear transfer oocyte-assisted reprogramming is what it is called. And obviously we need a lot of animal experimentation, which is what the bill provides for.

This is the technique that I had suggested to the President. I met him at an event shortly after I went to NIH, and I talked to some of the doctors there. They had an open laboratory there and invited the staff out and Members out. I think I was probably the only Member that was there.

But they were talking about the potential of embryonic stem cell research. They didn't know what position the President was going to take; and of course you can't get inside their head, but my feeling was that they believed that the President was going to permit the use of surplus embryos and use Federal money for that. He, of course, did not do that.

But I asked them during this discussion, if in the development of identical twins you can take half the cells away and each half produces a perfectly normal baby, why shouldn't you be able to take one or two cells away to produce a stem cell line from, and then the rest of the embryo would produce a perfectly normal baby? And they said, yes, that ought to be possible.

And this is just depicted here. You have taken a cell away and you developed it into an embryonic stem cell line. That is easier said than done, because these cells don't like to be alone. And now two doctors say they have done it; Verlinksy and Lanza both say that they have successfully developed a stem cell line from a single cell. But both of them did it creatively by giving this cell some company, and after developing a sufficient number of like cells, they then could take the company cells away, and they had a pure embryonic stem cell line.

The last one here is a really interesting one, and that is the idea that you could take cells from an embryo which was clinically dead, like a person could be clinically dead but their organs are still good; that is how we do organ transplants. So maybe there is a time when an embryo is clinically dead, but the cells are still alive. It does not have the organizational capacity to produce an embryo, but yet the cells are still alive. There has been a lot of research on this, and, yes, that is a possibility.

The argument might be, gee, what kind of confidence could you have? You have got a good stem cell line from an embryo that was dead? But the counterargument would be, and one of our colleagues has a lung transplant here in the House and one of my very good friends here had a double lung transplant and lived with it for a long number of years, and both of those came from people who were clinically dead.

The next chart shows a really interesting one. And if this could be made to work, it is better than any of the others because you now would end up with embryonic stem cells that were a genetic match for the person that you were going to treat. And we won't take the time to go through these, but these are all techniques of trying to convince the donor cell, this is the donor, this is the guy with Parkinson's disease or the child with diabetes. You take the donor cell now and you use embryonic stem cell, the cytoplasm of the embryonic stem cell to confuse the donor cell nucleus so that it thinks it is an embryonic stem cell. And if you can do that, it is called de-differentiation, you have now taken the de-differentiated state, if you could do that, this would be the best of all worlds, because not only do you have a stem cell, you have a stem cell that is generically identical to the person you are going to treat so you don't have any rejection.

Now, we don't know if this is going to work or not, and what this bill does is to authorize the NIH to expend Federal funds to explore all of these techniques.

The next slide shows a phenomenon, and I would like to ask Dr. Gingrey to make a brief comment. We will be closing here in about 7 minutes, but this is what led me to believe that you could take cells from an early embryo without hurting it, because nature does this all the time. It is called identical twinning. Sometimes they divide at the two-cell stage and sometimes as late as the inner-cell mass stage. And my understanding is that you can tell when the division occurred by how they present. If they present at birth in a common amnion, the division probably occurred at the two-cell stage. If they present in the uterus with two different amnions, the division probably occurred at the inner-cell mass stage. And I would like to ask Dr. Gingrey, in his many deliveries, if he has had a chance to verify if this was true.

I thank the gentleman very much. I had forgotten that he had identical twins and is very familiar with this, not just as a physician but as a father.

I want to close with a note that a very fortuitous thing has happened, and let me put the next chart up that simply is a page from this White Paper that refers to this technique and that credits me with this proposal early in this process.

After I suggested this to the President, a very interesting thing had happened after that with a dialogue between Karl Rove and the White House, and they were, in effect, carrying out simultaneous monologues and thought they were dialoguing. And that very frequently happens, one of our big problems in this world, which is why, I guess, we have a State Department, because sometimes people think they are dialoguing and they really are carrying on simultaneous monologues.

But during this 5 years this technology has developed to the point that the British now are doing this preimplantation genetic diagnosis. And I am sure he won't mind if I mention his name. Richard Doerflinger made one of the greatest contributions to this dialogue of anybody when he suggested, ``Roscoe, the first thing that you need to do with that cell that you take from this eight-cell stage is to establish a repair kit for the baby.''

Now, we are kind of trying to do that with freezing cord blood. That is the reason you freeze cord blood, because later you may need it. That, by the way, is not embryonic stem cell; those are the adult stem cells. The baby's is an adult when it is born. As a matter of fact, the day you are born, you start to die. You are an adult when you are born. The embryonic is when you are first starting to develop; it is not an embryo, it is a fetus at that time. And the tissues are really in terms of the genetic development; they are adult tissues.

But if now the first thing that a parent does with that cell that is taken is to establish a repair kit and take a second cell, because the six cells that were implanted do just as well as the seven that were implanted, with the second cell, do a preimplantation genetic diagnosis, if they wish. But the critical thing is that we would get the stem

cell lines now from the surplus cells, from the repair kit.

So now I think that all ethical arguments disappear, because the parents are making two decisions that we are not a part of; we don't even get involved. They make a decision to have in vitro fertilization; then they make the decision to establish a repair kit. And only after the repair kit is established do we ask for some surplus cells from the repair kit.

I am very pleased that there is this possibility, because I understand, and I have a number of prolife friends who have decided that since these surplus embryos are going to be thrown away anyhow that you may as well try to get some medical benefit from them. That may be, for some, a compelling argument. And if I didn't believe that there was an alternative to that, it might be a more compelling argument.

But since there is an alternative to that and we don't have to offend the sensibilities of a large number of people in the country, and I am one of them; I am a little different, I guess, because I am a scientist and understand these things a little from that perspective, too. But I am devoutly prolife.

And I am just so pleased, Mr. Speaker, that we will have the opportunity shortly in the House as they are doing in the Senate to vote on a bill that can go to the President's desk, where he can sign the bill and say, I am really happy that we have here a bill that gives all of the promise of embryonic stem cell research without destroying or even hurting embryos.

Mr. Speaker, I deeply appreciate the gentleman from Maryland for yielding. And I just want to say, as my good friend and our colleague Coach Osborne said at the outset, Roscoe Bartlett deserves a lot of credit for this bill, H.R. 5526. And it has not been easy. You heard him say, Mr. Speaker, that he has been working on this issue for over 5 years, has met with the Bioethics Commission, the President's Bioethics Commission, to discuss this issue, discuss this issue with the White House, understanding, as he said just a few moments ago, that while we want to search for that miraculous medical breakthrough, that cure, that hopefully we can obtain either from adult or umbilical cord blood stem cells or the even greater potential for utilizing embryonic stem cells to save human life, to save the people that he was just talking about, Mr. Speaker.

And, indeed, I am sure you know this as well as the other Members that these folks do come by and talk to us on an annual basis, whether they are juvenile diabetics or Parkinson's, as he described, Alzheimer's. I think often of children born with something called spina bifida, where there is an open defect in the spine. One of these germ cell layers that Roscoe was just talking about, the ectoderm, something goes awry in the developmental process, in the fetal stage of development, and these children are born perfectly normal in every way except for this defect, which in almost every instance leaves them with a permanent, noncurable paralysis usually from the waist down.

That not only affects their lower extremities, but of course, it affects the function of bowel and bladder in these otherwise perfect, perfect children, and yet their lifespan is drastically shortened because of the complication of this birth defect.

I have lain awake more than one night thinking about what might be done, whether it is a surgical technique or a medication. Obviously, it would be great if these birth defects never occurred, if we knew exactly what caused that birth defect, but we do not. We just do not, and so to be able to develop something, some way of helping these children and people with other diseases that the gentleman from Maryland has just described is a passion of mine as a physician.

To come to this Congress, as I did 3\1/2\ years ago in the 108th, and to meet other Members of this body on both sides of the aisle, but in particular Representative Bartlett, and understand that he has a knowledge of this subject far beyond probably any physician Member, Roscoe Bartlett of course is a doctor. He is a Ph.D. He has taught embryology in medical school. Physiology, he is a physiologist, and the subject matter of which he is describing and talking about this evening, he has done so over the last several years, and it is amazing how he can put that, Mr. Speaker, in a simplistic terminology, with charts but with a very lucid explanation so that we, other Members on both sides of the aisle in both chambers, can understand and the general public who hopefully are watching can understand because the sound byte becomes reality.

This issue revolves around the use of embryonic stem cells, embryonic stem cells to hopefully result in these medical cures, these miracles that we hope will be there in our lifetime.

Mr. Speaker, we have a President that feels very strongly about that, that has great passion and compassion. But what he has said, and I heard him loud and clear shortly before I became a Member of this august body, when he made a decision not to destroy human life for the sake of hopefully some miraculous medical cure.

You could almost compare it to what our military commanders do and the decisions that they make. I know that the Speaker tonight particularly understands that with his military service and that of his sons serving in the military, but you try as hard as you can to avoid collateral damage in the military. The last thing you want to do in going after the enemy and taking him out is to inadvertently destroy or injure the life of a civilian.

Well, this is getting right down to the core of this matter of what Representative Bartlett is so concerned about. We want to be able to improve human life and relieve the suffering of our fellow brothers and sisters, but at the same time, we do not want to destroy a life in the process.

That destruction of life, whether it is a little embryo from one of these infertility clinics or, indeed, whether at some point somebody extends that destruction of human life to a senior citizen at the other extreme who may have lost most of their, not all of their, but most of their mental capacity, I would hope, Mr. Speaker, that if we knew that we could obtain a cell from the brain of a senior citizen who is suffering from senility and use that as a stem cell to cure somebody else's disease but in the process kill that individual, no one would accept that, I would hope, I would think, I would pray, and I think not.

So this is really what this is all about. Roscoe Bartlett knows and has finally convinced his colleagues, I think certainly in this body, but also in the other body, that there is a better way, that there is indeed a better way and that we can obtain these pluripotential stem cells, not totipotential because I know some would say if it is a totipotential, that it is an embryo in and of itself.

But this bill has the precept of saying we can fund research that will allow the harvesting of stem cells without destroying human life, and anybody that suggests that the embryos that are so-called left over from the fertility clinics are throwaway embryos, are going to be flushed down the drain anyway and it is okay to churn them up and centrifuge out some stem cells and destroy that human life, that it does not matter, needs to talk to the parents of the snowflake babies, some of them 3 and 4 years old now, I think close to 100, who have been adopted from those parents that own those embryos, those so-called excess throwaway embryos.

So there is a better way, and we do not need to get into this debate about who is pro-life and who is pro-choice and all of that. If we can do this in the Bartlett way, H.R. 5526 is the way to do it, and it is a companion bill to what Senator Santorum has introduced in the Senate. I am just thrilled to learn that Dr. Frist will allow that bill, as well as the Castle-DeGette bill and the Brownback bill to be brought to the floor of the Senate, it is my understanding next week, voted on. Possibly all three of those bills, Mr. Speaker, will pass, and then the President will have an opportunity, after we pass the companion bill to H.R. 5526, to do the right thing.

Then I think the Members of this body will sustain if the President vetoes the Castle-DeGette bill, which, again, I am not criticizing the authors, but there is no question that it goes back and allows taxpayer dollars, mine, my constituents in the 11th of Georgia, Roscoe Bartlett's constituents, with their hard-earned money to pay for research that results in the destruction of human life, and we reject that.

So I am thrilled that the 4 years of hard work that Representative Bartlett has put into this issue is finally going to come to fruition and we are going to get good results from utilizing these stem cells that are obtained.

I know that he will begin in just a moment, as I conclude, to talk about the different techniques of how that can be done, and I think our colleagues can understand it because he explains it well. It is not rocket science. It is not something that is star wars, but it is real and it is the way to do it.

So I am real happy to be here tonight to once again join my colleague who I have such great affection for, not just him personally but the issue that he has taken on and the hurdles that he has had to go through, and I commend him for that.

I thank the gentleman.

Indeed, it is true, Mr. Speaker, what he is describing. In fact, I can relate some personal experience to that. I think a lot of my colleagues know my wife and I had our fifth grandchild, but our oldest grandchildren are identical twin girls; they are 8 years old, and they were actually born at 26 weeks. They only weighed one pound, 12 ounces. And, Mr. Speaker, normally that situation is fraught with a lot of problems, and we were, of course, very blessed that they did well.

But what Representative Bartlett is talking about is exactly right. And, as he said, in human nature, you get this division, and you may be dividing at the eight-cell stage, you may be dividing at the four-cell stage or the 16-cell stage, and no harm is done. You are basically taking away 50 percent; it is almost like the wisdom of Solomon in dividing a child without harming either. And it is amazing what human nature can do.

And the gentleman said earlier that preimplantation diagnoses biopsy of the embryos so that you can avoid reimplanting an embryo that has a genetic defect that is incompatible with life. And these processes are being done, the gentleman referred to maybe a couple hundred cases that he was familiar with, with absolutely no harm. So this is exactly the right track, and so I do agree with your statement.

Mr. Speaker, I want to make sure I am actually speaking on the right bill, and I am speaking to the Alternative Pluripotent Stem Cell Therapies Enhancement Act, and I thank my colleague from Colorado for yielding.

I do rise in opposition to a politically motivated bill brought to this House today to provide cover for certain Members who have tough elections ahead of them. It seems really simple: Vote for one type of stem cell research and then you can oppose another. This way you can appeal to voters on both sides of the issue.

But this bill is rather meaningless because there is nothing preventing researchers now from conducting research on stem cells derived from sources other than embryos.

I wish to enter into the Record a letter from the American Society for Cell Biology, which contains 27 signatories including Nobel Prize winners, chancellors of universities, researchers from across this country who are opposing this legislation not because it is evil but because it is a waste of resources.

The truth is there exists no way to extract embryonic stem cells without then having to discard those embryos, which, by the design of the underlying legislation, would have been discarded anyway. This would not be done without the expressed approval of the donating parent.

If you truly support giving hope to the millions of Americans who suffer today from diseases like ALS, cancer, Alzheimer's, diabetes, then you support feasible embryonic stem cell research that can be done today.

And those of you who claim that there is no hope for stem cell research are wrong. NIH-funded research, limited as it currently is, has already shown definite progress in this area. In the case of heart disease, scientists have been able to successfully use stem cells to create and transplant living heart cells in rats. The promise of these advancements for the human heart is incredible. This is surely a pro- life piece of legislation if there ever was one.

And there are so many more examples of the lifesaving potential of the

stem cell research we already know about, but our scientific researchers only need the resources to do this.

So I urge my colleagues to join me in voting ``no'' on this bill as a show of support for enactment into law of H.R. 810, voted for in a bipartisan way in this House, today voted for in the Senate. This is what the American people want. This is what we have supported. This is the only vehicle by which we can ensure expanded stem cell research and the ability to save lives.

The American Society

for Cell Biology,

Bethesda, MD, July 17, 2006.

Hon. Orrin Hatch,

U.S. Senate, Washington, DC.

Dear Senator Hatch: The Senate will shortly be considering

legislation to permit the National Institutes of Health (NIH)

to fund research with additional and new and existing human

embryonic stem cell (hESC) lines. As staunch supporters of

biomedical research and particularly research with hESCs, we

trust that you will exert your influence to ensure passage of

H.R. 810. Scientists engaged in ESC research are counting on

you and like-minded Senate colleagues to assure its passage.

The President must also be persuaded not to veto this

legislation, for if we continue on the path he set 5 years

ago, United States investigators will be out of the running

in converting embryonic stem cells into important new

therapies. It is especially frustrating and demeaning that

American scientists are prohibited from using their NIH grant

funds for research with the hundreds of hESC lines generated

outside the United States or generated in this country with

private funding.

Also, S. 2754, the ``Alternative Pluripotent Stem Cell

Therapies Enhancement Act,'' sponsored by Senators Specter

and Santorum, seems to us, superfluous. Ostensibly, it is

intended to authorize research ``to derive human pluripotent

stem cell lines using techniques that do not harm embryos.''

However, at present, such research is currently permissible

and, therefore, does not require congressional legislation;

indeed, the National Institutes of Health may currently be

funding such efforts.

Moreover, all the alternative procedures advanced in the

report by the President's Council on Bioethics and other

alternative methods that have been suggested encounter

equally vexing ethical concerns. Hence, S. 2754 is unneeded

and if passed would deflect from the current urgent need for

generating new stem cell lines from excess IVF-derived

blastocysts.

Sincerely,

Peter Agre, M.D., Vice Chancellor for Science and

Technology, James B. Duke Professor of Cell Biology, Duke

University School of Medicine, Nobel Prize in Chemistry,

2003; Bruce Alberts, Professor of Biochemistry and

Biophysics, University of California, San Francisco,

President Emeritus, National Academy of Sciences; Mary C.

Beckerle, Ph.D., Ralph E. and Willia T. Main, Presidential

Professor, University of Utah, President, American Society

for Cell Biology; David Baltimore, President, California

Institute of Technology, Nobel Prize in Physiology or

Medicine, 1975; Paul Berg, Cahill Professor of Biochemistry,

Emeritus, Stanford University, Nobel Prize in Chemistry,

1980; J. Michael Bishop, Nobel Prize in Physiology or

Medicine, 1989; Helen M. Blau, Ph.D., Donald E. and Delia B.

Baxter, Professor, Director, Baxter Laboratory in Genetic

Pharmacology, Stanford University School of Medicine.

Michael S. Brown, MD, Nobel Prize in Physiology or

Medicine, 1985; Linda Buck, Ph.D., Howard Hughes Medical

Institute, Division of Basic Sciences, Fred Hutchinson Cancer

Research Center, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 2004;

Johann Deisenhofer, Regental Professor, Investigator, Howard

Hughes Medical Institute, The University of Texas

Southwestern Medical Center, Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1988;

Joseph L. Goldstein, M.D., Regental Professor of Molecular

Genetics and Internal Medicine, University of Texas

Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, Nobel Prize in

Physiology or Medicine, 1985; Larry Goldstein, Investigator,

Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Department of Cellular and

Molecular Medicine, University of California, San Diego

School of Medicine; Alfred G. Gilman, M.D., Ph.D., Dallas,

Texas, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1994; Paul

Greengard, Professor, The Rockefeller University, Nobel Prize

in Physiology or Medicine, 2000; Lee Hartwell, Ph.D.,

President & Director, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center,

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 2001; Dudley

Herschbach, Baird Research Professor of Science, Harvard

University, Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1986.

H. Robert Horvitz, Professor of Biology, Massachusetts

Institute of Technology, Nobel Prize in Physiology or

Medicine, 2002; Douglas Koshland, Carnegie Institution,

Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Paul C.

Lauterbur, Center for Advanced Study Professor of Chemistry &

Distinguished Professor of Medical Information Sciences,

University of Illinois, Nobel Prize for Physiology or

Medicine, 2003; Sean J. Morrison, Investigator, Howard Hughes

Medical Institute, Director, Center for Stem Cell Biology,

University of Michigan; Eric N. Olson, Department of

Molecular Biology, University of Texas, Southwestern Medical

Center at Dallas; Thomas D. Pollard, MD, Sterling Professor

and Chair, Molecular Cellular and Developmental Biology, Yale

University; Randy Schekman, HHMI Investigator, Dept. of

Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California,

Berkeley; Phillip A. Sharp, Institute Professor and Center

for Cancer Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1993; Maxine F.

Singer, A.B., Ph.D., D.Sc., President Emerita, Carnegie

Institution of Washington; Harold Varmus, MD, President,

Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Chair, Joint Steering

Committee for Public Policy, Former Director, National

Institutes of Health, Nobel Laureate in Medicine or

Physiology, 1989; Eric Wieschaus, Department of Molecular

Biology, Princeton University, Nobel Prize in Physiology or

Medicine, 1995.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 4 minutes.

Mr. Speaker, today the President of the United States has snuffed out the candle of hope for 110 million Americans who suffer from debilitating diseases like diabetes, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, nerve damage and many, many more. He snuffed out this candle of hope because he used the first veto of his 6-year Presidency to veto H.R. 810, the embryonic stem cell legislation.

Mr. Speaker, this is the President's first veto in over 1,100 bills. The President issued veto warnings in nearly 150 bills, but he signed all of those bills. The President has signed bills to increase the national debt. He has signed bills to increase tax cuts for wealthy corporations and oil companies. He signed hundreds of post office naming bills, but he decided he would veto this one bill. This is not some minor legislation. This is legislation that would foster the only research that has shown hope for millions of Americans.

He said in his veto message that he was vetoing this legislation because ``American taxpayers would be compelled to fund the deliberate destruction of human embryos.'' One might think that the President would read this bill, his first veto, before he said that, because if he had read that bill, he would know that H.R. 810 specifically does not allow Federal funds to be used for the destruction of embryos. Rather, H.R. 810 says that Federal dollars can be used for the research on embryonic stem cell lines which have already been created with private dollars.

This policy is the same as the policy President Bush looked at in 2001 when he issued an executive order restricting the number of stem cell lines used. What he said at that time was embryonic stem cell research was okay, but he limited it to embryonic stem cell lines in existence as of that day.

So I ask the President, why is it wrong to simply expend Federal money for stem cell lines that have been created by private researchers since that date? It seems wrong, and it is certainly not what this bill is intended to do.

The President wants it both ways. He wants to say that he supports embryonic stem cell research, but he doesn't want to do it in a way that will actually effect cures.

Mr. Speaker, it seems to me that the President is confused about his role as chief executive of this country. We don't live in a theocracy. We live in a constitutional democracy in this country where we form a consensus about ethics and medical research. There is a widespread consensus. The public supports this almost three-quarters. Prolife, prochoice, Democrat, Republican, Independent, all of them share the same concern that we protect lives, but that we expand research in a way that will benefit millions and millions of Americans.

I urge this House to take this very seriously. Don't make a political vote. Think about the lives that could be saved. Think about what H.R. 810 actually does, and vote ``yes'' to override this veto.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Eshoo).

Mr. Speaker, I am now pleased to yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Rhode Island (Mr. Langevin), a leader on this issue.

(Mr. LANGEVIN asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson-Lee) for a unanimous consent request.

(Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Mrs. Capps), another fine leader in this movement.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gene Green).

(Mr. GENE GREEN of Texas asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, of course, the gentlewoman from Pennsylvania refers to the South Korea experiment which was not embryonic stem cell research. Rather, it was somatic cell nuclear transfer, not at issue today. And, furthermore, it only points out why we need Federal oversight and ethics in the United States.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from Connecticut (Ms. DeLauro).

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield for the purpose of making a unanimous consent request to the gentleman from Rhode Island (Mr. Kennedy).

(Mr. KENNEDY of Rhode Island asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 2 minutes to the distinguished member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, Mr. Engel.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 4 minutes to the distinguished Democratic whip, Mr. Hoyer.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from New York (Ms. Slaughter).

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 1 minute to the distinguished gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Carnahan).

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 1 minute to the distinguished gentlewoman from New York (Mrs. Lowey).

Mr. Speaker, I continue to reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Markey).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Cleaver).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the distinguished Democratic leader (Ms. Pelosi).

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, my colleagues, this is a sad day for America. But what is so sad is that our opponents would so distort the facts to stop research that would benefit so many. Many have talked today about the so-called snowflake babies, embryos which are donated to other couples. I don't oppose that. I think that is great.

But right now couples undergoing IVF treatment have three options for the spare embryos that are necessarily created. They can freeze them for future use by themselves. They can donate them to other couples, as several hundred have done, or they can say that the embryos that are left over should be destroyed as medical waste, and tens of thousands of those embryos have been destroyed.

All we say today, give those couples a fourth choice. Let those embryos that would thrown away as medical waste be donated for ethical embryonic stem cell research. The opponents of this bill also continue to claim that adult stem cell and core blood cells are just as good as embryonic stem cells. Shame on them. This is a bald lie.

Harold Varmus, the former director of the NIH, said just this week, compared to adult stem cells, embryonic stem cells have a much greater potential according to all existing scientific literature. Let's not distort the facts just for a political argument.

This Congress has been politicizing science in a way that the American public disagrees with. Earlier this year, we tried to assert our jurisdiction over end-of-life decisions with the terrible vote that we took in the Terry Schiavo case. Now, today, we are trying to stop ethical scientific research that could help tens of millions of people.

Many on the other side say, well, the taxpayers shouldn't fund this research. Excuse me, I thought we had a national consensus, 72 percent of Americans agree with this precept, people who are Democrats, Republicans, independents, prolife, prochoice. I don't know who decided that they were God and that Congress could not fund this research, because their religious thinking trumps the national consensus.

A majority of my constituents don't think we should fund the war. Does that mean we shouldn't fund the war? Of course not.

We need this ethical research. We need it for our colleague, Jim Langevin, so he can walk again. We need it for our colleague, Lane Evans, whose Parkinson's has made him so sick that he cannot be here today to vote to override this bill.

Let's give hope to millions of Americans. Let's give hope for ethical research. Let us override this veto.