The Democratic Agenda

THE DEMOCRATIC AGENDA

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Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding, and I commend her for calling this Special Order.

We have concluded now the first complete week under the Democrat majority rule, and I think it is worth talking about what their accomplishments have been. And I am very glad you brought up the issue of stem cells.

I am a physician, as you pointed out. I practiced medicine for 15 years before coming to the House. Indeed, I still see patients. Internal medicine. Many of my patients had Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease, the diseases that these folks claim they are going to cure with embryonic stem cells.

And to me I think it is really very unfortunate what they have been doing. It is really creating what I feel is false hope. Indeed, it is a deception to tell people that embryonic stem cells have that kind of potential.

And the reason I say that is embryonic stem cells have never been shown to be safe in animal studies. They have never really been studied in humans, whereas adult stem cells and umbilical cord blood stem cells have not only been shown to be safe in clinical therapeutics, but they have also been tested not only in animals and shown to be safe, but they have been given to human beings and shown to be effective and to work; whereas embryonic stem cells have a chronic problem, you might say. They form tumors, a specific type of tumor called the teratoma, in every animal study in which they have been used. And before embryonic stem cells could ever be used in any clinical application whatsoever, they have to first be shown to be safe. And for them to be shown to be safe, somebody has to turn off this property that they have to form tumors. And yet we saw person after person parading down to the floor saying these embryonic stem cells are going to cure this and cure this and cure that. And lo and behold, it is quite possible they will cure absolutely nothing.

Indeed, what is very, very interesting, and this just came out this past week, the week that the Democrats, in my opinion, are putting this deception forward on the American people, is it has been shown that amniotic fluid is filled with stem cells that have all of the properties of embryonic stem cells. They can do all the things and they behave just like embryonic stem cells, but they do not form tumors. And, of course, these cells are plentiful. They are noncontroversial. You don't have to kill a human embryo, which is what you have to do to get embryonic stem cells. You have to kill a human life. You have to kill a human embryo at its earliest stages to get those stem cells out, whereas amniotic fluid-derived stem cells behave just like the embryonic stem cells. They do all the things the embryonic stem cells do, but they don't form tumors. So they have tremendous potential application in clinical therapeutics.

So to me it was unfortunate, the deceptive messaging that went out from this body. And, indeed, it seemed to me like the bulk of the American press corps buys it hook, line, and sinker that these cures are around the corner. But in reality science is moving to a place where embryonic stem cells are not going to be used.

And the other thing is they have been studied for 25 years. There were many people who came to the floor and said this research is just beginning. The Journal of Science had a cover story about 6 months ago on embryonic stem cells. ``Twenty-Five Years of Study' was the cover. It was not 8 years. It is not a new field of study. It is actually an old field of study, and it is a field of study that, in my opinion, may yield knowledge and you may be able to write a Ph.D. thesis based on the material that you discover or learn from embryonic stem cells.

And, of course, we are funding it. We are funding it through the NIH right now. We are increasing funding each year, embryonic stem cell research, on the cell lines that exist at the NIH. And really all this study did was just to prove the destruction of more embryos, and that is really what the bill is all about. And this is a critical line in the sand, you might say, that our Nation's research establishment is moving across. We are now going to say that it is okay to take these forms of human life and exploit them in the lab, destroy them for therapeutic purposes, and we have never gone down that path before.

And that is not where it will end. They are saying now it is the ``excess embryos' from the fertility clinics. They will come back next and say, well, there really wasn't that many available in those clinics and we really need to create human embryos for research purposes and we need to specifically create them through a process called cloning. They want to do human cloning. That is creating human life through the process of cloning for their ``research,' and this is what they always do in all the arguments, saying what it will cure.

So before I yield back, I just want to say they were deceptive not just in their stem cell arguments. You were talking about taxes when I came to the floor. To me it was so ironic, or deceptive, almost like a culture of deception, in my opinion. They passed PAYGO and said no more are we going to pay for things if we don't have the funds to do it, and then the next day they waived PAYGO on their homeland security bill. I mean they get up and they say they are going to do all these things, and the very next day they waived that rule requirement in their homeland security bill. Furthermore, they had absolutely no explanation of how we were going to fund the provisions in their bill.

The Washington Post, a liberal Democrat newspaper, speculated that the cargo-screening requirements that they put in that bill, which the industry says is unnecessary, could end up costing our economy hundreds of billions of dollars. That is the Washington Post. An anti-Republican newspaper said that. They put that in there, and they have no explanation of how they are going to pay for it.

And, of course, I guess the ultimate irony was all the talk about doing away with earmarks and then they pass a minimum wage bill through the House that has a special earmark that was placed in there by somebody that benefited a company in Speaker Pelosi's congressional district, which, to me, is absolutely unbelievable.

But, anyway, I have covered a lot of territory. I really came to talk about stem cells, and I thank the gentlewoman for yielding.

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Mr. WELDON of Florida. Well, you are absolutely right. Adult stem cell research in humans has been funded for about 25, maybe even 30 years. Embryonic stem cell research in the mouse began about 25 years ago.

In the mid-1990s, the House and Senate passed and President Clinton signed into law a provision that said no Federal funds would go to any research that involved the destruction of a human embryo.

Shortly after that a doctor by the name of Jamie Thompson, I think it is, at the University of Wisconsin was successful in extracting embryonic stem cells from a human embryo. People had been doing that in the mouse, but I guess nobody had either the technique or the hutzpah, as my Jewish friends like to say, to actually destroy a human embryo in his lab. But he did that. He successfully isolated the human embryonic stem cell. And then researchers wanted to get Federal funding. This has always been about Federal funding.

We don't have a law restricting embryo research. People can do it. I think a lot of it is unethical, but there is no law barring it. This is all about getting the government to fund it.

Under the Clinton policy, because we had a law in place saying you can't get funding if you are destroying an embryo, what the Clinton people did is they destroyed the embryos in an outside lab, and then sent the embryonic stem cells over to the NIH and they funded the research. I and several other Members wrote the Clinton administration a letter saying you may not be violating the letter of the law, but you are certainly violating the spirit of the law. That is what President Bush inherited in 2000 when he became President of the United States.

What President Bush said, which I think is a reasonable thing, all of these embryos have been destroyed and all of these cell lines are being studied at the NIH. We don't want to throw them away. The embryos have been destroyed, but we don't want to keep destroying embryos, so we will continue to fund research on these embryos, we just won't destroy any more embryos. That is really what this debate has been about. The people on the other side of the debate have been saying this has so much incredible promise so we have to fund it. Even though, by the way, the biotech industry won't fund it; venture capitalists won't fund it. We want Uncle Sam and taxpayers to fund it, 50 percent of whom are pro-life and are opposed to this kind of research, because it ``has so much promise,' quote/unquote, is what they have been arguing.

When you actually look at the data, it really doesn't bear up to scrutiny. That is the fundamental point of my argument. If you look at the science, the science shows a lot of potential with adult stem cells, cord blood stem cells, and now these new amniotic fluid derived stem cells. The embryonic stem cells form tumors. Their potential application to therapeutics, I think, is very small, remote, unlikely. You have to turn off their ability to form tumors before they can be used.

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