Hope Offered Through Principled and Ethical Stem Cell Research Act--Continued

Floor Speech

HOPE OFFERED THROUGH PRINCIPLED AND ETHICAL STEM CELL RESEARCH ACT--Continued -- (Senate - April 11, 2007)

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Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Maryland for her very eloquent statement and for her strong support of hope and health and healing, as encompassed in S. 5.

Mr. President, while I wait the arrival of our next speaker, I want to point out that time and time again I hear those who are opposed to S. 5 use the phrase that they are opposed to funds being used for the destruction of embryos. Earlier today I had corrected one Senator who said that. I said: Show me in the bill where it is. Well, then other Senators--the Senator from Kansas and others--have gotten up and talked about not using money for the destruction of embryos.

I challenge anyone, any Senator to come and take S. 5 and show me anywhere in there where there is one dime used for the destruction of embryos. It is not there. I get the feeling that a misrepresentation repeated and repeated somehow seems to take hold so that people say: Well, there must be money for the destruction of embryos in this bill. There is not. That is covered by the Dickey-Wicker amendment which pertains to appropriations bills, and I am an appropriator, and that is covered there. So none of this money is used for the destruction of an embryo. All it is used for is for the research on stem cells that have been derived, which is what is being done today, by the way--which are derived. Now, those derivations can come from private entities or State sponsored or wherever, maybe some international, maybe foreign countries--wherever. But none of the money here in our bill, S. 5, can be used for the destruction of an embryo, period. If anyone says so, please come and show us where it is in the bill that says that.

Mr. President, I see the distinguished Senator from Missouri is here. I yield 15 minutes to the Senator from Missouri.

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Mr. HARKIN. I thank the Senator from Missouri for a very eloquent and poignant statement. I know the Senator mentioned that recently she came off a campaign in Missouri. I know that, in listening to her statement, she is reflecting the wishes and hopes of so many people in her own State who want to make sure we move ahead and find cures and treatments. I thank her for her eloquence and for her forthright statement on behalf of embryonic stem cell research.

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Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, we are getting close to the end of the debate, we have some floor time in the next hour or so to go back and forth. I thought I might take a few moments now to talk about why it is so necessary to have NIH do this kind of research, to oversee this research. The Senator from Oklahoma said that a lot of research is going on now on embryonic stem cells. To be sure, it is. It is going on in different States, in private institutions, in England and Australia and France and Japan and Singapore and a few other countries. Why do we want to get the Federal Government involved? First, there is no other area of medical research in which we say the Federal Government should step aside and let the States do it. I know of no other area of medical research.

I always look at the human genome project. What if we had said to the States: We are not going to do it. You do it. They might have sequenced one gene or another or let the private sector do it. They would have been getting patents on it or everything like. Now we have the mapping and sequencing of the entire human gene, and you can go online and get it, free to everybody. Any researcher anywhere can get it. Now they may take that and develop it into drugs and therapies. That is fine. That is that sort of symbiotic relationship we have developed very well between the private pharmaceutical industry and the basic research industry, which is NIH.

Again, our National Institutes of Health should be involved in overseeing this, because if we don't have a coherent Federal policy on stem cells, each State writes its own rules. That means that different States may have different ethical guidelines. One State would be different from another. You would wind up with a patchwork quilt of laws. Then you would wind up with States competing against each other. So California gets to doing stem cell research, and what it does is, it hires researchers away from Missouri. Then Missouri is hiring people away from Iowa and then Ohio. Then New York is trying to bid people away from Ohio. You get this terrible State-versus-State kind of competition in stem cell research.

We don't want that. We ought to be doing it on a national basis, a national effort, and we should not lose the international leadership we have always had in biomedical research. Should we give it up to Singapore or to Korea or England? No. We have always been the leader in the world in biomedical research, and we should continue.

Secondly, the issue of why we have to expand our stem cell policy. Again, I repeat, for the sake of emphasis, of those 78 cell lines that were supposedly available on August 9, 2001, only 21 have been available. A lot of them are sick. They are not propagating properly. They are unhealthy. Right now NIH is only using between four and six of these lines and even they, I have been told, are not very healthy. So the restrictions we have had by the Bush administration, since August 9, 2001, have resulted in a situation where fewer and fewer viable good stem cell lines are available for NIH researchers. However, during that same period of time in other sectors, we have derived over 400 different cell lines. Yet no one who gets NIH funding is able to do any research on these healthy embryonic stem cell lines. That is why we need to develop these. We need to expand it.

That is what S. 5 does. S. 5 takes off the handcuffs. It lets us use, under strict ethical guidelines, those embryos that are slated to be discarded at IVF clinics. With all due respect to my friend from Georgia, S. 30 does not do that. S. 5, if passed, will do everything that S. 30 wants to do. If S. 5 passes, what they want to do in S. 30 can be done by NIH. The problem with S. 30 is, if S. 30 passes and S. 5 doesn't, then S. 30 is very limited. It says you can only use these few embryos that are naturally dead which, by the way, I don't think there is such a scientific term, but it has been bandied about here and it is in the bill. There is no such scientific delineation of what is naturally dead.

So that is the situation we are in. S. 5 will do both. It will open new stem cell lines with ethical guidelines. It will allow them to extract stem cells from these nonviable embryos. S. 30 will not. S. 30 still will not permit us to get the healthy stem cell lines our researchers need. That is why we need to pass S. 5.

Mr. President, how much time do I have remaining?

The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator has 2 1/2 minutes remaining.

Mr. HARKIN. I will conclude my 2 1/2 minutes then by referring to the other chart. Again, we have to keep in mind that the policy now in effect, the policy in effect right now says we could use Federal money to examine and do research on embryonic stem cells that were derived prior to 9 p.m., August 9, 2001. But we can't use Federal money to examine or to do research on stem cells derived after 9 p.m., August 9, 2001. Those are morally unacceptable. Before 9 p.m., August 9, 2001, that is morally OK. After 9 p.m., it is not morally OK. Who decided that 9 p.m. on August 9, 2001, was some kind of moral dividing line, that stem cells derived before that, that is OK, but stem cells derived after that, that is not OK? Only one person decided that, and that was President Bush.

The people of this country didn't decide that. Ethicists didn't decide that. Theologians didn't decide that. Scientists didn't decide that. President Bush decided that. It is sheer hypocrisy to say we can fund those before, but we can't fund those after. That is the situation we find ourselves in today.

Let's take off the handcuffs. Let's get rid of that fake moral dividing line that has no substance in reality and let's get on with finding the cures for
people with Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and spinal cord injuries. That is what S. 5 is all about.

I yield the floor.

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Mr. HARKIN. I thought I had 12 minutes left, until 5:15. Well, anyway, in closing, first let me thank my colleagues, Senator Isakson, Senator Coleman, Senator Brownback, and others who have participated in this debate. It has been a very informed and a very good debate over the last 2 days. I thank my colleague, Senator Isakson, for his many courtesies. There were a lot of things we agree on and obviously there are things we disagree on, but that is the march of legislation in the Senate. I wish to thank Senator Isakson and others for their speeches and for their insight into this very important issue. I particularly wish to thank Senator Hatch and Senator Smith for their great leadership on this and so many other health issues in the Senate and for their very poignant, very powerful statements they made on the Senate floor.

I started this whole debate yesterday morning by talking about hope, hope for cures for Parkinson's, to repair spinal cord injuries, to end the scourge of juvenile diabetes, to lift the death sentence of those afflicted with Lou Gehrig's disease, or ALS, hope for families with someone lost to Alzheimer's disease. S. 5, the bill before us that will be our first vote, is a bill that provides this hope, not a hope based on dreams or fiction but based on solid scientific foundation. It is why 525 disease-related groups and research institutions and universities all support S. 5, because it has solid scientific foundation. It is why the Director of NIH, Dr. Zerhouni, recently said more embryonic stem cell lines needed to be investigated:

It is clear today that American science would be better served and the Nation would be better served if we let our scientists have access to more cell lines.

That is what S. 5 does: provides more cell lines.

It is why the former Director of NIH, Dr. Varmus, a Nobel laureate, supports S. 5, to take the handcuffs off our scientists. I wish to make it again abundantly clear, as there has been a lot of misinformation in the last couple of days on the floor, that S. 5 somehow contains money for the destruction of embryos. That is not true. I challenge anyone to show me in the bill anywhere where it contains any money for the destruction of embryos. It is simply not true. Anyone who says otherwise is simply not being accurate.

There are those who say: Well, the Federal Government shouldn't get involved. We can leave it up to the States and private entities. Well, we can't do that. We need coherence. We need to have the crown jewel of the Federal Government, the National Institutes of Health, to oversee this so we have good, strong ethical guidelines, so we have compatibility, so we have the kind of interplay between scientists that is necessary to advance scientific research. To leave it up to the States means we will have a patchwork quilt of laws all over this country when it should be a national effort--a national effort. Then we will have States bidding against one another for scientists to come to their States to do this research. We don't want that to happen.

Lastly, we cannot afford to lose our global leadership in biomedical research. We, the United States of America, have always been the world's leader in biomedical research. All the great scientific discoveries, whether it is the polio vaccine, smallpox, all these things that have made our lives better; all the new drugs we have for fighting AIDS around the world came from the United States. All the cancer interventions, the reason cancer is now on the decline is because of biomedical research in this country. We can't afford to lose that to other countries. We need to keep it in America.

So what it comes down to in the final analysis is simply this: If you want to promote good science, vote for S. 5. If you want strong ethical standards, S. 5 has the strongest ethical guidelines, stronger than what the Bush administration has right now and stronger than any other bill that has come before the floor of the Senate. If you want to move ahead with more cell lines, as Dr. Zerhouni wants, S. 5 is the bill that will provide those cell lines. If you want to put embryonic stem cell research into overdrive, to make it a national priority to do this research, S. 5 will put it into overdrive. If you want to say to Karli Borcherding right here, age 12, using 120 needles a month to give herself insulin shots because she has juvenile diabetes; if you want to say to Karli Borcherding and all the other kids with juvenile diabetes, if you want to say to them that we are going to give you hope, we are going to give you hope that your diabetes will be cured, hope that you can live a full and normal life; if you want to say to those families who have a loved one suffering from Alzheimer's, we are going to give you hope; if you want to say to those who have a family member suffering from Parkinson's disease or under the death sentence of ALS, we are going to give you hope--hope not based upon fiction, not based upon some will-of-the-wisp thoughts that somebody might have but hope based on solid science that scientists know we can use.

We have already taken embryonic stem cells and made nerve cells, motor neurons, bone cells, heart muscle cells. We know that it can be done. Yet our scientists are handcuffed today because of the policy laid down by President Bush on August 9 of 2001. It is time to lift those restrictions.

Some say the President will veto this bill. We can't decide what we do around here because a President--any President--threatens to veto something. We have to do what is right. We have to do what the people of America want us to do. We have to do what is in the best interests of this country as we see our duty to do it. I hope the President will sign this bill. I hope he will see we have made our compromises, that we have strong ethical guidelines, that this is the way to give hope to Karli Borcherding.

So I hope we don't fall prey to: Well, we can't pass this because the President will veto it. We have to do what we think is right. The right thing to do is to support S. 5. As Senator Hatch so eloquently said, let those thousands of embryos that are being discarded every year in in vitro fertilization clinics, let them be used to provide life to other people, hope to Karli Borcherding, hope for people suffering from multiple sclerosis, spinal cord injuries. To me, that is the true ethical course to take. That is the guideline I think we must follow. Let those embryos be used to provide hope to these people.

Mr. President, I see my colleague and a cosponsor of our bill who has been a leader on this issue for so many years, and I yield the remainder of our time to Senator Specter of Pennsylvania.

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