Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act of 2007

STEM CELL RESEARCH ENHANCEMENT ACT OF 2007

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Mr. WELDON of Florida. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I rise in opposition to this bill.

If this bill becomes law, it will establish a new precedent for our government. For the first time, we will be funding researchers who are knowingly destroying human embryos in the course of their research, and that is really what this debate is essentially about.

This Congress enacted legislation over 10 years ago, and President Bill Clinton signed it, specifying that no Federal funds will be used for research that involves the destruction of a human embryo. This piece of legislation takes us down a path that overturns that.

Now, the advocates for this legislation assert that this is necessary because of the great potential of embryonic stem cells, and I rise essentially as a physician and a concerned American to challenge that notion based on my understanding of embryonic stem cells. And by the way, we have heard it said repeatedly that embryonic stem cells have only been studied for 8 years. They have been studied for 25 years in the mouse. Eight years in the human model, but 25 years in the mouse.

All embryonic stem cells form tumors. All of them. Indeed, if you are in the research lab, that is how you determine you actually have an embryonic stem cell. You put it in an animal, and it forms a tumor called a teratoma.

They have never been shown not only to be really good and therapeutic, but they have never been shown to be safe. Before an embryonic stem cell therapy could ever be approved by the FDA, it would have been to be shown to be both effective, which embryonic stem cells have never been shown to be; and as well, safe, and the very nature of embryonic stem cells renders them unsafe.

So why is this such a critical debate? Why is this such an important debate? It is simply because this is not necessary and it is morally wrong. It is morally wrong because it takes us down a path where we will be saying certain forms of human life are expendable and can be discarded. And it is totally unnecessary, because they have never been shown to be therapeutically useful.

Furthermore, we were just amazed to discover that in the amniotic fluid are cells that behave just like these embryonic stem cells, but they don't form tumors. It is not ethically controversial to use them, and they have all the potential that embryonic stem cells have been shown to have in the lab.

So I would encourage all of my colleagues to vote ``no' on this legislation. Support the President of the United States, and just remember, just remember, that there are absolutely no restrictions on this research in the private sector. This is all about Federal dollars and how they are going to be used.

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Mr. WELDON of Florida. I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of this motion to recommit, and I would encourage all of my colleagues to vote for it. Why are we offering this motion to recommit? It is really very, very simple. This institution, the House of Representatives, is previously on multiple occasions on record being in opposition to human cloning, both human cloning for the purpose of creating a baby and human cloning for the purpose of creating embryos for research purposes.

Why do we bring this up? Why do we offer this motion to recommit in its current form? Well, it is very, very simple. Some of the labs that are going to get the money under this bill are currently pursuing an agenda of human cloning. I would encourage you all to go to the Harvard medical school Web site. You can pull this down. I have it right here. I would be very interested to share it with any of my colleagues how they are pursuing, through the process that they refer to as Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer, which is human cloning, an agenda to create disease-specific cell lines for embryonic stem cells. That is their agenda through the process of cloning.

Now, we are on record wanting to make it illegal, make it criminal, to do human cloning. This motion to recommit doesn't do that. This says something much milder than that, and this is why I think most people in this body should be very, very comfortable with this motion to recommit. It simply says, we don't want to be using Federal dollars in a lab that is engaging in human cloning. If we can't get through the Senate a ban, a total ban on human cloning, at least let's make sure that, as we move forward in this brave new world of using human embryos in research and discarding them, that at least we are not incentivizing cloning.

I commend my colleague from Texas and the staff for developing this motion to recommit, and I would just again remind all of my colleagues, we are out of step with the civilized world. Canada, France, Germany and Italy have all completely banned embryo cloning. All the other G-8 countries have serious restrictions on it. This is a restriction on human cloning, a simple, mild restriction that we won't allow Federal dollars to be going to a lab that is doing cloning.

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