Heidi Alexander: “this morning, our Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee had a hearing, and one of the members came up to me…”

“this morning, our Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee had a hearing, and one of the members came up to me on the floor and said: That was the most civil hearing I have attended in the Senate in a while. The truth is that most of our hearings in the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee are civil. We have Senators of widely different points of view. I thank Senator Murray, the Senator from Washington State, who is the ranking member of our committee and a member of the Democratic leadership, for the way that she and the Democratic members of the committee worked with the Republican members so that we can have the Surgeon General of the United States, Dr. Adams, and Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, who is one of our country's most esteemed scientists and the man who headed the human genome project, there for 3 hours and we can ask questions. Virtually every Senator participated, and we got some good answers. I would like to report to the other members of the Senate about that hearing. I began it by saying: I have been rereading the book ``Guns, Germs, and Steel,'' a book by Jared Diamond, written in 1997, which is as relevant today--maybe more relevant today--than it was when he wrote it. Mr.…”