Pete Stark: “I rise in support of H.R. 2608, the Greenwood-Deutsch Cloning Prohibition Act of 2001, and in opposition to H.R. 2505.…”

“I rise in support of H.R. 2608, the Greenwood-Deutsch Cloning Prohibition Act of 2001, and in opposition to H.R. 2505. Cloning technology has been the subject of heated debate since 1997, when news of the successful cloning of Dolly the sheep rocked the scientific community. The resulting ethical discussions have raised many important questions of scientific development. Perhaps the most important discussions have centered on the lengths to which science can and should go in the future. What remained true throughout the debate, however, is that the vast majority of the American public vehemently opposes the creation of cloned human beings. The Greenwood-Deutsch bill respects that feeling to the utmost. H.R. 2608 would criminalize reproductive cloning of human beings while simultaneously protecting the rights of scientists to perform somatic cell nuclear transfer. Somatic cell nuclear transfer is a technology that holds great promise for medicine by permitting the creation of stem cells that are genetically identical to the donor. This is valuable because many of the potential medical therapies involving stem cells could be stymied when the immune systems of therapy recipients reject the transferred tissue. Using cloning technology to create stem cells could circumvent this problem.”