Connie Mack: “I rise today to support this sense-of-the-Senate amendment concerning the Federal Accounting Standards Board's proposal…”

“I rise today to support this sense-of-the-Senate amendment concerning the Federal Accounting Standards Board's proposal to change the Generally Accepted Accounting Principle relating to employee stock options. While most people have a tendency to talk about these things strictly in terms of dollars and cents or from an accounting perspective, I believe that this issue goes further than that. I had a younger brother who died of cancer in 1979. You might be thinking, ``what has this got to do with employee stock options?'' I would say that it does relate. When Michael was diagnosed with melanoma everyone said that there was no cure. At that time if you were diagnosed with melanoma, you were going to die; it was just a question of when. Dr. Stephen Rosenberg at the National Cancer Institute has done some remarkable work in the area of research on melanoma. In fact, in certain cases he is experiencing a 40 percent cure on melanoma. While this is wonderful progress, I cannot help but think that if there were fewer hurdles for high tech companies and if there were fewer roadblocks in the way of new companies starting up, would my brother have had an opportunity to live? There are probably hundreds of thousands of people around our country who are looking to the breakthroughs in biotechnology and bioresearch for a cure to their fatal illnesses.”