David Weldon: “I rise on the floor to address an issue that will be in the news a great deal next week. The Congress of the United…”

“I rise on the floor to address an issue that will be in the news a great deal next week. The Congress of the United States has debated on and off for quite a few years the issues surrounding new breakthroughs in cellular treatments for a variety of clinical diseases, and specifically what I am talking about here are stem cell therapies. The debate that the Congress has been engaged in for some time now is the issue of whether adult stem cells, stem cells taken from my body, or any adult's body, or even a child's body, because they are considered adult stem cells, can more successfully be used to treat a variety of different clinical conditions; or whether cord blood, which is blood from the umbilical cord, or actually you can get stem cells from the placenta, from the cord itself; or whether this notion that has been put forward for quite some time now, that the stem cells taken from an embryo is actually the best hope for the future for treating a whole variety of different diseases, diseases that we today have no treatments for. I have taken a keen interest in this issue for some time now for a variety of reasons, the first of which being I am a physician. I still see patients about once a month in the veterans clinic in my congressional district. I practiced medicine for 15 years, internal medicine, prior to my election in 1994.…”