David Weldon: “I thank Chairman Deal for yielding. I want to commend Dr. Roscoe Bartlett. Many of you don't know him as a doctor, but…”

“I thank Chairman Deal for yielding. I want to commend Dr. Roscoe Bartlett. Many of you don't know him as a doctor, but he is a doctor of physiology. He led the charge on this issue beginning over a year ago now. Frankly, I am really surprised anybody would get up and oppose this legislation. It has been claimed that the Congress never directs research like this. We have had a line item directing NIH on diabetes for years. As a matter of fact, I think it passed as a separate authorization through the Commerce Committee. Then we have obviously had the directed research on AIDS for years and years and years. So there is plenty of precedent for this. As was stated earlier, this passed the Senate unanimously. You know, the embryonic stem cells that the opponents of this bill prefer to use, the embryonic stem cells from the fertility clinics, if they were ever used in a human clinical trial, first of all, you have to get over the issue that I have been saying for years and years, that they become tumors when you put them in animals, they become teratomas. That is a feature of embryonic stem cells that nobody has published a study showing the ability to turn that feature off. So they have never been shown to be safe. But then you are going to have the genetic mismatch issue. And, you know, Senator Specter recently held a hearing. And he asked Dr. Beatty, he runs the stem cell program at the NIH, and he asked him this question.…”