David Weldon: “prior to coming to the United States Congress, I practiced internal medicine for 15 years, including treating many…”

“prior to coming to the United States Congress, I practiced internal medicine for 15 years, including treating many patients with diabetes, Alzheimer's disease, and Parkinson's disease. For that reason, I was very interested in this issue of stem cell research. I have reviewed the medical literature on this issue. Today, most of the people advocating for the use of embryonic stem cells are bench researchers who like to use them because they tend to proliferate very nicely in the U.S. culture. That very same property makes them very problematic in using them in clinical applications. There is today the use of adult stem cells in treating diseases. There is no use of embryonic stem cells in treating any diseases. Indeed, there is not even an animal model where we can take a rat with a disease and treat it with an embryonic stem cell. Using embryonic stem cells in clinical applications is very problematic for the very same reason that the bench researchers like to use it, the cells tend to proliferate and behave like malignancies. It is not only ethical to use adult stem cells, it makes the most sense, and it is where the research money should be going.”