Tom Harkin: “for example, I want to read a couple of things from the article. It says: House Majority Leader Dick Armey has thrown…”

“for example, I want to read a couple of things from the article. It says: House Majority Leader Dick Armey has thrown his weight behind a bill that would ban human cloning permanently. ``This is the right thing to do, at the right time, for the sake of human dignity,'' said Armey. ``How can you put a statute of limitations on right and wrong?'' Right and wrong? It is wrong to conduct cloning research that might enable us to grow a liver out of a person's own DNA? To grow skin out of a person's own DNA? Perhaps even to grow heart tissue, or even a full heart, out of a person's own DNA, so there would be no rejection possibilities? It is wrong to do research in cloning of cells that might permit my nephew, Kelly, who, at the age of 19, got injured in the military, his spinal cord was broken and he has been a quadriplegic since and still holds out the hope that research someday is going to enable him to walk again? And, yes, cloning research might be able to rebuild those kinds of cells from his own DNA that will get those nerve endings going again so that my nephew can walk again. That research is wrong? I ask who appointed the House majority leader as the arbiter of what is right and wrong in biomedical research? Well, as the drafter of this article went on: . . . hasty legislation could easily be too restrictive. Last year, for instance, Florida considered a law that would have barred the cloning of human DNA, a routine procedure in biomedical research.…”