Tom Harkin: “I thought I might take a few moments now to talk about why it is so necessary to have NIH do this kind of research, to…”

“I thought I might take a few moments now to talk about why it is so necessary to have NIH do this kind of research, to oversee this research. The Senator from Oklahoma said that a lot of research is going on now on embryonic stem cells. To be sure, it is. It is going on in different States, in private institutions, in England and Australia and France and Japan and Singapore and a few other countries. Why do we want to get the Federal Government involved? First, there is no other area of medical research in which we say the Federal Government should step aside and let the States do it. I know of no other area of medical research. I always look at the human genome project. What if we had said to the States: We are not going to do it. You do it. They might have sequenced one gene or another or let the private sector do it. They would have been getting patents on it or everything like. Now we have the mapping and sequencing of the entire human gene, and you can go online and get it, free to everybody.”