Sam Brownback: “I wanted to note to the Members of this body that this is the current issue. Indeed, one group that is looking and…”

“I wanted to note to the Members of this body that this is the current issue. Indeed, one group that is looking and studying this issue believes that there are three patents either pending or already granted that could or are being used by the patent people or the process to create a human clone already. Madam President, my point is that it is a live issue, and what we are doing here does not ban human cloning. It simply says you can't patent the human clone because there is a person; that if you allow this person to grow it is going to become a full-scale human being. It appears as if we are not going to be able to take this up in front of this body--the overall issue of cloning. Negotiations on that have broken down. Yet here is one to which I was hopeful we could get actually 100 percent of the Members of the body to agree. I want to point to a couple of other issues that the Senator from Utah mentioned. One is the unfertilized egg. We continue to speak about the unfertilized egg, which I believe is not a person. I want to state that clearly. The unfertilized egg he spoke about is not covered by the amendment. We do not cover the unfertilized egg. He notes the position of a number of scientists on the issue of cloning. I would agree that there are differences in the scientific community on the issue of cloning. I also note that there are differences in the public. Two-thirds of the American public is opposed to human cloning.”