Roscoe Bartlett: “a couple of weeks ago on this floor there was a very prolonged and serious debate on stem cells. Now that we have had…”

“a couple of weeks ago on this floor there was a very prolonged and serious debate on stem cells. Now that we have had time for emotions to subside, I thought it might be productive to spend a little while this evening talking about the subject of stem cells and why there is so much interest in it across the country. A few months ago there was so much interest in this subject in California, for instance, that the voters voted favorably for a resolution that would make $3 billion from California taxpayers available to do research on embryonic stem cells. What are stem cells? We have a chart here which kind of shows this. {time} 2215 There are fundamentally two types of stem cells. There are adult stem cells and there are embryonic stem cells. I guess the ultimate stem cell is the fertilized ovum, which is referred to here as a zygote, because from that cell develops all the cells of the body. That single cell, produced from the union of the egg and the sperm, divides and divides again and again until finally it is a blastocyst; and then it goes to the gastrula stage, and at that stage the three germ layers begin to sort out the cells that are already differentiating, is the technical term that is used for that. Every cell in our body, of course, has all of the same gene complement.…”