Roscoe Bartlett: “I was in my office last evening about 11 p.m., as was all the rest of the House of Representatives, waiting for a…”

“I was in my office last evening about 11 p.m., as was all the rest of the House of Representatives, waiting for a resolution of some of the concerns on the transportation bill so that we could vote on it, when we were looking at the ``Drudge Report'' on our screen and we saw there a headline that I could hardly believe, that Senator Frist had reversed his position on embryonic stem cells and was now advocating the passage of the Senate version of H.R. 810. I thought it would be appropriate today, with stem cells, embryonic stem cells being so much in the news, if we could spend a few minutes looking at what stem cells are and what this is all about, what was Senator Frist talking about and what is the issue here. I have here on the easel a chart that shows the development, not all of the stages, but it shows the development of the human embryo. It starts with the zygote. The zygote is the fertilized egg. It now has chromosomes, genes from the sperm and genes from the egg, having what we call the diploid number of chromosomes. And that develops through several stages, we will see a little later in another chart, but it goes through the blastacyst stage here and then it goes down to the gastrula stage. And by the time you get to the gastrula stage, the embryo that began as a single cell here just a few days before has now developed into a large number of cells. What is shown here is the embryo and the part of the wall of the uterus to which it is attached.…”