Roscoe Bartlett: “very shortly now the juvenile diabetes people will be coming through the Congress. They do this every year, I believe. I…”

“very shortly now the juvenile diabetes people will be coming through the Congress. They do this every year, I believe. I look forward to this visit with really mixed emotions. These children come in with this disease that has and will change their lives. Many of them are so brittle that they have to have a pump embedded under their skin that pumps insulin, because the sugar may go violently up or down with potentially disastrous effects on the person. Many times a day they may have to get a droplet of blood to determine the sugar level. They will appeal to us, as they have every year for the past 5 years, please vote for Federal funds for embryonic stem cell research because they believe, like the loved ones of many other types of patients, that there could truly be miracle cures from embryonic stem cells. They will tell us that there are several hundred thousand embryos out there that are frozen in fertility clinics. I have a daughter-in-law who is going through that process now. They harvest eggs. They fertilize the eggs. First, they have to give a hormone treatment to the prospective mother so that there will be the production of more than just the one egg that is produced normally per month. They will harvest a number of eggs, 8, 10, 12 eggs.…”