Sherwood Boehlert: “let me observe here that I am not unwilling to spend the taxpayers' money for a good reason, to support a wide range of…”

“let me observe here that I am not unwilling to spend the taxpayers' money for a good reason, to support a wide range of programs that provide for a better lifestyle and improvement in our society. But one of the reasons why our government is so big and so all-pervasive is that we have a bill like this and we say, now, we want everybody involved in a national nanotechnology initiative to be concerned about societal and ethical concerns; and we want all of these grants, and we want the grantees to pay attention to that. Then we say, in addition to that, we are going to build this new center over here, and I do not think we need the new center. If we were silent on this very important subject area in the rest of the bill, then I would probably be jumping up and down in support of the Jackson-Lee amendment, but we are not silent. We have had the whole history of our committee deliberations, the whole history of this floor debate, and congressional intent is very important and it is clear in our intent: we want to address societal and ethical concerns. But there are going to be a whole bunch of people financed by the Federal Government saying that we do not need a brand-new center to do it.”