Tom Coburn: “The second question we have to ask ourselves is, if you are a mother of a juvenile diabetic, a 2- or 3-year-old, or you…”

“The second question we have to ask ourselves is, if you are a mother of a juvenile diabetic, a 2- or 3-year-old, or you are the wife of a Parkinson's patient or the caregiver of somebody with a spinal cord injury, if we told you that in fact we can do everything to produce a cure, to give you the exact same opportunity for a cure without ever destroying the first embryo, which would your choice be? Would your choice be to destroy that embryo or to do it in a nondestructive way getting exactly the same results? That is where the science is today. That is going to be disputed. But the false hopes that have been created that that is the only way that we can find these cures is nothing but hogwash, scientifically proven hogwash. The fact is, we don't know what is going to come from embryonic stem cells. We know a lot that will come from other treatments. I just shared with Senator Coleman, we will have a treatment for juvenile diabetes within 5 years, but it won't come from stem cells. It is going to come from the tobacco plant. That is very new research. It has been repeated in mice. It is working. We will have that cure. That is going to get funded, and it will be produced long before anything else that comes to an actual cure.”