Tom Coburn: “I will spend a few minutes. This is a very emotional debate for every family in this country. Every family in this…”

“I will spend a few minutes. This is a very emotional debate for every family in this country. Every family in this country has someone who, in fact, has a disease that will be impacted in the future by research that is ongoing in terms of stem cell research. I make a couple of points. We have heard today a couple of very strong statements that are highly inaccurate. One is that the only way you will cure this is with embryonic stem cells. No one knows that. As a matter of fact, most of the cures in science have come not by what we thought was going to happen but by what happened that surprised us. That is not true. No. 2, there is no ban at the present time on research in this country on embryonic stem cells. What there is a ban on is using additional Federal funds to create additional stem cells, but additional stem cells can be created outside of the Government. The Senator from South Dakota created a false choice. The false choice is not incineration. There are 400,000 embryos that are frozen in this country today; 93 percent of those the parents want to save for themselves. So that leaves us a smaller portion. If you look at the numbers, when you thaw embryos, you have a 50-percent wastage, you lose 50 percent of them. The false choice Senator Johnson put forward was this: they either get burned up or they get used for embryonic stem cell research.…”