Joe Cunningham: “Mr. Chairman, I do not totally disagree with my colleague but just a little bit that just spoke, because there are…”

“Mr. Chairman, I do not totally disagree with my colleague but just a little bit that just spoke, because there are limited directions of stem cell research that I think that we could all support, whether you are prolife, prochoice, which is not an issue in this case. Dr. Larry Goldstein from the University of San Diego, California, my daughter interned with him, and he does genetic research. I would like to remind my colleagues, first of all, that it was President George W. Bush that supported stem cell research in a certain line, that turned out to be tainted. There are some folks and some doctors that would actually clone people for body parts. I do not think most Americans support that, and I do not support cloning. But there is an area in which I think we can all come together. Dr. Goldstein told me that quite often a woman invests her embryos because she is going to go through chemo or radiation treatments, and maybe she wants in-vitro fertilization at a later date. But they do not save those embryos for 1,000 years. They discard them. They throw them away, because they can't save them. They are thrown down the toilet. In that case, why can we not use those stem cells to further research? They are not going to become life. They are going to be discarded, they are going to be thrown away.”