Nick Lampson: “I want to first compliment the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Weldon) for the comments he just made, and I want to talk…”

“I want to first compliment the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Weldon) for the comments he just made, and I want to talk also about space. Obviously, some of us are significantly dedicated to this issue in this Congress and in this country of ours. The work the gentleman has done and the work I have the honor to be able to participate in is most appreciated, and that has to be infectious and carry over to every Member of this House of Representatives and our Senate to move forward with this. In starting, I want to talk first about a little girl whose name is Keely Woodruff. She is a little beyond this now, but when she came to me a couple of years ago, at 6 years old, she was having in excess of 50 epileptic seizures a day. This little girl had been to the emergency room so many times that her parents could not even count them. She had the developmental age of about 2½ and did not have much to live for in her life. Interestingly enough, her doctor found a company in Clear Lake, Texas, in Houston, Texas, called Cyberonics; and Cyberonics had developed and markets today a takeoff on one of those spinoffs from space, a spinoff from a heart pacemaker called a vagus nerve stimulator. This little device was implanted under Keely's skin, with a little wire run up to the vagus nerve in her brain which began to control the impulses in her brain, and it changed her life. She has now set out on normalcy within that life of hers.”