mr. speaker , we have just heard an impassioned plea to proceed with embryonic stem cell research . 
tomorrow we are going to vote on a bill that would expedite embryonic stem cell research . 
i have here the latest issue of time magazine . 
it just arrived in our office , may 23 , and the lead article in it says `` why bush 's ban could be reversed. '' it is talking about stem cell research . 
in view of the interest all across america and in view of the fact that tomorrow we are going to be voting on a bill , i thought it might be well this evening to spend a few minutes putting this debate in context . 
what are stem cells ? 
this is a new term to many americans . 
our first chart is a depiction of the development of early embryos and then all of the tissues in the body which develop from this embryo . 
the ultimate stem cell here is the zygote itself . 
the zygote is produced by the union of the egg from the mother and the sperm from the father . 
a stem cell is a cell which has the capability of differentiating into a number of other cells . 
of course , that is the hope of embryonic stem cell research , that we might induce a cell to develop into a tissue , an organ or cells which will be useful in treating diseases . 
this is a very abbreviated depiction of the early development of the embryo because it skips the morula stage , and we will come back to that in a few moments because that is the stage where most of the attention is focused now . 
this goes from the zygote through the morula and finally , to the blastula and then to the gastrula . 
here we see in the gastrula the development of what we call the germ layers . 
i guess you would say that a cell from each of these three germ layers , a cell from the endoderm , a cell from the mesoderm or a cell from the ectoderm , are all stem cells because they are destined to become a lot of different tissues and organs in the body . 
from the ectoderm develops our nervous system and the skin . 
from the mesoderm develops most of the mass of the body , all of the bones and all of the muscles , the heart , the red blood cells and so forth . 
and then the endoderm , although widely dispersed in the body represents less mass in the body because it is the lining of the lung and the digestive tract . 
my chart shows the germ cells , the sperm in the male and the egg in the female . 
now there are cells in all of these that one could say were stem cells . 
tissue , and blood is a tissue , the tissue which has the most obvious stem cell that students were taught at least 50 years ago when i first was studying these things , is the stem cell in the bone marrow from which a number of different blood cells develop . 
when you are working with adult stem cells , if you want something other than the organs from which this cell could differentiate , then you need to de-differentiate the cell . 
in other words , you need to convince the cell that it is not exactly what it is as a result of the development process , that it returns to its original undifferentiated , or relatively undifferentiated state , and then it can make other tissues . 
the embryonic stem cells philosophically certainly hold the most promise because they are cells from which all of the tissues and organs of the body develop . 
there is the rationale then that these embryonic stem cells hold the promise of producing anything and everything that might be needed for fighting diseases . 
there is enormous theoretical potential from working with stem cells . 
they are useful in treating diseases that result from tissue or organ deficiencies . 
we need to differentiate these diseases that result from the action of pathogens . 
there is a very large list of diseases that theoretically might be treated by stem cell application . 
diabetes is one of those . 
it , by the way , represents the largest cost of all the diseases in this country . 
this is probably the one that in my experience is the most heart wrenching because i have seen these little children come to my office . 
many times during the day and frequently at night they have to prick their finger , their hand , their ear lobe , something in their body to get a drop of blood , and now we have new instruments that require a pretty small drop of blood , and then this new almost miracle instrumentation analyzes that blood to see what the glucose content is so that they know how to set that pump . 
many of them have embedded in their side a little hockey puck size pump that pumps insulin . 
this of all the diseases , mr. speaker , is the one that perhaps most obviously might lend itself to cure through stem cell research . 
giving insulin to a diabetic does not cure the disease . 
it simply delays the inevitable . 
the person whether they are young or old will go on to have circulatory problems . 
they may lose their eyesight . 
circulation in their legs may be so bad that their toes become gangrenous and have to be removed . 
when you see these little children come through your office suffering with this disease , your heart really goes out to them and you want to do everything that you possibly can to make sure that they have every potential for a healthy life . 
and they will not live so long , they will not live so well as the average person in spite of all the miracles of medicine today because insulin does not cure diabetes . 
but if through embryonic or adult , for that matter , if you could do it , stem cell research , if you could develop islet of langerhan cells , you could then put them anywhere in the body . 
in our bodies , they reside in the pancreas . 
i am not sure why because what they do and what the pancreas does are two very different things . 
the pancreas secretes a large number of enzymes for digestion in the small intestine and the islet of langerhan cells just happen to be resident there . 
they could be anywhere . 
they could be in your tongue , they could be in your toe , they could be in your ear lobe . 
they could be anywhere as long as there is a blood supply there to pick up the insulin that is made by these islet cells . 
there is a long list of diseases : multiple sclerosis , lateral sclerosis , lou gehrig 's disease . 
i have personal familiarity with this because my grandmother died of this a number of years ago , and i remember as a little boy standing by her bedside as she deteriorated and finally the only way that she could communicate with us was by blinking her eyes . 
she could not move anything else . 
she had no other way to communicate with us . 
there is a hope , realizable , who knows , until we conduct the research and do the medical experimentation , but there is a hope that one might develop from stem cells tissues that could be injected into people with multiple sclerosis or lateral sclerosis . 
sclerosis , by the way , means a scarring . 
what happens is that there is a scarring that inhibits the function of these nerves . 
alzheimer 's disease , that is frequently mentioned . 
that is a particularly tragic disease . 
although it was not specifically diagnosed in my mother because she had other ailments that were easier to diagnose , she lived to be 92 and i am sure that she had alzheimer 's because she had many of the symptoms . 
it was really tragic to watch a woman who was very bright and vital lose her ability to remember , lose a sense of proportion , to be calling , roscoe , roscoe . 
i would say , i 'm here . 
she said , oh , you 're not roscoe because my father was roscoe , sr . 
and she was way back 50 years earlier in her memory . 
there is a hope that stem cell research could help cure diseases like this . 
i have here a very large number of autoimmune diseases . 
there are 63 of them here . 
i have mentioned a couple of them . 
autoimmune diseases are diseases where the body fails to recognize itself , that is , the parts of the body that have to do with recognizing foreign invaders and assimilating them , ejecting them , killing them . 
very early in our embryonic development , we have a very special kind of life cell which we call t cells . 
very early in embryonic development , they are imprinted with who you are . 
there are 6.5 billion of us in the world and these t cells are smart enough to recognize a difference . 
there may be somebody out there close to you , but nobody out there quite like you ; and you try to take their body organ and put it in you , these t cells are going to recognize it as foreign and move to reject it . 
sometimes for reasons we do not understand , these immune reactions in the body get confused , and they attack the body itself . 
we have a large number . 
lupus was probably the first widely recognized of these diseases . 
what has happened is that when the body is attacked , the specific tissues of the body are attacked , they degenerate and become not useful . 
there is some evidence that the body develops an ability to recognize its own ; and so the hope is that after this has happened , if you could replace the damaged tissues , that the person gets returned to normal function . 
there is enormous potential from use of stem cells , whether they are embryonic or adult , to cure many , many diseases . 
the argument today is about whether it should be adult stem cells or whether it should be embryonic stem cells . 
we have been working with adult stem cells , mr. speaker , for over 3 decades , and so there have been a fair number of applications to medicine . 
you will hear the figure 58 . 
we have been working with embryonic stem cells a little over 6 years . 
there just has not been time to make those applications , but the fact that there are presently no applications to medicine of embryonic stem cell work does not mean that there will not be and it does not mean that those applications might not be more efficacious than adult stem cell applications . 
indeed , if you will talk to the researchers and the experts in this area , they will all tell you to a man and to a woman that the potential for embryonic stem cell application to medicine should be greater than adult stem cell application just because embryonic stem cells , they are called totipotent , they can produce anything and everything that is in the body . 
the adult stem cells have already been differentiated , at least to some extent ; and so they are limited in their potential application . 
there is another very interesting potential that i do not hear often discussed of embryonic stem cells . 
fifty years ago when i was studying and teaching in this area , there was an experiment where the researcher went into a mother black mouse and took a little patch of skin in the uterus from one of her little black babies and then he took that little patch of skin , and he went into the uterus of a white mouse with her white babies , and he cut a little patch of skin out of the white mouse and put in that little patch of black skin and when the white mouse was born with that patch of black skin , it did not reject it . 
this gives the promise , mr. speaker , that there may be less rejection of tissues and organs developed from embryonic stem cells than from adult stem cells . 
i do not know whether this was a host or donor phenomenon . 
both were embryos . 
all we know is that when the black skin was sewed onto the little embryonic mouse that there was no rejection . 
if you tried to do that after they were born , i do not know if we have determined at precisely what time they lose that ability , it certainly would have been rejected . 
the debate that we are going to vote on tomorrow and the debate which was the subject of the special order just before i spoke has to do with whether or not we can effect the needed cures in medicine from adult stem cells or whether we need to move to embryonic stem cells to make this happen . 
early in this debate , i had a personal involvement which was kind of an interesting one . 
in a former life , i got a doctorate in human physiology . 
i taught medical school . 
i did medical research . 
i went out to nih in 2001 , before the president made his executive order . 
it was an information meeting at nih where the scientists working in this field were briefing , they were largely staff members from the hill . 
i think i was the only member there . 
it occurred to me that you ought to be able to take cells from an early embryo without hurting the embryo , because nature has been doing that forever as far as we know . 
that is what happens in identical twinning . 
i would like to look at the next chart . 
this is two zygotes . 
this is not identical twinning . 
i just wanted to contrast this with identical twinning . 
this is where we have fraternal twins . 
they are so-called wombmates . 
they could be two boys , two girls , one of each . 
they are conceived at the same time . 
the mother that ordinarily sloughs one ovum a month this month sloughed two ovums and the sperm , and there are a whole lot of those , millions of them , they found both of them and they fertilized both of them and the uterus was receptive so they both were implanted in the uterus . 
this simply shows how they present at birth , depending upon how they implanted . 
if they are implanted far apart , they present one way at birth . 
if they are implanted very close together , they present another way at birth . 
the next chart shows twins from monozygotic twins , that is , from a single zygote , from a single egg . 
this presentation looks very much like the dizygotic , that is from two eggs , dizygotic twins that implanted in the uterus very close together . 
knowing that in identical twinning , regardless at what stage it occurs and it can occur all the way from the two-cell stage clear up to the inner cell mass and there are several stages between these two , but no matter where it occurs , the embryo has lost half of its cells and both parts go on to produce a perfectly healthy baby . 
so i reasoned that it should be possible to take cells from an early embryo without hurting the early embryo and i asked the researchers at nih , was that possible . 
they said , yes , of course that is possible . 
but with all the embryos out there that could be simply destroyed to get the stem cells , nobody had determined how easy this was to do . 
but they said that it certainly was doable . 
a little bit later , and this was again before the president gave his executive order , i met the president at an event and i told him very briefly that i had met with nih , and there was this possibility that we could take cells from an early embryo without harming the embryo . 
he asked karl rove to follow up on that . 
several days later , karl rove called me , mr. speaker , and he said , roscoe , i went to nih and i told them what you told the president , and they told me they can not do that . 
i said , karl , there is some problem here . 
either they misunderstood your question or something because these are the same people that go into a single cell and take out the nucleus and put another nucleus in the cell . 
of course they can go into a relatively large embryo and take out a cell or two . 
he went back to talk with them again and called me back and said , they are telling me the same thing . 
and so the president came out with his executive order which said that federal funds could be used in research only on the cell lines that had been developed from embryos that had been killed in the process of developing them , that no new cell lines could begin with embryos that had to be killed . 
this is only with federal money , of course . 
the private sector can do whatever it wishes because there is no law prohibiting the use of embryos . 
my concern , mr. speaker , is that we in congress ought to be a player in this , and now we are standing on the sidelines . 
mr. speaker , i see that the gentleman from georgia ( mr. gingrey ) xz4001510 has joined us , and i yield to the gentleman . 
