mr. speaker , i appreciate my colleague 's coming and entering into this discussion .  before leaving this little experience with nih , i will , mr. speaker , submit for the record a letter which i received today from dr .  battey , who is the spokesman for embryonic stem cell at nih , and what the letter says is , and i will come back to it in a few moments to read a couple parts from it , that what we are proposing to do is certainly possible ; that there is no medical or scientific impediment to doing this .  i just wanted to put to bed the suggestion that nih says what we are doing can not be done in spite of the fact that that is what karl rove thought they said .  in my office just a few months ago , nih kind of sheepishly admitted that there was some misunderstanding in conversation because they had never said that we could not go into an early embryo and take a cell .  what they had said , which is true , which is why i am proposing this research , was that we have never developed a stem cell line from that early an embryo .  ordinarily , we develop a stem cell line from the inner mass cell stage of the embryo .  but the earlier we get the stem cell , the more totipotent it ought to be and the more efficacious it ought to be in treating the diseases .  i have here , mr. speaker , a little diagram which shows the ontogeny , the development of the embryo .  it begins , of course , with the egg that comes from the mother , the oocyte , and then the sperm , and it shows only four or five there .  there will be millions there , i assure my colleagues .  and there is really a miracle that occurs here because as soon as one of them penetrates that egg , there is a big barrier put up so that there is no other candidate .  it would be quite disastrous if two of them penetrated that egg because that would create an embryo which would certainly die .  and then the egg , called a zygote , goes on to develop , and it is two cells .  and it may split here to make two babies , by the way , identical twins .  and then the four-cell and then the eight-cell stage .  it is at the eight-cell stage , and i am jumping a little ahead here , it is at the eight-cell stage in a petri dish .  this is what happens in the body .  if this kind of thing happens , they can fertilize it in a petri dish .  it is at this eight-cell stage in more than 1 , 000 times now in clinics .  it started in england .  it is now in this country .  they have gone into the eight-cell stage and taken out one cell .  they might get two .  and they then do a preimplantation genetic diagnosis on that .  in other words , they determine whether or not there are any genetic defects like down 's disease , for instance , in which case they would not want to implant that embryo .  they do this for the benefit of their baby because one would not want , if they had a choice , to bring a child into the world that was going to have a less than optimum quality of life because they had a genetic defect .  this is not genetic engineering .  genetic engineering is when they change the genetics .  all they are doing here is seeing what genetics are there , and if there is no deficiency in the genetics , they implant the six or seven cells that remain , and more than 1 , 000 times they have had a normal baby .  all of this happened in the intervening years between 2001 and now .  this may have been going on when i talked to the president and when i talked to nih .  i did not know that it was going on , but just a few months ago , this report came out , and now i spent the other day , for a half-hour , probably , talking with two investigators here in virginia who are doing this .  i just want to spend a couple of moments talking about the debate .  the debate is between the use of discarded embryos that the proponents , and that is what the bill is tomorrow , say are going to be thrown away anyhow and why do we not get some good from them by developing stem cell lines from them since they are going to be discarded anyhow ?  the argument on the other side is twofold .  first of all , it is not certain they are going to be discarded because they can be adopted .  what is it ?  operation snowflake where parents can adopt one of these embryos and have them implanted in a mother other than the one from whom the ovum was taken .  so it is not certain that they are going to be discarded .  the other challenge to this is that this is a life .  in the proper environment , this is a human being .  it is an embryo .  put it in the mother 's womb , and it will become a very distinct human being , unlike any other out of the 6.5 billion people in the world .  and there are those who feel that it is immoral .  the president is among them , and he has said this , that it is immoral to take one life so that we might help another .  the good news is , as the gentleman from georgia ( mr. gingrey )  said , we do not have to do that because we can take cells from an early embryo without hurting the embryo .  by the way , umbilical cord blood stem cells are not an alternative to embryonic stem cells .  just a little quote here .  this is from a scientist at the johns hopkins university school of medicine , one of the best medical schools in the world : `` as a physician-scientist who has done research involving umbilical cord blood stem cells for over 20 years , i am frequently surprised by the thought from nonscientists that cord blood stem cells may provide an alternative to embryonic stem cells for research .  this is simply wrong , '' he says .  do they have a place in treating ?  yes , they do .  but they are not a substitute for embryonic stem cells , and he makes that very plain .  opponents of embryonic stem cell research suggested that 58 diseases have been successfully treated using adult stem cells .  that is true .  i asked nih , is that true that we had 58 treatments from adult stem cells and none from embryonic stem cells ?  they said yes , that is true .  i said , why is that true ?  that is true because we have had more than 3 decades ' experience with adult stem cells , and just a little over 6 years ' experience with embryonic stem cells .  there simply has not been time .  all of the 58 listed , all of them , are represented by organizations that support stem cell research .  so what this says is that all of those physicians that are involved with these 58 applications of adult stem cells , all of them support stem cell research .  the argument on the other side is that it is immoral , that we should not take one life to support another life ; and in making those claims , they state the following : this kills human embryos .  it does .  you may not think that is a problem .  you may not see this little bit of life that holds the miracle of chromosomes and against that will develop the whole unique individual , not like any other .  out of 6.5 billion in the world , you may not see that as human life , but it clearly is .  it kills a human embryo .  you may be okay with that , you may not be , but a great number of people are not okay with that .  they argue that h.r. 810 , which is the bill we will be voting on tomorrow , is an empty promise because the embryonic stem cells have not treated a single human disease , and that is true .  we just gave the reason for it : they have not been worked with long enough to know whether they can treat a disease or not .  h.r. 810 does not have 400 , 000 discarded embryos to use , that is true ; and the statement is made that if you used these 400 , 000 embryos , you would only get 275 stem cell lines , and that is because only 2.8 percent of them have been donated for research .  that gets you down to 11 , 000 , not 400 , 000 .  only 65 percent of those will survive the thawing .  they are frozen .  this is not an event that is not traumatic .  it is very traumatic to the embryos .  a third of them do not survive the freezing and rethawing .  twenty-five percent of those that are still alive after they thaw , only 25 percent will go on through this development stage , through the blastula , gastrula and so forth , so they can be implanted .  then , even if it has gone that far , in one trial only one out of 18 attempts produced a stem cell line , and in another trial only three out of 40 produced a stem cell line .  so that now gets you down to about 275 .  yes , we have not developed perfection yet in these techniques ; but 275 stem cell lines is more than 10 times more than all the stem cell lines we have now , which , by the way , i think are almost all in this country contaminated with mouse feeder cells .  i see that we have been joined by my colleague from nebraska .  