madam speaker , reclaiming my time , i want to thank my colleague very much for his comments .  he is very generous .  i did not come to the congress , and that was 13 years ago , until i was 66 years old ; and i am very fortunate to have some prior life experiences that have permitted me to understand some opportunities here in the congress that might not have been so obvious to others who did not have this background .  after the president came down with his executive order , i continued to meet with the folks at nih , and i subsequently learned , by the way , i need to come back to that problem with karl rove and his discussion with the nih people , and this was a typical example of failed communications .  and so often we think that we are carrying on a dialogue and we are really carrying on simultaneous monologues .  however it happened , what the nih people were telling karl rove was that they were not sure that they could make a stem cell line from an embryo that early .  that is true .  that is why in our bill we advocate animal model research rather than beginning with humans .  but there is no reason we should not be able to do that .  now , as a matter of fact , a russian scientist working in this country , verlinsky , says he has , in fact , done that .  i have met a number of times with people from nih .  on july 20 of last year , for instance , we had an extended meeting in my office with representatives from nih , with representatives from health and human services , and with representatives from the white house .  and then , madam speaker , a very interesting thing happened while we were having this series of meetings with the nih and hhs and the white house and with the outside groups .  there appeared in the literature a paper , a very interesting paper , on preimplantation genetic diagnosis .  and what these medical people were doing , and this was in england , the first paper came from a clinic in england , what they were doing was going into the eight-cell stage and taking a cell or two out to do a preimplantation genetic diagnosis to see if the baby would have a genetic defect .  and if there was no genetic defect , they implanted the remaining seven cells , sometimes six cells .  and more than 600 times that went on to produce a perfectly normal baby .  that is now being done in this country just outside washington , in virginia .  a few weeks ago i spent probably a half hour or more on the phone with two of the medical scientists there who were involved in this research .  there is one potential ethical problem here , although the president 's council on bioethics thinks it is not a problem .  i would like to avoid , madam speaker , even the possibility of a problem .  and that problem is that the cell that we take from that embryo might , under the right circumstances , become an embryo itself .  the members of the president 's , and i have the white paper here i am going to refer to in just a moment , council on bioethics think that that is not feasible .  but , madam speaker , if we were to wait just a little later to take the cell to the inner cell mass , and i probably ought to put that chart of the uterus back up here so that i can point to what i am referring to here , in the laboratory they are going at the eight-cell stage and taking a cell or two out and doing a preimplantation genetic diagnosis .  if there is no genetic defect , they implant the remaining cells , and more than 1 , 000 times worldwide now , they have had a normal baby born .  the argument is that that cell they take out under the right circumstances is pluripotent , totipotent at that stage probably , and could produce another embryo .  to avoid that , if we just wait until the inner cell mass stage , which is the stage from which the embryonic stem cell lines are now developed when they destroy the embryo , there is no reason they can not go into this inner cell mass and through the trophoblast and they could take out several cells then because there are a lot of cells there .  by that time we already have some differentiation .  the cells in the inner cell mass are going to produce the baby .  the three germ layers that we talked about at the very beginning and the cells in the trophoblast are going to produce the decidua .  the decidua is the amnion and chorion , the tissues that support the baby , and we can see those starting to develop down here in day 8 and 9 when the embryo has attached itself to the wall of the uterus and the uterus grows and produces some tissues and there is a growth of this decidua here and we have the placenta , these big opposing vascular bags through which food and oxygen and co 2 and hormones and so forth are exchanged between the baby and the mother .  by the way , madam speaker , this is a pretty hazardous journey ; and we do not know the exact percentage , but maybe less than half of all of the ova here that get fertilized actually implant in the uterus .  as a matter of fact , one of the techniques for preventing conception is an iud .  they simply place a foreign object here in the uterus , and the uterus reacts to the presence of that foreign by not permitting the fertilized egg , the embryo , to implant there .  