mr. speaker , i yield myself the balance of my time .  mr. speaker , what we have before us today is not a debate as some have suggested between science and ideology , but between aspirations and actions .  both sides of this debate wish to ease human suffering .  so what divides us is not our ends , but the means to which we would resort to pursue those ends .  that is why the castle bill must be defeated , because while we are motivated by our aspirations , we are defined by our actions ; and the federal government simply can not sanction the actions authorized and funded by this legislation .  for all the arguments we have heard today , scientific , ethical , political , the debate for and against the castle bill , for and against the authorization of federal taxpayer dollars to fund medical research predicated on the destruction of human embryos is in essence a question of the level of respect and dignity our government chooses to grant human life in its earliest stage .  that embryos are human beings is not a political dispute .  an embryo is a person , a distinct , internally directed , self-integrating human organism .  an embryo has not merely the potential to become a human being .  it is one , and as such , just like a newborn or a toddler or a teenager , possesses instead the internally directed potential to grow into adulthood , to become in a sense what he or she already is .  an embryo is whole , just unfinished , just like the rest of us .  we were all at one time embryos ourselves , and so was abraham , so was mohammed , so was jesus of nazareth and shakespeare and beethoven and lincoln .  and so were the 79 children , those snowflake children , those snowflake children ages 6 and under who have been adopted .  do not throw them away .  adopt them .  these children have been adopted through different programs , but particularly the snowflake embryo adoption program , who under the castle bill and its predictable progeny might otherwise have been destroyed in a petri dish , these children that were embryos .  an embryo is nothing less than a human being , a fact both morally intuited and scientifically unquestioned .  what level of respect and dignity , then , should our government grant such little creatures , these tiny beings who our eyes suggest are not like us but who our hearts and minds know in fact are us ?  the castle bill is very clear , and though i oppose it , its clarity well serves both sides in this debate .  the castle bill says essentially that the potential medical and scientific progress represented by an embryo 's stem cells justifies , justifies taxpayer funding for the destruction of that embryo through the harvesting of the stem cells .  of course , it is not the hoped-for end of the castle bill that we oppose , nor necessarily , among some on this side of the aisle , even its destructive means , but instead the entitlement of those destructive means to federal tax dollars .  after all , human embryos are being harvested for medical research every day in this country .  we just do not think the government should be forcing the american people to pay for it , especially considering the discouraging track record of the kind of research the castle bill has in mind .  to date , mr. speaker , none , none , not one of the countless and extraordinarily well-endowed private embryo-cell-harvesting projects has yielded a single treatment for a single disease .  not one .  embryonic stem cell therapies which are by design definitely untherapeutic to the embryos have in fact proven to be similarly harmful to those patients the treatments were supposed to help .  harvested embryonic stem cells are typically rejected by the host patient and often form cancerous tumors as a byproduct of that rejection .  that is to say , mr. speaker , it does not work .  and , indeed , many embryonic stem cell experts concede that such research will not yield results for decades , if at all , if ever .  in truth , then , it is not the ends that would supposedly justify the grizzly means of the castle bill , but the mere aspiration to those ends .  on the other hand , better developed stem cells from the umbilical cords of newborn babies and the bone marrow of fully grown adults have led to treatments of no fewer than 67 separate diseases .  based on this successful track record , the biomedical industry is pouring its own money into adult stem cell research .  it is the smart investment .  in other words , mr. speaker , the castle bill would throw taxpayer money at the same unsuccessful research that companies with the financial motivation for developing such research are avoiding .  it just does not work .  indeed , one might say the stubborn advocacy of embryonic harvesting in the face of the overwhelming clinical evidence of its futility might be a genuine case of ideology trumping science .  but what if it did work , mr. speaker ?  what if all the utopian comments of the castle bill 's proponents were to come true ?  what then ?  what if we could be sure that government-funded destruction of human embryos could do all the things we are asked to believe ?  well , in that case , mr. speaker , we would still be right to oppose it because in the life of men and nations , some mistakes you can not undo .  some mistakes do not just come back and haunt you , they define you .  a decision by our government to sanction embryo harvesting here at the very dawn of the biotechnology age could come to own us , for the paltry research sum envisioned by the castle bill is but the first generation , the first drop of the deluge .  its offspring will ultimately include cloning , genetically engineered children , a black market of human body parts , and a global economy organized around the exploitation and hyper-ovulation of impoverished women and girls for their eggs .  if the mere aspiration of ends justify the means here , in our first ethical challenge of the biotechnology age , how could we hope for a higher standard the next time ?  which returns me to the irreducible question of this debate : what level of respect and dignity ought this government grant defenseless unburdensome human life at its earliest , most vulnerable stage ?  given the biological fact of a human embryo 's membership in the human family , given the technological necessity of embryonic destruction as a precondition of embryonic stem cell research , given the medical reality of embryonic stem cell research 's consistent therapeutic failure , given the moral catastrophe of means-justifying-the-ends morality , and given the physical revulsion people instinctively feel when considering the destruction of defenseless human life by scientists in lab coats ; given all these factors , the answer a proponent of taxpayer-funded embryonic stem cell harvesting and research must give is `` none. '' for if we afford the little embryos any shred of respect and dignity , we can not in good faith use taxpayer dollars to destroy them .  i wish there was another way , mr. speaker , but there is not .  it is just wrong , not as a matter of ideology or even fate , but as a matter of respect and dignity .  we are not asking anyone here to recognize the rights of human embryos , but the wrongs of human adults .  this is not about the embryo 's standing as a juridical person , but our standing as moral persons .  because the choice to protect a human embryo from federally funded destruction is not ultimately about the embryos , it is about us and our rejection of the treacherous notion that while all human lives are sacred , some are more sacred than others .  i heard it said here today , some are more sacred than others .  like our embryonic cousins , mr. speaker , our nation is whole but unfinished .  the issue is a test in which we are asked out of good and pure intentions just this once , just this tiny little bit , to let the ends justify the means , to let the noble aspirations justify ignoble actions .  in this test , in this vote , then , we have an opportunity today to speak truth to the power of biotechnology , to rise up against the prevailing winds of human excess and hold fast to the dignity of human life upon which all other worldly truths are based : to ensure our appetite for knowledge is checked by our knowledge of our appetites ; to stand up , as only america can , in the name of the least among us , whom we serve , and become the people we are .  i ask my colleagues , seize the opportunity and vote `` no . '' 