mr. speaker , i commend the chairman of the committee on energy and commerce and his staff , as well as the gentleman from new jersey ( mr. smith )  , for their diligent work on bringing this very , very good bill to the floor of the house .  what we are going to be voting for here will help create a banking system so that if a patient comes in to see me with a particular illness that is amenable to treatment with stem cells , i can enter their genetic information in a computer , find a match of cord blood that would be kept in a freezer , and actually treat the patient .  it is really exciting , i have to say .  i never thought i would live to see the day where we would be curing sickle cell anemia .  and for those of my colleagues who do not know about sickle cell anemia , sickle cell is a terrible disease .  you get these young people , kids , coming in your office with these horrible , painful crises where their bones are aching and you end up having to give them narcotics and transfuse them .  it stunts their growth , horrible condition .  we now have 10 , 10 kids that have been cured of sickle cell anemia .  just yesterday i was flying up here , and as i often do , i grabbed some medical journals to read on the plane .  i was reading the may 19 issue of the new england journal of medicine and , lo and behold , another research article , this one on transplantation of umbilical cord blood in babies with infantile krabbe 's disease , a rare disease , a terrible disease , the babies die ; and this cord blood study shows if you catch it early , you can actually cure these kids .  i know there have been a number of members coming to the floor talking about the embryonic bill that we are going to take up later ; the embryonic stem cells have never been shown to be successfully useful in a human model .  they do not even have one case .  we have thousands of people who have been treated with adult stem cells and these cord blood treatments .  i just want to correct the gentleman from alabama .  he has implied some of us are against stem cell research .  that is not the case at all here .  we are just for ethical stem cell research .  