mr. speaker , i am one of seven children .  i am the second oldest .  my older brother john is 2 years and 2 days older than i. we grew up together closer than any other members of the family .  after i left this house on the first occasion , within 2 years , my brother developed parkinson 's .  he has now suffered with it for 15 years .  i have learned a lot of things from my brother , but one of the things i learned most of all was there is a difference between right and wrong .  there is a moral dimension in most of the serious issues that we must face .  would i like to support embryonic stem cell research without a question of ethics because it might assist my brother ?  sure .  would i like to see embryonic stem cell research in the area of cancer where it might have helped one of my sisters who has had cancer ?  yes .  would i like to see it in terms of research of cancer that plagues 4-year-old children like my nephew ?  of course .  but can we divorce all of that from the ethical norm that we must present here ?  we look back in history and , yes , america has oftentimes promoted science .  but america has made mistakes in the past .  the worst mistakes we have ever made in the history of this nation have been when we have defined a part of the human family as less than fully human and then done things to them that we would not allow done to ourselves .  we have done it with slavery .  we have done it with the tuskegee medical experiments .  other countries have done it as well .  the commonality among all of those mistakes , the greatest mistakes in our nation 's history , has been the ease with which we defined members of the human family as less than fully human .  we are talking about embryonic stem cell research that requires the destruction of the embryo , the destruction of part of the human family .  we should remember that as we talk here today .  we should resolve doubt in favor of life as we do in our criminal justice system , as we do in our civil law system .  