House Majority Leader Ryan GainesDemocrat from OregonMr Speaker, stem cell research holds the possibilities for unlocking treatments and cures for a host of currently fatal, debilitating, and otherwise untreatable diseases and conditions, including genetic and hereditary ones. The administration's continued restrictions on stem cell research are preventing America's universities and research institutes, the scientists and doctors working in laboratories and gene clinics, from advancing our knowledge and understanding, and are denying patients, parents, children, those praying for a cure, a remedy, from any source of hope. I'd like to enter into the record the following statement from NIH Director Elias Zerhouni, one of this country's leading biomedical scientists:
It is in the best interest of our scientists, our science, and our country that we find ways and the nation finds a way to allow the science to go full speed across adult and embryonic stem cells equally.
Back home in my district in Oregon, I've met with veterans who have served America with valor in combat and suffered spinal cord injuries that have left them unable to walk, unable to hold their new baby in their arms, unable to feed and bathe themselves - and yet, still able to beseech me, beseech this Congress, this government, that stem cell therapy remains the best and most viable future opportunity for treating them.
A great deal of time and energy was spent debating this legislation in the last Congress. In the last Congress it was firmly established that this legislation in no way incentives the creation or farming of embryos, but makes use of what would otherwise be discarded biomedical waste. It was established that adult stem cells do not hold the same morphological characteristics and potential as embryonic stem cells. And it was established that a majority stand in favor of our doctors and scientists, of our future scientific potential, and yet the President acted against that majority anyway.
This new Congress has the opportunity to take up this mantle again, and it should do so and send the President this bill with unambiguous support for science, medicine, and compassion behind it.