Roscoe Bartlett

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, I was in my office last evening about 11 p.m., as was all the rest of the House of Representatives, waiting for a resolution of some of the concerns on the transportation bill so that we could vote on it, when we were looking at the ``Drudge Report'' on our screen and we saw there a headline that I could hardly believe, that Senator Frist had reversed his position on embryonic stem cells and was now advocating the passage of the Senate version of H.R. 810. I thought it would be appropriate today, with stem cells, embryonic stem cells being so much in the news, if we could spend a few minutes looking at what stem cells are and what this is all about, what was Senator Frist talking about and what is the issue here. I have here on the easel a chart that shows the development, not all of the stages, but it shows the development of the human embryo. It starts with the zygote. The zygote is the fertilized egg. It now has chromosomes, genes from the sperm and genes from the egg, having what we call the diploid number of chromosomes. And that develops through several stages, we will see a little later in another chart, but it goes through the blastacyst stage here and then it goes down to the gastrula stage. And by the time you get to the gastrula stage, the embryo that began as a single cell here just a few days before has now developed into a large number of cells. What is shown here is the embryo and the part of the wall of the uterus to which it is attached. By this stage in its development, the embryo has already now developed four very specific stem cells that will go on to produce a variety of tissues and organs in the body, all of the tissues and the organs in the body, and we see those down here at the bottom. Some of them develop into ectoderm. This is the external layer. The ectoderm becomes primarily two things in the developing baby and in the adult. It becomes the skin and the nervous system and some of the pigment cells. Most of what we are in terms of mass is all developed from the middle layer, or the mesoderm, and from that develops all of your skeletal muscle, all of your skeleton, all of your bones, all of your heart muscle, the red blood cells, the smooth muscle in your intestines and stomach and so forth. Then a third stem cell here ultimately develops into the entoderm. And here we see that this is the lining of the lung, the thyroid gland, and pancreatic cells, nowhere near the mass that is produced by the mesoderm, but very important tissues nevertheless. Then there are some very unique cells. They are different in the male and the female. They are the germ cells. In the male they produce the sperm and in the female they produce the egg. Some of these stem cells persist even into the adult. In the bone marrow of every adult are stem cells which will produce erythrocytes, your red blood cells, which produce some of your white blood cells. The polymorphonuclear leukocytes will produce those cells that help in clotting, the thrombocytes. And there are stem cells in other adult tissues. And there has been a lot of research for more than three decades now on using these stem cells to see if we cannot cure or help patients with a number of different diseases. And there have been a number of good applications of adult stem cells. They have produced betterment in a number of individuals, in some cases what looks like actual cures. But these adult stem cells are limited in their capability because they are already what we call differentiated. They have already split, and a number of the genes have been turned off, and they now are destined to produce only a certain kinds of cells. What the researcher tries to do at times is to take these adult stem cells and put them in an environment that convinces them that they are not really an adult stem cell, but that they have gone now back to a more primordial state, that they are back to an embryonic stem cell. Here in the blastula we see embryonic stem cells. Of course, the ultimate embryonic stem cell is the zygote: one cell, which will divide again and again and again, and then differentiate, and then finally produce all of the cells of the body. But here in the blastula stage we have the cells already differentiated into two different categories: those cells which are going to produce the embryo, and they are shown here in this inner cell mass; and then those cells which will produce the dissidua. And the dissidua is the cells around this which will become amnion and corion parts of the placenta. In the stage just before this are the cells that can produce the full embryo. I would like now to look at our next chart here because this shows the development of the embryo, and it has all of the stages there. It starts with the zygote. Here we have the fertilized egg, or the zygote. Of course, this all begins with an ovary. This is only half of the reproductive system of the female. An ovary which every month routinely during the childbearing years will produce an ovum. Here it shows the follicle rupturing and the ovum coming out. Here is the oocyte. And then here are the sperm, and the sperm of course make their way all up through the uterus and the fallopian tube, clear up here to the end of the fallopian tube. And by the way, they actually sometimes get out into the abdominal cavity. Sometimes this egg is not picked up by this little funnel- shaped end, and you see part of the funnel here, called the infundibulum. Sometimes that cell does not get out there, and it does not get picked up by the fallopian tube and carried down with the beating of a number of cilia and it goes out into the body cavity. And the sperm may actually get out there too, and it can be fertilized there. We call that an ectopic pregnancy. And of course the baby cannot develop there and it is going to die, and it is going to cause a lot of problems for the mother. So this ectopic pregnancy has to be terminated because it will cause the death of the mother if it continues. After the fertilization, the egg begins its journey, taking several days, maybe as many as 8, 9, 10 days before it finally reaches the end of the journey and is implanted in the wall of the uterus. It divides first two cells, then four cells, and then eight cells. And I would like to pause for just a moment at that eight-cell stage. Imagine now that we are not in the reproductive tract of the female, but we are in a petri dish in the laboratory, because that is what in vitro fertilization means. In vitro means in glass. And they are now taking the egg from the mother and sperm from the father and they have combined these two and produced this fertilized egg, the zygote. It now divides and divides until they come to the eight-cell stage. At this stage, more than a thousand times worldwide, in one clinic in England more than 600 times, they have taken in the laboratory under the microscope a cell, and sometimes they get two from that eight-cell stage, and they have done what they call a preimplantation genetic diagnosis. They look at the genes, and you can do that, we now know what they ought to look like, and they can determine if there is any genetic defect. One of those genetic defects is what we call trisomy 21, mongolism. If there is an extra chromosome at the 21st chromosome, you get what we call trisomy 21, or mongolism. If there is no genetic defect in the cell that they analyze, which would be like all the other cells because they began as a single cell here, then they implant what is remaining, that is the six or seven cells that is remaining, and now more than a thousand times worldwide we have had what looks like a perfectly normal baby born from this process. This technique, which has been widely used in England, is now used in this country; and just outside Washington, here in Virginia, is a clinic that is doing this. They have done it more than 300 times now. Several weeks ago, I talked for perhaps a half-hour with two of their doctors about the procedure. Let us now take a look at how they get embryonic stem cell lines. They take an embryo in the laboratory which had been produced by the fertilization of an egg, and they let it develop, not to the eight-cell stage, they go just a little beyond that. They go to the inner cell mass, and then they destroy the embryo. And there are now a lot of cells, not just eight; and they take a number of the cells from the inner cell mass, which I indicated previously had all of the genetic potential to produce the body of the baby, but none of the genetic potential to produce the dissidua. And so here we see right at the bottom of this chart we see the dissidua developing there, the little fingers like that are growing into the lining of the uterus. Well, what this debate is all about, Mr. Speaker, is about the morality, really, the ethics of taking this little embryo, which is a baby in miniature, because, you see, if it goes on just a couple of days later and implants in the uterus, it will become a baby, although it is now in the petri dish in the laboratory, but it can be implanted in the uterus, to take this embryo and to destroy it and take the cells from the inner cell mass to produce a stem cell line. Up to this time that has been the only technique that has been available for developing these stem cell lines. The President had a very difficult decision to make 4 years ago when there was an interest in using Federal monies to fund further embryonic stem cell research. Maybe we ought to pause for a moment, Mr. Speaker, to look at why we are so much interested in stem cell research. Because these stem cells, as the earlier chart showed, can produce all of the tissues in the body, there is the hope, the promise, and in fact even the realization with some of the work we have done with adult stem cells that we can use these stem cells to replace tissues which have been damaged by disease or some other trauma in the body. We can replace those so as to restore health. Now, we have a lot of applications from adult stem cells and, as we stand here today, essentially no applications from embryonic stem cells. And why should we have this big debate, Mr. Speaker, about embryonic stem cells when almost all of the applications to medicine have been from adult stem cells? You see, we have been working with adult stem cells for more than three decades, so we have had a lot of opportunity in the medical community to make applications there, but we have been working with embryonic stem cells for only about 6 years, and there just has not been the opportunity to make the medical applications from embryonic stem cells that we have been able to make from adult stem cells. But because of what embryonic stem cells are, because embryonic stem cells still have all of the capability to produce any and every tissue in the body, doctors and researchers believe intuitively from what they know of embryology that there ought ultimately to be more and better applications from embryonic stem cells than there are from adult stem cells. We do not know. It may be that these embryonic stem cells are going to be like unruly teenagers, very difficult to control. You see, their destiny in life is to divide and divide and divide. We want them to do that, but we want to be able to control how they divide and what they produce, because if it is a liver the patient needs, you need to convince the cells that is what they ought to be producing, and when they have done enough, they need to quit. They may be very difficult to control. They may keep on dividing, and when you put them in the body, they may form tumors. Because of what embryonic stem cells do, the medical community and indeed millions of Americans with relatives with devastating diseases believe there are important applications from embryonic stem cells to medicines. We need to provide that opportunity without harming the embryo. To this date the only way we have gotten these embryonic stem cell lines started is by taking some of the cells from the inner cell mass, which destroys the embryo. In 2001, the President was faced with a very difficult decision. He needed to determine whether Federal funds could be used in embryonic stem cell research when the only way to get embryos at that time was to destroy the embryo. When the President was making that difficult decision, the scientists at NIH had an open house for Members of Congress and staff to come to NIH and learn about embryonic stem cell research and the potential. I went there, Mr. Speaker, and listened to their presentations. Because in a former life I was privileged to be able to get a Ph.D., a doctor's degree in human physiology, because I taught medical school, because I had a course in advanced embryology, I knew a little bit about what they were talking about. As I sat there listening to the researchers at NIH explaining what they were doing and the dreams and the hopes that they had for the applications of embryonic stem cell research, and when I thought about the dilemma that the President was in in trying to decide whether it was okay to destroy these embryos to get a stem cell line that may come up with some miraculous cures, I thought back to my studies and to a course that I had in advanced embryology. And really you do not need to have had that course to understand this, but it occurred to me nature had been doing for a very long time what we needed to do, and that is to take cells from the early embryo without hurting the embryo. Nature had been doing that by producing identical twins. In identical twins, half of the cells are taken away from the embryo, and each half goes on to produce a perfectly normal baby. And one of those identical twins is a clone. Think about that and decide how that relates to the dialogue that we are having on cloning. Well, there are two different times during the development of the embryo, maybe more, but at least two different times that it can split to produce identical twins. One is at the two-cell stage. Instead of just dividing to make four cells, it splits, so there are now two one- cell embryos, and each one goes on to divide and produce a baby. Or it can wait until the inner cell mass stage, and in some embryos there are two inner cell masses, and that can now split to form identical twins. Sometimes this is not perfect, and they do not split totally, and we have what we call Siamese twins. This is the origin when the split has occurred probably at the inner cell mass stage, and it is not complete, and they remain close enough that some parts of the body grow together. We know that the embryo is capable of splitting at these two different stages because of the way the babies present themselves at birth. If they are both within the same amniotic sac, they probably split at the two-cell stage. If each have their own amniotic sac, they probably split later. It occurred to me since nature many times takes half of the cells away from the early embryo and they go on to produce two perfectly normal babies, we ought to be able to take a cell or two from an early embryo without hurting the early embryo. And I asked the scientists at NIH, should we not be able to do it? They said we ought to be able to do it, although we have not done it. A little after that I was at an event when the President was there, and I mentioned this possibility to the President. He asked Karl Rove to follow up on it, and a few days later I got a call from Karl Rove saying he had talked to the NIH; the NIH told him what I was proposing was not doable. I said Karl, either they did not understand your question, or there is some confusion, because these are the same people that can take a single cell and take the nucleus out of that cell and put another in it. Of course they can do this. He went back and asked them again, and he came back and said he got the same answer, that they could not do this, and so the President came down with his executive order. A couple of years after that, not very many months ago, the people from NIH were sitting in my office, and I asked them how could this have happened. What apparently happened as so often happens, there was a miscom- munication. What they told Karl Rove was they were not sure they could produce an embryonic stem cell line from an embryo that early because they had never done it, not that it was not doable. He interpreted this as saying they could not take the cell, and, therefore, the research could not be done. I would like to spend just a moment looking at some of the reasons why people are so concerned and why this was such an important decision on the part of the President, and why Senator Frist's decision last night has stirred up so much controversy. It is because there are a very large number of diseases that have the potential of being cured ultimately with the application of embryonic stem cell research. Let me give us one example, and that is diabetes. Kids come in my office with this hockey puck-like thing under their skin, which is an insulin pump. They have to prick their skin to get a glucose level so they can set the pump, and they are very brittle. It has to be pumped in regularly. This is the most expensive disease in our country, and it is potentially totally curable with stem cell applications. All we need to do is produce some islets of Langerhans cells because these are the cells that just happen to be embedded in the pancreas. There is no reason why they need to be in the pancreas. They have nothing to do with the function of the pancreas, because the pancreas is a big digestive gland at the beginning of the small intestine that produces enzymes that digest fats, carbohydrates and proteins. Embedded in the tissue of the gland are what looked like these little islands to Dr. Langerhans, and so we call them the islets of Langerhans. They produce insulin. Now, insulin does not cure diabetes, as any family who has diabetes in the family knows; it simply delays the course of the disease. There may ultimately be some problems with the eyes and circulation. You lose some toes, they have to be amputated. If we could create islets of Langerhans cells, which could be under the skin anywhere in the body, anywhere that the blood can get to them so the circulation can pick up the hormone that is produced, this should cure the disease. And there are many others, particularly the autoimmune diseases, and there are 63 autoimmune diseases. These are diseases where the body gets confused what is really body. There is something very interesting that happens with early embryos. Obviously we need to know what is us so foreign things can be rejected. When you get inside your body, there are no bacteria in there. That is a pristine world. We have a big army of white cells in there that make sure that it is pristine. The white cells are told by what we call T-cells as to what is you and what is not you, so they attack what is not you. Sometimes, and in more people than we would like to have it occur in, sometimes the body gets confused as to what is really you. I have a little problem, rheumatoid arthritis, which is an autoimmune disease. The body starts attacking itself; and there are 63 of them, and potentially all of them could be addressed with embryonic stem cell research. Alzheimer's disease, a very tragic disease. Central nerve injury, an injury to the spinal cord, those cells do not grow back. There is a potential you could put new cells in the spinal cord, and people in a wheelchair could walk again. There is that potential, and that is why embryonic stem cell research is of such great interest, because of the enormous potential that they ought to have because they are so totally undifferentiated because they can produce any and every cell in the body. I have been working with the White House, with the National Institutes of Health, with the Conference of Catholic Bishops, and with the prolife community in developing a bill, H.R. 3144, which would permit research on not just the procedure that I recommended more than 4 years ago now, but several other procedures that are outlined in a little book here called Alternative Sources of Human Pluripotent Stem Cells, A White Paper, produced by the President's Council on Bioethics, and they talk about four different kinds of research, four different ways of procuring embryonic stem cells that might be ethically acceptable to the prolife community. The first of these is pluripotent. By pluripotent, they mean cells that have the capability of producing all of the tissues of the embryo, but not the decidua. That is a totipotent cell. Pluripotent stem cells are derived from embryos that are essentially moribund, dead; the equivalent, if you will, of an adult that is brain dead. It is perfectly ethical, most people believe, to take organs, that is how we get organs for transplant from adults that are brain dead, so if you now have an embryo which is obviously not going to develop, but it still is alive enough that you might take cells from it to produce a stem cell line, if you really knew that it was dead and could never produce a baby, then ethically it would appear to many people to be okay to take cells from that to establish a stem cell line. You might have a little concern that an embryo that had sat there a day or two and never divided because there was something wrong with it, that the cell you took from it to produce a stem cell line might not produce just the high-quality stem cell line that you might like for research, but at least it is worth exploring, and it gets by the ethical arguments. The second one of their proposals, and I would like to look at the next chart now as we do that. Let me just look at this chart for a moment here with you. This comes from a white paper on the President's Council on Bioethics. Let me look at the highlighted portion: ``It may be some time before stem cells can be reliably derived from single cells extracted from early embryos.'' That is the procedure that I was talking about that occurred to me when I was out at NIH talking to the investigators there. ``And in ways that do no harm to the embryo, thus biopsied. But the initial success of the Verlinsky's Group's efforts at least raises the future possibility''--Verlinsky is a Russian scientist working in this country who says that he has done what NIH said they were not sure they could do, and that is to produce an embryonic stem cell line from one cell taken from an early embryo--``at least raises the future possibility that pluripotent stem cells could be derived from single blastomeres.'' A mere is a cell, and it is taken from the blastula so it is a cell taken from the blastula. A blastomere. ``Removed from early human embryos without apparently harming them.'' And then the asterisk there. If you look down at the bottom of the page, it says, ``A similar idea was proposed by Representative Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland as far back as 2001.'' What they are referring to is the recommendation that I made to the President that he relayed on to Karl Rove. This is recognized in this fairly recently published white paper, Alternative Sources of Human Pluripotent Stem Cells, a white paper by the President's Council on Bioethics. This is one of four different procedures. The first, you remember, was taking cells from an embryo that is essentially moribund, it is going to die, and like the person who is brain dead, why not get some benefit from it. We do that with organ transplants all the time. The third one is very interesting, and that is to produce pluripotent stem cells derived from biological artifacts. There are two artifacts that they are looking at to do this. One of those goes back to this little embryo in the petri dish that we talked about. What they want to do is go in that early embryo and turn off some of the genes. We know how to do this. To turn off some of the genes so that it can never produce a baby, but could go on dividing and produce a mass of cells. They call this an artifact. If it is not going to be a baby, it is just this mass of cells growing, maybe it is okay to take cells from it to produce an embryonic stem cell line. But some people might have a little concern, Mr. Speaker, that you have gone in early and messed up what could have become a perfectly normal baby, you have turned off some of the genes so it cannot, so now you have created kind of a freak that you can take some cells from, and since it is not going to be a baby, it is okay to take the cells from that. But at least it is a way of getting embryonic stem cells without destroying what at that moment is perfectly normal stem cells. There is another possibility, and that is parthenogenesis. That is the development without the union of sex cells. The fourth technique is an interesting one and that we are trying to do all the time. That is to take what is called the pluripotent stem cells via somatic cell dedifferentiation. A somatic cell simply means a body cell. The soma is the body. Take a body cell from anywhere in the body, skin, muscle, lungs, anywhere, and dedifferentiate it, try to produce this cell in an environment that it is confused as to what it is, that it kind of thinks and behaves like it is an embryonic stem cell. If we can do this, that is great, because ethically there should not be any problem doing this. But this has not been done. There are big technical challenges to doing this. Now, this white paper gives a very good discussion of the proposal that we made; that is, of getting cells via blastomere extraction, sometimes called biopsy. You are going in and just taking out a cell or two. They even talk about producing the repair kit, which would be really advantageous to the baby through all of its life now. If it needed a new liver, new islet of Langerhans cells, if it needed new spinal cord cells, hopefully in the future we would be able to produce those from this repair kit. But when they get back for some strange reason, Mr. Speaker, it almost looks to me like two different groups wrote the body of this text where they talk about this technique and where they make the recommendations, because in the recommendations they say the second proposal, blastomere extraction from living embryos, we find this proposal to be ethically unacceptable in humans. Owing to the reasons given in the ethical analysis, we should not impose risks on living embryos destined to become children for the sake of getting stem cells for research. I agree. That is not the reason the stem cells are taken from this baby. As a matter of fact, if the cells are taken with no thought that they are stem cells, the cells will be taken by the parents to produce a repair kit or to do a preimplantation genetic diagnosis for the baby, and I think that most Americans do not have an ethical problem, Mr. Speaker, with in vitro fertilization. I think that most Americans do not have an ethical problem with deciding that your baby is not going to have a genetic defect. I do not think that hardly any Americans could ever have a problem with establishing a repair kit for your baby. What is envisioned is that at the end of the day, the parents would have made at least two ethical decisions, what I consider ethical and I think what most people consider ethical; that is, to have their own baby, the only way they can do it is in vitro, and to establish a repair kit for their baby, and then all that needs to be done to get another stem cell line is to ask them, Couldn't we have some surplus cells from the repair kit that you have established. There is a big discussion going on in our country now, Mr. Speaker, about embryonic stem cells. They voted how many billions of dollars in California to pursue embryonic stem cell research because a big percent of our population believes that there could be a major medical application there which would provide miraculous cures for many of our diseases. And then we have a large number of people, the prolife community, that have a big problem with taking these embryos, any one of which could become a baby, we have more than 100 of them, is what we call the snowflake babies that have been adopted, implanted in the receptive womb of a mother, and they become a baby; to take this human life, and it is a life, and it is human, and destroy it so that you can produce a stem cell line. Most of this debate ignores the fact simply because the debaters do not know that it is possible, Mr. Speaker, to get embryonic stem cell lines without harming embryos. I would like to go back again to the second chart I showed, which is the path of the reproductive tract of a female, so that we can look at this again together so that we understand clearly what we are talking about here. We will imagine now that this is happening in the laboratory and it is in a petri dish, in glass. In vitro is what we call it. Because the parents could not have a baby any other way, they decided to have in vitro fertilization, and they decided they would like to at least do one thing, and that is to establish a repair kit for their baby. They might also want to do a preimplantation genetic diagnosis. So now the physician in the clinic will wait until the cells divide and produce several embryos. By the way, they do not all produce really good-looking embryos, and so what they do is to fertilize more than one egg, and they then watch the development of these embryos, and they will take the best of them and generally more than one of them. One of my colleagues, Congressman Rohrabacher from California, his wife had three beautiful babies from in vitro fertilization. I do not know how many the doctor implanted, but at least three of those that he implanted grew, and she had triplets. I saw a recent picture of them in their little life vests out in the surf in California. There is a potential ethical argument in doing this even if we let the parents make the decision they are going to do the in vitro fertilization, if the parents make the decision that they are going to establish a repair kit, and then all we ask for is a few cells from that repair kit. You see, if the cell is taken from the eight-cell stage, then you could make the argument that maybe the cell you took could become another embryo. So then you start all over again with the ethical argument. You now have another embryo. And so you now ethically should not destroy that embryo with the hope that you are going to have some applications to health care for somebody else. There is, Mr. Speaker, one way to avoid this, and it is one of the things that our research, H.R. 3144, would pursue, and that is waiting a little later to take this cell. I am not sure for all the reasons that they take the cell at the eight-cell stage, but that is the convention. If you waited to take that cell from the inner cell mass stage, which is a little later, a few days later, then the differentiation has already occurred to the point that the cells in the inner cell mass which can produce the whole baby, but they cannot produce a baby by implantation because they have lost the ability to produce decidua. So you have now removed that possible ethical argument, although those who wrote the white paper on the Alternative Sources of Human Pluripotent Stem Cells do not believe that you could do this. But if there is any possibility that you could do that, then for those whose sensitivities would be offended by this, if we could demonstrate that you could take it from the inner cell mass stage, now you have bypassed even that. Our bill, H.R. 3144, is a bill that looks for the moment only at animal experimentation, because we believe that before you go to humans, you ought to know that what you are doing is going to work and that it has worked. The best way to do that is to go to animals and ultimately to what we call nonhuman primates; that is, the big apes which genetically, by the way, are remarkably close to humans. It may be embarrassing, Mr. Speaker, to look at the genetic complement of one of the great apes and look at our genetic complement. There is not all that much difference in us. Once we have demonstrated it there, then we could have more certainty that it is going to work in humans. What we do not need, Mr. Speaker, is for millions of Americans to feel that their last best hope for a cure for their relative had been removed when the President vetoes H.R. 810 and its Senate complement, which he has said he would do, which I hope he does. I think it is the ethical thing to do. What we need, Mr. Speaker, is to have this bill on the President's desk so that those millions of people out there who believe that there is potentially a lot of applications in health care from embryonic stem cells will know that the Federal Government believes with them that this is possible; that we are going to support responsible, ethical research, using cells taken from early embryos that certainly do not kill the embryo, do not harm the embryo. As a matter of fact, if, Mr. Speaker, we get those cells, the surplus cells from the repair kit, then the parents have made two decisions which I think, and I believe most Americans will believe, are ethical, one, to have their own baby, the only way to do it is in vitro; secondly, to establish a repair kit so that at any time during its life, their child is going to have the potential for new tissues, new organs, new cells that is going to be them, so there will be no rejection. Mr. Speaker, what we saw last night I hope results in a very positive eventuality. I hope that by the time H.R. 810 and its Senate complement gets to the President's desk, that also on his desk is H.R. 3144, so that the President can say, today I proudly sign a bill which provides for research which has the potential of producing embryonic stem cells for all the miraculous applications to health care that citizens all across the country believe. Because in State after State now they are voting in referenda to provide, sometimes in the legislature, sometimes just a vote of all the people, to provide very large amounts of money statewide because the Federal Government is not doing it, and they believe there is a big potential there. I hope that in the not-too-distant future, Mr. Speaker, that we will be using Federal funds to support responsible, ethical embryonic stem cell research, and H.R. 3144 will do it.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, pursuant to House Concurrent Resolution 225, 109th Congress, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, if you go to your computer this evening and do a Google search for peak oil, you will find there a large assortment of articles and comments. Like every issue, you will find a few people who are on the extreme, but there will be a lot of mainstream observations there. One of the articles that you will find there was written by Matt Savinar. Matt Savinar is not a technical person. He is a lawyer, a good one, and he does what lawyers do. He goes to the sources and builds his case. I remember in another life I was involved in morphing some of my knowledge of human physiology into the practical world, and I was awarded 20 patents. For every one of those I had a lawyer. I knew that he knew absolutely nothing about the subject that he was helping me on before he came to work with me. By the way, Mr. Speaker, the 20 patents I had, 19 were military patents so these were military lawyers. I was really impressed with how quickly they caught on and knew what was going on and were able to contribute. I think that Matt Savinar has done that, and I wanted to begin this discussion this evening with a quote from Matt Savinar because it kind of grabs your attention and makes you either want to put down his article with the statement that gee, this guy cannot be for real, or you want to finish it to see the basis for his statement because he begins his article by saying, ``Dear Reader, Civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon.'' When my wife read that she had the first reaction that I mentioned, Gee, this guy is a nut. I am not going to read any further. I said, Please read on and reserve judgment until you have finished reading his thesis. She read on and at the end was genuinely frightened by what she read. I do not believe Matt Savinar has to be correct, but he could be correct. I am going to spend a few minutes this evening talking about the subject that caused Matt Savinar to make his prediction: ``Dear Reader, Civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon.'' I have on the first chart here a trend that I think everybody in America is familiar with. This shows the inflation rate, and we have done a pretty good job since 1995 in the last 10 years of taming inflation. It has gone up only slightly. But the zigzag magenta here is the price of fuel, of gasoline. This is a month or so old because you see it stops at $55 a barrel, and fuel oil from which we get gasoline is now up to around $60 a barrel. It has fallen off just a little now. It was over $60. This is a trend that we are all familiar with and you see in the last 4 years from 2001 to 2005, if you draw a best fit line through those points, it would be a pretty steep slope. This gave rise to a letter that was written by about 30 prominent people in our country, McFarland, James Woolsey, Frank Gaffney, and a number of retired admirals and generals. The next chart shows the subject of their letter to the President. They noted that we have only 2 percent of the world's oil reserves, and that is a generally agreed upon figure. You will not find much contention with that statement. Some will say closer to 3 percent. They point out that we use 25 percent of the world's oil, and we are importing about two-thirds of what we use. That is up from about one- third that we imported as of the Arab oil embargo. The other points here are significant ones, I think. This 25 percent of the oil used in the world is less than 5 percent of the world's population. If we divide the 280 million people in our country into the world's population, just short of 7 billion, we get about 22. So we are one person out of 22 in the world, and we use a fourth of all the world's energy. These first two bullets here are really interesting ones. We have really only 2 percent of the world's oil reserves, but from that we are producing 8 percent of the world's oil. We are pretty good at pumping oil. What this says is that we are pumping our oil four times faster than the average well in the world. We do a good job of pumping oil. Their letter to the President pointed out that this was an unacceptable national security risk. And the President himself, Mr. Speaker, has noted that much of this two thirds of imported oil that we get comes from countries, in his words, that do not even like us very much. They are unstable, unpredictable. And these 30 prominent Americans wrote to the President, saying: Mr. President, we think this is an unacceptable national security risk and our country needs to mount an aggressive program to free us from our dependence on foreign oil. The next chart shows us how we got here. And we have to go back several decades, like 6 decades, to see where this story started, and it started with a Shell Oil Company geologist, a scientist, who was studying the exploitation and exhaustion of oil fields. And he noticed that for each typical oil field that production increased until it reached a peak, and, then after holding that peak for a little while, it started down the other side, and it is perfectly reasonable that the last oil that they get out of the well is probably going to be harder to get than the first oil that they get out of the well; so it should come more slowly. His name was M. King Hubbert, and he theorized that if he knew the totality of the oil fields in the United States and that they all behaved the way that several fields that he had studied behaved that he ought to then be able to predict when the United States would peak in oil production. And so he did that. He added up all of the fields that he knew of in the country. He made a reasonable estimate of how many more fields the country was likely to discover because this discovery trend followed a similar curve. That was a lot earlier on, and we generally are discovering the oil something like 30 or 40 years before we are using oil. And he then created a curve, a bell-shaped curve, which we call bell shaped because it rises to this peak and then falls off. That is a very typical curve that is familiar to scientists and statisticians. And he theorized that if he added up all the little bell curves in the country, he would get a big bell curve for the country. And he predicted in 1956, from his studies in the 1940s and 1950s, that the United States would peak in oil production about 1970. As it turned out, it was precisely 1970 that we peaked in oil production. When he came up with that prediction, his employers told him, Please do not publish that; people will think you are silly. He published it anyhow, and when he finally was proven to be a prophet who had predicted correctly, he became something of an institution in his own time. The smooth green curve here is the curve that he predicted, and he made this prediction in 1956. We were up that curve, and he predicted it would peak about 1970 and then fall off. And the more ragged, heavier green symbols, those are the actual production. And we now are well down on that curve. This is called Hubbert's Peak. And, Mr. Speaker, if one is doing this Google search, they can do one for Hubbert's Peak too, and they will find a lot of articles there, pretty much many of the same articles that one will find when they do a search for ``peak oil.'' The red curve here is the curve for the Soviet Union, now Russia. They had more oil; so their peak was higher than ours. And we see that the reality of their production fell off very dramatically after the collapse of the Soviet Union. So they are going to have a little secondary peak here to compensate for the fact that they were very inefficient in pumping oil during the collapse of the Soviet Union. The little blue here that we cannot see very well represents what happened with the oil discovery in Alaska, in Prudhoe Bay. The next chart is a graphic one that shows us where we have gotten our oil from and where we are getting our oil from. The red on top is natural gas liquids, and we see that as oil runs down, we are depending more and more on this source. Notice the enormous contribution that Texas made here, that one State, but they are really winding down now, as we can see. It peaked in 1970, and notice that the big Alaska oil find produced just a little bump in the down slope of Hubbert's Peak. Except for a very short period of time, there was never any increase in oil production as a result of that. It plateaued briefly and then went on down. The yellow is an interesting one. I am sure the Members can remember, Mr. Speaker, the fabled Gulf of Mexico oil discoveries that were going to save the world, there was so much oil there. That is the only contribution from the Gulf of Mexico deep water oil discoveries. It helped a little, but it certainly did not stop the downward slope of our production. We are now talking about drilling in ANWR. And for a couple of reasons, Mr. Speaker, I am opposed to drilling in ANWR. One of them is that if we were to drill in ANWR, there would be the perception that we have solved the oil problem. Nobody believes, almost nobody believes, that there is as much oil in ANWR as there was in Prudhoe Bay. And notice, Mr. Speaker, the relatively small contribution that the oil in Prudhoe Bay made. ANWR would make much less. So I am opposed to drilling because I think it would give us a false sense of security and we would not then have the incentives to do what I think we must do if we are going to avoid the consequences that Matt Savinar talked about: ``Dear Reader, civilization, as we know it, is coming to an end soon.'' The other reason that I am opposed to drilling in ANWR goes back to our second chart, which showed that we have only 2 percent of the known reserves of oil. If we have only 2 percent of the known reserves and are using 25 percent of the world's oil, help me understand, Mr. Speaker, why it is in our national security interests to pump that little bit of oil as quickly as we can. Would it not be nice to husband that? This may be a rainy day, but I suspect that there will be a rainier day when we need it more than we need the oil today. The next chart is a chart that Albert Einstein would really have appreciated. He was asked after the discovery of nuclear energy and the nuclear weapons went off, an enormous release of energy from a very small amount of mass, and he was asked what would be the next great energy source in the world? And his answer was that the greatest force in the universe was the force of compound interest. And that is, in effect, what we have in these exponential growth curves here. When it is compounded, that is referred to by mathematicians as ``exponential growth.'' That is, if we grew 5 percent last year and we leave the 5 percent in this year, then we do not start out with 100 units; we start out with 105 units. So 5 percent of 105 is obviously bigger than 5 percent of the 100 from the previous year. So each year, now, we are going to have a greater incremental increase. And the straight line on the bottom here shows what we get if we extrapolate from a 2 percent growth the first year and just assume it is going to follow that straight line. But that is not exponential growth. If we now are taking out the interest, if we are taking out the interest and the principal is going to grow, that is the curve, I guess, we would get. But if we have exponential growth, that is the next curve here, and it shows what happens. This doubles in 35 years, just 2 percent exponential growth. I am using the 2 percent figure because that has been about the rate of growth of the consumption of oil over the past several years. If we double that and go to a 4 percent growth rate, that doubles now in 17\1/2\ years and it quadruples in 35 years. The curve over here on the extreme left is one I want to spend just a moment talking about because it is a really interesting one. That is a 10 percent growth rate. That is about the rate at which China's economy is growing. With a 10 percent growth rate, it doubles in 7.2 years. That is rounded off to 7. That means it is four times bigger in 14 years. That means it is eight times bigger in 21 years. If China's economy is going to be eight times bigger in 21 years than it is now, that is really going to challenge our GDP, is it not? The next chart shows the consequence of this enormous exponential growth rate in China. China's use of fossil fuels, they used to be an exporter. The last several years they have become an importer of oil. As a matter of fact, they now are the second largest importer in the world, just behind the United States. They just displaced last year, I think, Japan as the second largest importer of oil. And this map shows some symbols that indicate where China has gone to secure the rights to future oil and gas production. And they are all over the world. They are in Canada. They have locked up most of the future increased production from the oil sands in Canada. They are all over South America. They are in Colombia and in Venezuela and in Brazil and in Argentina. And notice, Mr. Speaker, that not all of these countries in South America, as a matter of fact, the one with the largest reserves there, Venezuela, is not particularly friendly to the United States. They have locked up oil in the Caribbean and in Africa and all over the Middle East. We see the symbols here for the oil production rights that they bought up in the Middle East. The Members may have noticed, Mr. Speaker, that in the last few days there have been some reports of the decision of the Russians, announced by Mr. Putin himself, that they are going to favor China with their Sakhalin oil production rather than Japan. And Japan, which needs to import essentially all of its energy, is really concerned about the decision that Russia has made from the Sakhalin Island region here. That is called the Far Eastern Russian oil, and it is very difficult to get that to the countries in the West, and they are now moving it by train, and they are building a large pipeline, and China is going to be the primary beneficiary of this. There have been several reports recently about the fact that China is making an aggressive bid to buy Unocal, which I think is the ninth largest oil company in the world. They are not particularly interested in the oil that they own in this country, but Unocal has rights to oil in a number of other places in the world, much of it closer to China than we are. They have offered about $2 billion more than Chevron has offered, and there have been some really interesting articles. I have here a Washington Post article from the 13th. The government's current push, that is the government of China, to secure oil fields is driven by worries that there may one day be too little oil to meet worldwide demand and that foreign powers and particularly the United States will choke China. Now, it is interesting, Mr. Speaker, to note that when M. King Hubbert was making his predictions about the United States, after he made that prediction, he looked at the world and he made a prediction about the world and that was that if you added up all of the fields in the world and made some reasonable estimates about how much more oil the world would find, that the world should peak out in oil production, which is why we are calling this peak oil, should peak in oil production about the turn of the millennium. That did not quite happen, because he could not have known about the Arab oil embargo or the oil price spike hikes or the worldwide recession that resulted from that. That reduced the demand for oil and the use of oil, and so we are now reaching, in the view of many experts in the area, we are probably reaching peak oil now. By the way, Mr. Speaker, there may be some disagreement as to when we will reach peak oil, but there is no disagreement that oil is a finite resource. I know of no one who believes that the elves or God or whoever is filling the oil wells as we are pumping them out. If he is doing that, we are failing somehow in the United States, because our oil wells are being pumped down. Here we are now just pumping barely more than half of what we did at our peak. It is very interesting that, although we have 5,000 years of recorded history, we have been in the age of oil just a little over 100 years, and we are now probably about halfway through pumping all of the reserves of oil in the world. A couple of Congresses ago, I was Chair of the Subcommittee on Energy on the Committee on Science, and I wanted to determine the dimensions of the problem. So we had a hearing with the world's experts in as to how much oil was out there, how much had been pumped and how much was out there. A gross estimate of how much oil is still out there, which happens to be the same number as the oil that has been pumped, because there is general agreement that we probably have pumped about half of all the oil out there, there is about 1,000 gigabarrels of oil remaining in the world. Nobody in the industry, by the way, expects that we are going to find any more giant deposits of oil. We are now very good at prospecting for oil. We use 3-D seismic with a lot of computer analysis. As you may note, Mr. Speaker, with the plethora of cash that the oil companies now have, they are doing very little prospecting. I just read the other day that for the last several years, they have spent more money prospecting than they will ever get from the oil they found, even at $60 a barrel. So the oil companies know that this is not a good financial investment, to spend a lot of money looking for what are, in most people's views, very small oil fields remaining out there yet to be discovered. Well, this is what the Chinese government is concerned about. There may one day be too little oil to meet worldwide demand and that foreign powers, in particular the United States, will choke China. They are very concerned about the Straits of Malacca through which a lot of their oil passes. Mr. Speaker, we ought to really be concerned about where our oil comes from, because there are some choke points, that if one of those choke points was cut off, our economy would suffer grievous damages from that. The Straits of Hormuz are one of these. Just mining those straits by terrorists or sinking a single supertanker in there would probably shutdown oil through the Straits of Hormuz for a number of months, and 40 percent of all the world's oil moves through the Straits of Hormuz. Of course, it would not be the United States that was affected by that, it would be all of the great industrial powers. I have here a copy of Fortune Magazine, July 25, that is the most recent one. There is a big article here ``Why China Scares Big Oil.'' The Chinese company that is looking to buy UNOCAL is called CNOOC. This is their offshore oil company. We have a new word coined for them, I saw it the other day, called CNOOCered, that China is now buying or looking to buy this billing oil field and lock up reserves of oil that both we and they need. The next chart that I want to show, Mr. Speaker, is a schematic one, but I think it shows very well the challenge that we face. I mentioned that the production of oil had been increasing at about 2 percent a year. This curb that we show here is a 2 percent exponential growth rate, and then it falls off after it reaches a peak down the other side. Now, of course, by choosing different scales for the abscissa and the ordinate, you can make this a very spread out curve, as we have shown here, or you can make it a very sharp curve, if you make the scale bigger and the scale on the bottom smaller. But it is still a 2 percent growth rate, and notice it keeps going up and up. The curve on top here is the rate at which we have been using oil. Of course, up until this point in history, we have used all the oil that has been produced, and there has been enough to fuel everybody's economy, so the oil we used matched the oil we produced. By if in fact we are reaching peak oil, as many of the experts in the field suspect, then there will be a leveling out of the supply of oil, but the demand for oil, unless everybody is interested in conservation and efficiency, the demand for oil should keep going up. Now, there is a suggestion by many experts that we are probably at this point. Maybe we haven't peaked yet, although one of the major experts in this area, a professor at Cornell University, says that the peak is going to occur on Thanksgiving day of this year. It is going to occur a little before or after that. Even if it is 10 years after that, Mr. Speaker, it is not going to make a lot of difference. Because let us look at the scale here. We mentioned before that if you have a growth rate, exponential growth rate of 2 percent, that doubles in 35 years. This point on the graph is half as high as this point on the graph. So that period of time, time is on the abscissa here, that period of time is 35 years, and you see that about 17\1/2\ years before you reach peak, the curve starts to level out and you are having a discrepancy between the amount of oil that you would like to use, that is demand, and the amount of oil that is available to use. Well, if in fact we are at that point, then this explains the $60 a barrel oil. There is some evidence that the high price at the gas pump is reducing demand a little. I do not see any less SUVs and pickup trucks on the road with one person on it, but there is a waiting line for buying any of the hybrids. Mr. Speaker, I have been driving a hybrid now since 2000. We have 90,000 miles on it. It has performed very well. We get an honest 45 miles per gallon. We bought the first one in Maryland and the first one in Congress. Now to buy a hybrid, whether it is an SUV or just a sedan hybrid, there are, for many of them, pretty long waiting periods. If in fact this is where we are worldwide now, in order to avoid the kind of a consequence that Matt Savinar referenced when he started his article by saying ``Dear reader, civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon,'' if we are going to avoid that kind of a consequence, we have got to do two things right now, Mr. Speaker. The first thing that we have to do is to use even less oil than is under this blue curve, because we cannot use all the oil in our present economy or there will be none left to make the big investments that we are going to have to make in the alternatives as we transition from the age of oil to the alternatives. We are going to have to reduce our demand even below this point so that we have something to invest. I might point out, Mr. Speaker, that we, the world and the United States, have blown 25 years. We knew very well in 1980 we were already 10 years down Hubbert's peak. The United States was producing meaningfully less oil than we were 10 years before. We had peaked 10 years ago. Ronald Reagan knew that when he came to office. He knew the problem, but he certainly did not have the right to suggestion to the problem. His presumption was that there was essentially for at least present purposes an infinite amount of oil out there and all we needed to do was give the American producer the incentive to explore more, give them a better profit motive, and he would go out and drill more. And we did that. I have a chart, I did not bring this evening, but it shows the frequency of drilling. We drilled a whole lot more wells, but it did not help because we did not find much more oil because we pretty much found all the oil there was to find in the United States by that time. But we are going to have to, worldwide, reduce the amount of energy that we are using so that we have some to invest. We should have started these investments at least 25 years ago when we knew that M. King Hubbert was right about the United States. If he was right about the United States, Mr. Speaker, why should he not be right about the world? There should have been a very good reason that we just ignored what he said and relegated him to the lunatic fringe and kept on using oil as if there was no end to oil. So we now have blown 25 years. I have used an analogy in talking about this, it is a plane that is flying across the Atlantic. They notice when they are well out there that they do not have enough fuel to get to the other side. As a matter of fact, they do not have enough fuel to turn around and come home. They have passed the point of no return. For perhaps 30 years now I have been telling audiences that we will pass the point of no return. We will come to that point where there is not enough readily available, high quality oil in the world to both sustain our present economies and make the investments we are going to have to make in the alternatives if we are going to transition. What would you do if you were in a plane crossing the Atlantic and you have passed the point of no return? Well, you would jettison all the luggage, and then you would make some assessments, am I going to make it to the other side. I cannot make it to the other side. What would you then do? Ask half the passengers to jump overboard so you can make it to the other side? We are now in a situation, Mr. Speaker, where if we, and I mean the world, but since we in the United States use 25 percent of the world's energy, whether we like it or not, we have a leadership position and we have got to take a leadership role in this. What should we do? Well, the first thing to do is an enormous effort at conservation so we reduce our demand, so that we have something to invest. We need to make big investments of money, let us not worry about money, because we just borrow that from our kids and grandkids without their permission. But there are two things we have to make investments of. One of those is time, and the other is energy. Mr. Speaker, we are running very short on both time and energy to make the investments that we need to make. The next chart shows the alternatives that we face. There are some finite resources out there. There are the tar sands up in Canada, the oil shales in our Midwest, coal, and we will come to that in a few minutes. Some people say do not worry about energy, we have a world supply of coal out there to last 500 years. That is not true. At current use rates it will last 250 years. We will come to that in a few minutes. Nuclear fission. We get 20 percent of our electricity from nuclear. As you drive home tonight, Mr. Speaker, every fifth house and every fifth business would be dark if we did not have nuclear power. We have never had a death, we have never had a serious accidents. I live very near Three Mile Island. There was nothing serious that happened then. It was blown up in the press. We got through that with proper design. It was all contained. There was really no big problem. I want to spend a little time, a few moments talking about each of these. I am going to Canada, I have been invited up by the Canadians to see what they call their oil sands, others call them tar, because it is really very tarry. The way this oil and gas is produced we believe was that a very long time ago when the Earth was much warmer because it was subtropical and tropical climate up in Prudhoe Bay and ANWR, there were lakes, fresh water lakes, everywhere, with lots of life growing in it, and at the end of the season the life would die and fall to the bottom. Then there would be rains which would carry sediment in from the shores and it would cover this organic material, it was decaying on the bottom there, and this happened year after year. And then upheavals of the big plates that the crust of the Earth floats on, and these could be buried under large rock domes. And when you have a rock dome, like a lid over it, that will trap the volatiles that come off the oil, that is where we get gas. But when you have the oil very close to the surface, and in our Western United States and in Canada, there was never these big upheavals that submerged it way down so it was covered by rock and so forth. So the volatiles have all gone out of this, and instead of being oil and some gas trapped with it or above it, all the volatiles are gone now, so it is real sticky, tarry stuff. Out in California, these tar pits out there have some ancient animals that were trapped in those and we can find a lot of fossils there. But it takes a lot of energy to get this oil out of the ground. It will not flow. They need to do one of 2 things. Drill 2 wells side-by-side, eventually make them horizontal, pump steam into the upper well that softens the oil, and it now flows down and is picked up by the lower well and you can pump it out. Or, you can simply mine it and put it in a vessel and heat it up, and that is maybe more economical as far as heat is concerned but, of course, you have to spend all the energy mining it. Mr. Speaker, I do not know whether this is a net energy winner or loser. I know they are producing oil up there at $30 a barrel. That sounds great when it is selling for $60 a barrel. But I also hear that more energy from gas is going in to produce the oil than they are getting out of the oil. Now, there could be better ways of doing it. But the point I want to make, Mr. Speaker, is that there are many people who tell us, do not worry about energy, because when the conventional oil is gone, we have this nonconventional oil, and there is more oil in the tar sands and in the oil shales than there is in all of the Middle East. That may or may not be true. But even if it is true, Mr. Speaker, and it takes more energy to get the oil out than you get out of the oil, then in terms of energy balance, unless the oil is a higher quality than the energy you are putting in, why would you want to do it, if you are putting more energy in than you get out of it. Now, hopefully, we will have processes that will be energy positive. But at least a number, several experts now believe that the processes we are using are energy deficient. It is a negative energy balance. By the way, we seldom talk about energy balance when we are talking about exploiting these energy resources. We are always talking about profit and profitability. Now, if the gas is there and the gas is cheap, what does it matter if you are using more gas energy than you get out of the oil you get, because the gas is there and it is hard to transport. When you get the oil, it is easier to transport; put it in a pipe and it is a liquid and move it to gas, you have to liquefy it under very cold temperatures and high pressure, or move it as a gas and you cannot move much mass through a pipe when you are moving it as a gas. So I just caution that there may or may not be a lot of finite resources there that are usable. With coal, we have a chart in a few minutes that will show us something about coal. We really do need to look at fission and fusion. Fusion, of course, if we get that, we are home free. But hoping to solve our national, international energy problems by counting on fusion is a little bit, Mr. Speaker, like you or me hoping to solve our personal financial problems by winning the lottery. It would be real nice if it happened, and I think the odds are probably roughly the same. I support all the money that this technology can use, because if we get there, we are home free, but boy, I surely would not bet the ranch that we are going to get there, at least in time to avoid the crunch that may be coming. Well, we really do need to look at nuclear fission. There are 2 kinds of fission. We use only one in this country, that is the light water reactor. There is not an infinite supply of fission or uranium in the world. If everybody cranked up their nuclear fission, we would fairly shortly run out of uranium. At current use rates, it will last a very long time. But as we run down on these conventional fossil fuels, we are going to be turning to some of these other sources. We saw from the previous chart, exponential growth rates are just incredible. If you run out of fission uranium, you still can have efficient electricity from nuclear, but now it is breeder reactors. As the name implies, they produce more fuel than they use, but they also produce a lot of potential problems with enrichment and transporting and bomb grade material that might be more readily available to terrorists and so forth. So these are all issues we need to look at. But once we have gone through these, and these are all finites, except for the fusion and breeder reactors, and they come with uncertainties and big problems; then we come to the real renewables: solar and wind and geothermal and ocean energy. My goodness, the moon lifts the whole ocean about 2 feet. Mr. Speaker, take a bucket of water and lift it 2 feet, enormous amount of energy in lifting the ocean 2 feet. But we have great difficulty in harnessing that energy because it is so dispersed. There is an old axiom that says energy power to be effective must be concentrated. And unless you are a fiord in Scandinavia where the tides are 60 feet high because they are funneled in, we have great difficulty in capturing ocean energy. But there is other kinds of ocean energy. There is the thermal gradients between the deep cold water and the more shallow warm water. There are some entrepreneurs out there that are working, and it will not help us, by the way, to get meaningful energy from that, unless you live in Key West, because this is only going to be effective probably down in that part of the world, that much above and that much below the equator. Then there are the agricultural resources, soy diesel, biodiesel, methanol, ethanol, biomass. I was very enthusiastic about these, and today I saw, I guess it was a couple of days ago, an article which distressed me a little. A group of scientists out in California at Stanford and at Berkeley published an article saying that it takes more energy to produce a gallon of ethanol than you will get out of the gallon of ethanol. Now, others say that they use antiquated data and that really is not true, that you might get a little net energy out of producing ethanol anyway; after you produce the ethanol, there is still something left in the corn. All the fat is there and all the protein is there, and you can eat that or feed the chickens and pigs and then eat the chickens and pigs. But the point I want to make, Mr. Speaker, is that if we are going to solve this problem, we at least have to focus on what the facts are. We cannot start to have a rational discussion about how to solve the problem until we agree on the facts. There is no agreement that, as a matter of fact, you can actually get energy out of the tar sands and the oil shales. Some people believe that will always be negative. Some people believe that the ethanol is negative. It may be positive. I am going to show a chart in a few minutes from our Department of Energy that shows that it is slightly positive. I am told that is wildly optimistic, and this article that just appears says that it is, in fact, negative. Another caution on energy from these agricultural products. We are barely able to maintain the quality of our soils by leaving all of the agricultural waste on the soil. If you take that organic material off to make energy from it, you are removing humus from the soil, we call that tilth, and if you remove enough of that humus, you have removed much of the ability of the soil to produce crops. Until we learn to do no-till farming, we are losing the battle of maintaining our topsoil. It was increasingly ending up in the center of our country in the Mississippi Delta and, in the east here, into our lakes and streams and so forth. So although there are some opportunities from agriculture for energy, I would caution, Mr. Speaker, that in terms of the enormous amounts of energy that we need to get, this is going to contribute, it is going to contribute only marginally. Let me give my colleagues a couple of little illustrations of the energy density in fossil fuels. The energy density in one barrel of oil, the refined product, 42 gallons, of which you can buy at the pump today for about, what, $100, 42 gallons of gas at the present rate, about $100; that energy is the energy that would be produced by 12 people, Mr. Speaker, working full-time for you for one year. That is the energy density in these fossil fuels. They have been such cheap slaves. We have become addicted to this energy. Just like the cocaine addict, we are addicted to this cheap energy. Let me give another example, Mr. Speaker. If you go out this weekend and you work really hard in your yard all day, I will get more physical work out of an electric motor with less than 25 cents worth of electricity. So in terms of fossil fuels, Mr. Speaker, you are worth less than 25 cents a day in energy output. Now, that is the challenge that we have. What are we going to come up with that has anything like the quantity and the energy density of these fossil fuels? Just one word about waste of energy. We really need to be doing that. There is a great facility up in Dickerson, Maryland, I am proud to have it next to my church, and they burn trash and you would never know it, it looks like an office building. You ought to go up and see it. They are burning trash. We do not need to fill the gullies, or more than gullies, because the landfills become more than a fill, it becomes a mountain. We really need to be getting what energy we can from that. Just a word about hydrogen. Hydrogen, Mr. Speaker, is not an energy source. There is no place you can go to get hydrogen. The only way to get hydrogen is to make it, using more energy to make it than you will ever get out of the hydrogen. Well, we say gee, why all this fuss about the hydrogen economy? The reason, Mr. Speaker, is that hydrogen is a really nice fuel once you have it. It burns very cleanly. Water is the by-product. And you can use it in a fuel cell which has at least twice the efficiency of a reciprocating engine. Please think of hydrogen as a really neat battery. It takes energy from one place, like a nuclear power plant that produces electricity, I cannot put that electricity in my truck, I can put it in batteries, but the batteries do not have much energy density. You fill up your car with batteries and they will take you 50 miles. That is all you can get from it. But I can put the hydrogen in there and it has a lot of energy. So please think of it as a battery, as a convenient way of hauling energy from one place to another. It is no solution for our energy crisis. It is a nice way to take energy from something nasty and dirty like coal and put it in a form that is really convenient and clean to use in another place. The next chart shows us how we got here, Mr. Speaker, and this is a really interesting chart. This goes back to the history of the world, and this relates just to the United States, that it mirrors what happened in the rest of the world. The brown one on the bottom here is energy from wood and, by the way, we still get a fair amount of energy from wood. But primarily, in those industries that use a lot of wood like the timber industry and the paper industry, and they have by- products which they burn and they get energy from that; but notice that leveled out, and then we discovered coal. The industrial revolution stuttered a little, you can see it here, with coal, and then we found oil and gas. Look what happened. Over on the ordinate here is the quadrillions of BTUs. Look at the energy density, the quantity of energy that we got from gas and oil. Now, if we are going to look at something to replace these conventional sources of energy, the next chart shows us the qualities that these replacements have to have. We are looking for two things. One, we are looking for something which is really neat and easy to use. That is on the bottom here. Economic effectiveness in transport, something really neat and easy to use. And on the ordinate here, we are looking at something that you do not pay too much for, and this is called the energy profit ratio. The giant oil fields are about 60 to 1. We do not have any of those. They are in Saudi Arabia. The giant oil fields are about 60 to 1. You put in $1, as an example, and you get out $60. Well, we do not have any of those. Here is our 1970 oil fields in the United States, still really neat in terms of its effectiveness and quality, but energy profit ratio, much lower. Here we are in 1985. I do not know where we are; we are down now near zero in 2005. And we look at some of the other photovoltaics. Here they are in 2005, here they are in 1995, getting better. They will never move this way, because they are just stuck on the roof of your house or out in the field or something, but they can move up here as they get more and more efficient, and they are getting more efficient. We do not show wind generators here. They are pretty good. We can now produce electricity at about 3.5 cents a kilowatt hour. Here is coal. It is no good at all in terms of effectiveness for transport; big and dirty and bulky, but the profit, energy profit ratio is up about here. That will come down, by the way. It is coming down, because coal is getting harder and harder to get. The next chart shows us a number of things that we might get energy from, and it shows, this is energy density is really what it shows. And natural gas you see is very high here. Become aviation fuel and naptha and petrol. This is automotive gasoline and diesel and crude oil and ethanol. Notice ethanol is way down, compared to the gas and oil and things like that. Then it is downhill from there. Coke and black coal and wood and dung. Many people heat their homes with dung in other parts of the world. Baled straw, brown coal, a very poor quality coal and domestic refuse. There is something in domestic refuse. You may as well use it. The next chart shows us something really interesting. I could have shown one for the world, which would have shown the average person in Europe using half the energy that the average American uses. And you would be hard pressed to argue that they do not live as well as we live. This is a really interesting one. It shows energy used for the United States as a whole and for California. And notice that the people in California, and we have a lot of Members from California, and they are not going to tell you they are living less well than we do. But they are getting by on about two-thirds of the energy of the average in the rest of the country. This is because of many of the regulations that they have in California. I put this up, Mr. Speaker, to show that life can be good with less energy. You do not have to live poorly because you are using less energy. The Europeans, I see as many smiles on their faces as I see on faces in this country. And the average Californian seems to me to be as well off and as happy as the average American. The next chart is a really interesting one and it gets to one of the things that I was talking about previously, that is the top part of the chart here. And this shows the energy you get when you start with crude oil. And it takes 1.23 BTUs to get 1 million PTUs of gasoline. Obviously you have got to use some energy to pump it and haul it and refine it and take it to the service station and so forth. And it is about what, 1/5 of the total you take to do that. This is what the Department of Energy says is the energy balance for ethanol. I have been using this because they gave it to me. And I had an expert the other day tell me that is wildly optimistic and it is maybe not even half that good. But even with this, what I am told is a very optimistic projection, you have .74 million BTUs to get 1 million. Now of course you have got a lot of energy from the sun. That is why you get more than you are putting in. But others, I mentioned the article previously where they say that it is really a net energy loss. And again, Mr. Speaker, we cannot really have an effective discussion on this until we can agree on the facts at a very minimum. And I think we in the Congress, we in the Federal Government, have a responsibility. At a very minimum we need to agree on the facts before we can start talking about solutions. The bottom here is a really interesting one. It shocked me, and I am a farmer. This is the energy input in producing a bushel of corn. And notice the big, almost 50 percent of it here says nitrogen. Almost half the energy in producing a bushel of corn comes from nitrogen. And that is because we are producing nitrogen from natural gas. Before that the only source was barnyard manures and guano. That is gone. We mined the guano. If we wait 10,000 years we will have some more. All these others are energy largely from fossil fuels. Mine the potash. Mine the lime. This is diesel fuel, gasoline, liquid gas, electricity, natural gas, cost of work was a lot of oil. A lot of the chemicals we use in agriculture come from oil. You are almost literally eating oil, Mr. Speaker, when you eat that food on your plates because of the energy that went into producing it. The next chart shows coal and, you know, do not worry, we have got this big supply of coal. At current use rates it will last about 250 years. That is true. But if you have to start ramping up the use because you are running short of other fuels, at a 2 percent growth rate you are down to about what, 85 years? But I cannot put a trunkful of coal in my car and go down the road and have to convert it to gas or oil. And once I do that and the energy to do that, now I am down to about 50 years. So we do not have a surfeit of coal out there. We must be very careful how we husband these finite resources to make the transition. The last chart I want to show is a really interesting one. And I want to use a little analogy here that I think helps us understand where we are and the challenge we have. This shows our total energy and where it comes from, 23 percent from coal, 8 percent from nuclear power, electrical, 30 percent from petroleum, 24 percent from natural gas. If you add up these three big ones, natural gas, petroleum and coal, you get 85 percent of all the energy we use comes from fossil fuels. We are a little bit like the couple that has just gotten married and they have gotten a big inheritance from their grandparents, and they have established a lifestyle where 85 percent of what they spend comes from their grandparents inheritance, and only 15 percent of it comes from their income. Now the grandparents inheritance will not last forever. And so they are going to have to transition from the present lifestyle they have, where 85 percent comes from their grandparents inheritance and only 15 percent is interest income. Our income is nuclear power, 8 percent, and then renewable energy, 7 percent. And we have blown up the renewable energy here to show where that comes from. Solar. And that is going to have to be a big source of future energy when we have run out of these fossil fuels. I want to make the point that we are not running out of oil. Half of what was ever there is still there, Mr. Speaker. There will be a lot of oil for a long time, but not at the quantities that we are used to using it, with ever diminishing quantities, with an ever greater demand in the world for oil. This 1 percent solar, that is 1 percent of seven. That is .07 percent of our current energy comes from solar. Mr. Speaker, it is a long way from .07 percent to the quantities of energy we are going to have to get from somewhere else when we are running down Hubbert's peak and running out of these fossil fuels. Here is wood. We probably cannot increase that much unless we stop building houses because we are barely able to maintain our forests now. We are using a lot of wood energy, but that, as I mentioned earlier, is in the timber industry, the wood industry and in the paper industry they are burning waste product. 8 percent of 7 percent comes from waste, 1 percent from wind. Wind has got to be a big sorts of energy. .07 percent of our current supply comes from wind. Conventional hydroelectric. That is a big part. What is it, more than half of all the renewables. Mr. Speaker, we are tapped out on that. There are no more rivers we can dam. As a matter of fact, they are now breaching some of the dams so that the fish can move up to spawn. So we are not going to grow anything here. We probably cannot grow much in wood. We ought to use more waste. We can really do something more there. But we are going to have to count on solar and on wind. Alcohol. That may or may not be a positive. We mentioned that previously. That is still a very small amount, .07 percent. Geothermal. There are some opportunities in the West to get energy from the deep molten core of our earth. We need to be exploiting those. If you go to Iceland Mr. Speaker, there is not a single chimney in the whole country because they do not need to burn anything because they have geothermal energy. Mr. Speaker, the challenge that we have now is to reduce the amount of energy we are using so that there is a surplus of the available energy to make investments in the alternatives that we are going to have to turn to as we run down Hubbert's peak. I think that our country, Mr. Speaker, needs something like a melding of the Manhattan Project, the urgency of the Manhattan Project and the commitment that we had in putting a man on the moon. Short of that, Matt Savinar could be correct when he said, ``Dear Reader, civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon.'' I would encourage you, Mr. Speaker, to pull up his article and read it. It is really very sobering. One of the great attributes of being in America is that we are entrepreneurs. We do very poorly at avoiding crises. We do very well at responding to a crisis. We now are approaching a crisis. I think the Federal Government and the Congress needs to take the lead in challenging our people, our entrepreneurs, our creative spirit, to address this problem. There may be solutions that I have not dreamed of here. But I think if you look through all the potential sources of energy in the world, there are not many that we have missed here. This is a big challenge. There is nothing like a challenge like this to sharpen the intellect and give you a feeling of really doing something worthwhile. Mr. Speaker, I would like to see this not as a problem but as a challenge. And if every American addresses that appropriately, I think we will weather the storm.

Mr. BARTLETT

Mr. BARTLETT. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Madam Speaker, there have been a number of articles in the recent press relative to stem cell research, with particular reference to embryonic stem cell research. I thought it might be well in starting this little discussion to take a look at what we mean by stem cells. I have here a chart which shows in very abbreviated form the development of an early embryo. It starts out with the zygote, which is the fertilized egg; and then it skips a couple of stages of development, and it goes through the blastocyst, and then it goes to the gastrula. By the time the embryo gets to the gastrula stage, the cells have already differentiated to the place that we have three different kinds of somatic stem cells. This is the ectoderm, and the mesoderm, and the endoderm, and then those very specialized cells, which in the female will be the germ cells in the ovary, the ova, and in the male will be the millions and millions of sperm that are in the gonads of the male. If we look back, Madam Speaker, at these stem cells that are present here in the gastrula, where we have these three, as we call germ layers, we see the ectoderm can further differentiate into skin and nervous system and some of the pigment cells in our body; and then the mesoderm, the middle layer, that differentiates into what is most of us by mass and weight, cardiac muscle, our big skeletal muscles, the bone, the smooth muscle, all of our blood, and the blood is an organ, it happens to be a liquid organ that is dispersed through the body; and then the endoderm. This is much more limited in volume and in variety, but still very important. The pancreatic cells, the thyroid cells, the lining of the gut, the lining of the lung and so forth. It might be worth just a moment, Madam Speaker, to take a look at our next chart, which kind of puts this in context. We started out with the zygote, which is the fertilized egg here, and we ended up with the inner cell mass with these three germ layers. What we show here are all the stages that were omitted in that first chart. This is one-half, as the little diagram here in the upper left shows, of the reproductive tract of a female. It shows the ovary on one side and the fallopian tube, with the funnel-like opening here called the infundibulum. Then it shows the fallopian tube on down to the uterus itself. What it shows, Madam Speaker, is that fertilization takes place well up in the fallopian tube, and that begins day one. And then as the egg slowly moves down the tube, it splits first into two cells, then four cells, and then eight cells, and then the larger variety of cells, and finally where you have the inner cell mass and then to the gastrula. There are two kinds of stem cells, adult stem cells, and those are derivatives of the cells that we showed in the previous chart. For instance, in the humans we have adult stem cells in our bone marrow. These are cells which are differentiated to the point that they will produce a limited variety of cells, but still undifferentiated to an extent because these stem cells in the bone marrow can produce red blood cells and polymorphonuclear leukocytes, part of the white blood cells, and the thrombocytes, those are the cells, the platelets as we call them, that are associated with clotting. And there are a number of adult stem cells similar to that that still retain some of the capability for producing more than just one kind of cell. We have been working with adult stem cells medically now for more than 3 decades, and there have been a number of medical applications, treatment of humans that have been made with adult stem cells. But just because they are what they are, Madam Speaker, a great number of people believe that there should be more potential from the embryonic stem cells simply because they can produce any and all of the tissues of the body. Since we have been working with embryonic stem cells for now just a little over 6 years, we have not had the opportunities for medical applications we have had in adult stem cells, but this does not dim the hopes of the scientific community and the medical community that ultimately there may be more and better applications of embryonic stem cells to treatment of diseases than adult stem cells, simply because of what they are, puripotent cells retaining the ability to produce any and all of the tissues of the body. It is possible, Madam Speaker, that this characteristic, which makes them so potentially attractive and exciting, may be uncontrollable. They may be so bent on dividing that we cannot control their division. They may end up producing tumors and cancer-like growths in the organism in which you put them. But if that can be controlled, the medical community and the researchers associated with it believe there is potential for enormous applications to medicine of embryonic stem cell research. We have now had 58 applications of adult stem cells in helping to treat some of the diseases. What are the diseases that could be treated with stem cells? Ordinarily, one thinks that the greatest potential for the use of stem cells would result from use in diseases from tissue deficiency rather than diseases that result from some organism, although if there is an infection in the body and a tissue is damaged, there is the hope that it might be replaced with stem cell application. There are a number of diseases that the scientific community and the general public believe might be amenable to treatment with stem cells, particularly embryonic stem cells. Diabetes is one of those. This is the most costly disease in our country. It costs more to treat the diabetics in our country than any other single disease. I have these come through my office. Particularly heartrending are the little children that come there, 5 and 6 years old some of them, such brittle juvenile diabetics that they have an implanted pump and they have to prick their finger or some part of their body a number of times a day to monitor the glucose level so that just the right amount of insulin can be injected to control this. This insulin is produced by cells called island of Langerhan cells. Dr. Langerhan was the German scientist that described them. And they look like little eyelets because they are simply distributed through the tissue of the pancreas. The pancreas is a very large gland at the very beginning of the small intestine that secretes all of the different kinds of digestive enzymes so that fats, carbohydrates, and proteins all are digested using the enzymes secreted by the pancreas. I have no idea why nature placed the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas. They could be placed anywhere. With these stem cell applications if we could create islet tissue, they could be placed in the person. It could be placed in the groin, under their arm, under the skin, anywhere. It does not have to be in the pancreas. This islet tissue could then make insulin which would cure diabetes. When you give insulin to the diabetic, it delays progression of the disease, but it does not cure it. A person with juvenile diabetes faces the prospect that they probably will have a shortened life, problems with their vision as the vascular bed in the back of the eye breaks down, and they may have problems with circulation in their extremities, particularly in the feet where there is some difficulty getting blood back uphill to the heart. As many people in this country know through relatives and friends, this results frequently in sores that do not heal and results in gangrene, so the toes or a foot may need to be taken off. Diabetes is one of the diseases that is very attractive as a potential for use of stem cells, because if we could just produce islet tissue, we could cure diabetes, the most expensive disease that we have. Another disease is multiple sclerosis, and if impaired cells could be replaced through stem cell therapy, then the person could walk again. Lou Gehrig's disease, I remember my grandmother was tripping and falling, and they did not know why. It took them quite awhile back, this was a number of years ago, to determine she had Lou Gehrig's disease. I remember as a teenager going to her bedside. She was maintained in the home. She slowly deteriorated, losing first one muscle function and then another. Finally, at the end, the only muscle function she had remaining was the ability to blink her eyes. It was once for yes and two for no, as I remember. She could not swallow and had indicated she did not want to be force fed and ultimately she died from starvation with this disease. Well, anybody who has a friend or a relative that has gone through that kind of experience has to be enthusiastic about the potential for stem cell therapy. This was a number of years ago, but if it were tomorrow or the day after tomorrow figuratively, maybe there could be stem cell therapy for my grandmother, and she would not have to have died at the relatively young age she died at. Alzheimer's disease is another one. President Reagan died from Alzheimer's disease. Victims do not even recognize their favorite loved ones, have no memory and may wander outside and wander off. There is a whole category of autoimmune diseases. I have a paper which lists 63 of the autoimmune diseases. By that, I mean a disease where the body gets confused as to what is the body and what is not the body. When we are developing as embryos in our mother's womb, there are certain cells in our circulatory system called T-cells located in the lymphatic tissue, and the T-cells are imprinted with who we are because once we get out of the mother's womb, we are going to be in a hostile environment, exposed to bacteria and viruses, and so it is important that the body knows what it is so the defense mechanisms in the body can be marshaled to eject the intruder. These T-cells identify what is you and what is not you, and they alert some of the specialized cells in our white blood cell system so they are attracted to the site, and they eject, they may consume, they eject the intruder. There are 63 distinct autoimmune diseases. For some reason, the body gets confused and the autoimmune system gets confused and starts attacking your joints, for instance. We know that disease as arthritis. I remember my first real introduction to this big list of autoimmune diseases was a secretary I had, a very vibrant young lady whose life was really, really changed because she had lupus. There are many Americans who have family or friends who have lupus, and lupus was one of the first autoimmune diseases that was discovered. There is a controversy going on over the potential for embryonic stem cell medical applications and adult stem cell medical applications. We have been working for more than 3 decades with adult stem cells, and our very able medical scientific community has been able to develop a number of applications that can cure or at least lessen the severity of disease using adult stem cells. Since we have been working with embryonic stem cells for only a brief period of time, we do not have any direct applications to medicine of embryonic stem cell therapy, but that does not dim the enthusiasm of the medical community because they believe that the potential there ought to be greater. But the real problem here is that up until this time the only way that we can get embryonic stem cells is to destroy the embryo. The scientists go into the inner cell mass stage. That is this stage here, day five. Of course, what we are doing now in the laboratory is not done in the uterus. All of this is done in a petri dish. The in vitro is in glass. In vivo means life. The embryo is destroyed at the inner cell mass stage, and cells are taken to produce a stem cell line. About 4 years ago, this produced a real dilemma for the President who, like all of us, has family and friends who have one or more of these diseases that could be potentially ameliorated or cured by embryonic stem cell application. Yet the President knew the only way we were presently getting embryonic stem cell lines was by destroying embryos. He, as I am, is a strong pro-life advocate and the President had a problem with taking one life because that embryo produced in the laboratory in surplus and in vitro fertilization had the potential when implanted in a receptive mother to become a baby and the President's problem was that he had a moral problem with taking one life with the hope of helping another. While the President was wrestling with this problem and what to do about it, there was a briefing at the National Institutes of Health for Members of the Congress and for their staff. I went out there to that briefing. As the next chart shows, when we were talking about the potential for embryonic stem cell lines, I remembered my training of more than 50 years ago when I got my doctorate at the University of Maryland and had a course in advanced embryology and then went on to teach medical school for 4 years and postgraduate medicine doing basic research at the National Institutes of Health. I remembered what everybody knows, because they had the course in advanced embryology it was in my mind, that whenever we have identical twins what has really happened is that half of the cells have been taken from the early embryo. The half that is taken becomes a perfectly normal baby, and the half that is left becomes a perfectly normal baby. Madam Speaker, one is a clone. When one thinks about cloning, remember that Mother Nature or God, to whomever you want to subscribe it, has been cloning for a very long time. Now these early embryos can split either at the two-cell stage or at the inner cell mass stage or anywhere in between, presumably. We know at least at those two extremes because we can tell by how they present at birth when they split. If they share an amnion, they split at the two cell stage. If they have separate amnions, they probably split at the inner cell mass stage. So knowing that half of the cells could be taken away from an early embryo without harming the embryo, unless you think identical twins are somehow deficient, and I have talked with a number of identical twins, and I have not talked with any of them who thought they were less a person or deficient because half of the cells were taken away to produce the other identical twin. It occurred to me that you ought to be able to take cells from an early embryo without hurting the embryo to develop a stem cell line from that early embryo. I mentioned this to the researchers at NIH, and they said, yes, that is theoretically possible to do that. Just after that, I was at an event and the President was there and when I went through the line, I mentioned my visit at NIH and the response that they had given to my question. A few days later, I had a call from Carl Rove and the President had turned the pursuit of this suggestion over to Carl Rove. Carl told me that he talked to the people at NIH, and they tell me what you have suggested is not possible. Carl, I said either they are funning you or they misunderstand you, because these are the same people that can take a single cell and take the nucleus out of that cell and put another nucleus in it. That is what they did with Dolly the sheep and the large number of clones that have been produced since then. I said, of course, if they can take the nucleus out of a cell and put another nucleus in it, they can certainly take a cell or two out of what is a relatively big embryo. So he went back and asked them again and then called back and said they are still telling me they cannot do that. So a few days later, the President came out with his executive order. Madam Speaker, you may remember this was kind of a decision like Solomon might have made. Obviously, from the potential efficacy of embryonic stem cell research and medical applications, it is very desirable that we do that. On the other hand, if the only way to get embryonic stem cells is by destroying an embryo, then you are left with the quandary of, is it really acceptable to destroy one life with the hope that you are going to help another? So the President came to a decision that I think represented great wisdom. He recognized that a number of embryos had already been killed, destroyed to establish stem cell lines, and since you cannot turn back the hands of time to change that, these embryos were gone, the stem cell lines were there, and so the President, recognizing the potential for embryonic stem cell research, and being concerned that you should not take one life with the hope of helping another, wisely I think, said we could spend Federal dollars on any exploration we chose with the existing stem cells lines, and he thought there were about 60. There have never been 60, but he was told there were something like 60 stem cell lines, and Federal dollars could be used for research on those lines, but no Federal dollars could be used for developing or destroying any additional embryos for stem cell lines. This was about 4 years ago, and as we knew, the scientific community knew, as I knew because of my background, these stem cell lines would eventually run out. Stem cell lines, like people, age. For reasons that we may not understand, they do not last forever. Those stem cell lines, Madam Speaker, are running out. We now have, I think the accepted figure is 22 stem cell lines left, and all of these are contaminated with mouse feeder cells. This is the result of a technique which is used to facilitate the replication of these cells in the tissue culture, and they are now all contaminated with mouse feeder cells so that although they are perfectly good for research and a lot of research is being done, they are not good for medical application because you would not want to put the cells contaminated with mouse feeder cells in a human. So what now? One of the potential solutions to this problem is included in H.R. 810, the Castle-DeGette bill; and the argument made in this bill is that there are about 400,000 surplus embryos out there from in vitro fertilization. You see, to make sure that the doctor is going to have a good embryo or two or three to implant in a mother, because they do not all take, he will produce more embryos than he will probably need. Then he will look at them under the microscope and pick the strongest looking of those embryos and may put two or three or so in the mother. One of our Members, the Rohrabachers, are now the proud parents of triplets from in vitro fertilization. All of them grew and so they are now the proud parents of these very happy and healthy little babies. Since there are 400,000 surplus embryos out there that are frozen, the argument is, and this is the argument of the bill, that since these embryos, at least many of these embryos, realistically most of these embryos will ultimately be discarded, they will not stay frozen for 49 years there, they will not last forever, and by and by they will be discarded, and so the argument is, why should medicine not benefit from cells, from embryos that are going to be discarded anyhow? That to many people is a compelling argument. It was a compelling argument to a majority of people in the House, and now they are considering this bill in the Senate. But to those in the pro-life community, there is another way of looking at these embryos. I am at the microscope and there is an embryo under the microscope there. That embryo could become a snowflake baby. More than 100 times parents who do not have an ovum, cannot get pregnant any other way, have adopted these surplus embryos and we have more than 100 of what we call snowflake babies. The embryo that I am looking at under the microscope might be adopted and that could be any one of the 400,000 embryos, and it might be the next Albert Einstein. How could I destroy an embryo that might be adopted and might be the next Albert Einstein? So this is the argument on the other side, which is why the great debate over H.R. 810. As a result of a series of discussions with the White House and with a number of the interested groups, we have developed a bill which is called H.R. 3144, the Respect for Life Pluripotent Stem Cell Act of 2005. Madam Speaker, I will make this short bill a part of the Record.

Mr. BARTLETT

Mr. BARTLETT. Madam Speaker, the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey) has joined us. I would like to yield to him before I go through the history of how we got to this bill and the people we talked to and exactly what is in the bill. I thank the gentleman for joining us.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. 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 cannot 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 CO2 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.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. I yield to the gentleman from Georgia.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Madam Speaker, reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman very much for that contribution. While we are carrying on these discussions with the White House and NIH and HHS and with the outside groups, the President's Council on Bioethics submits a white paper; and in this white paper they go over four potential techniques that might produce pluripotent stem cells, which is another way of saying the equivalent of embryonic stem cells, without destroying or harming an embryo. And what our bill does, Madam Speaker, is simply ask NIH to please explore these potentials, first of all, in animal models; and the bill gives them $15 million to begin this exploration. I just wanted to spend just a moment talking about the four things that are in here because it may be of interest to a number of people. The first is called pluripotent stem cells derived from organismically dead embryos. Well, this says that all these embryos I had mentioned earlier, all these embryos will not live. And when an embryo is moribund, it is not going to divide anymore, then it is the equivalent of a brain dead person and there should be no problem taking cells from it like they would take organs from a brain dead person. One might have a little question about the vitality of the cell they take from that embryo, but at least ethically if the embryo is dead or moribund, the equivalent of a brain dead person, they could take an embryo from it. The second procedure, and the next chart shows a little clip from that, is one in which, down at the bottom here, it says ``a similar idea was proposed by Representative Roscoe Bartlett.'' This was my recommendation in 2001. And this simply says they go into an early embryo, as I have mentioned, and take out a cell without hurting the embryo because mother nature or God, whoever people think makes identical twins, has been doing this for a very long time. Our bill simply asks the NIH to do this in animal models to make sure that it is safe and efficacious. A third technique is called pluripotent stem cells derived from biological artifacts. This is an interesting one. And what the proposal there is that they take an ovum and they take the nucleus out of the ovum and then they take an altered nucleus out of a somatic cell. You alter the nucleus so that you have turned off some of the genes, and then you put that nucleus inside the egg. Now, why would you do that? Because in the cytoplasm of the egg outside the nucleus of the egg, there are some factors which turn on and turn off genes and kind of control what happens inside the nucleus. So now they have turned off some genes so this thing will divide; that will never be a baby because they have kind of messed up the genetics. Well, if they can never be a baby, then maybe ethically you can take stem cells from it, and this is something that really needs to be explored. These several techniques are all open for investigation. Oh, the fourth one of these is pluripotent stem cells by differentiation. I mentioned the differentiation of cells. That is when they decide that they are going to be just this or that, and all the cells they produce after that are just that kind of cell. Now, sometimes, you can take a cell and kind of put it in an environment where you have confused it, you have shocked it, you have done something to it, so it forgets what it was supposed to be, and it starts making cells, tissues that it would not ordinarily make in that stage of differentiation. So what our bill does is to permit the research, particularly on two of these, the nucleus transfer and the taking of cells from the early blastomere. Our bill has received input from the White House, from the Conference of Catholic Bishops, from Right the Life communities, so there is a broad spectrum of individuals and organizations out there that are supportive of what we are doing. In the few moments left, Madam Speaker, I would like to note that there have been a plethora of articles very recently about this, and I would like to submit these for the Record. They are not very long, and I will insert them into the Record. Here is National Geographic, July 2005. Stem cells, a big article, very good article on stem cells there. Here is a letter of May of this year from Dr. Battey who is the chief spokesman for stem cell research at the National Institutes of Health who is quite supportive of our bill and what we propose to do, and here is a very interesting op-ed piece written by Richard Doerflinger who represents the Catholic Bishops. By the way, I need to give credit where credit is due. It was Richard Doerflinger who made the great suggestion that the first thing you do with that cell you take from the early embryo is to create a repair kit so that all during the life of that person, they will have frozen the ability to produce a new liver if they need it, islets of Langerhans, spinal cord cells, whatever they need. There is a great op-ed piece by Richard Doerflinger who explains his support for our bill. He says, Representative Bartlett and his colleagues are helping to demonstrate what has always been true: science and ethics were meant to be allies, not enemies, and this is certainly true. Tuesday, July 12, Associated Press, Lawmakers Wary of Backup Stem Cell Bill. For those who would like to see just the Castle-DeGette bill passed, our bill, and the President, by the way, says that if that other bill gets to his desk, he will veto it. For those of us who believe that we really ought to research stem cells, we really look forward to a bill which the President can support. Stem Cell Legislation is At Risk, July 9, Washington Post. GOP Probes Nondestructive Cell Research, Washington AP, June 29. And then just today, in Congressional Quarterly, Congress Considers Numerous Stem Cell Bills. It mentions our bill in the House, and that Bill Frist is expected to draft a related bill in the Senate. I am very pleased, Madam Speaker, that my background has permitted me to understand some of the potential here, my experience with my grandmother, with these little diabetic kids, my profound pro-life commitment. I am very pleased that I was able to propose a potential solution that I think meets the morals and the demands of both sides of this issue. Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to insert the following articles: Department of Health and Human Services, Bethesda, Maryland, May 23, 2005. Hon. Roscoe G. Bartlett, House of Representatives, Washington, DC. Dear Mr. Bartlett: I am pleased that Drs. Allen Spiegel and Story Landis were able to meet with you, Mr. Otis and Mr. Aitken during your visit to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) last month to discuss ways to derive human embryonic stem cells (hESCs). Drs. Spiegel and Landis were serving as Acting Co-Chairs of the NIH Stem Cell Task Force during my leave of absence from this position. Earlier this month, I returned to chair the Task Force. NIH shares your enthusiasm on the therapeutic potentials of hESC research and thank you for your continued support of this field. Drs. Spiegel and Landis briefed me about your April 26th meeting. I am also aware that you have had previous meetings with NIH officials, including myself, Lana Skirboll and Richard Tasca, on this topic. You propose the possibility of using a cell (or two) removed from the 8-cell stage human embryo undergoing preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) to: (1) create a ``personal repair kit'' made up of cells removed from the embryo and stored for future use; and (2) for deriving human embryonic stem cell lines. You suggested that creating hESC lines in this manner would avoid ethical questions surrounding the fate of a human embryo. Live births resulting from embryos which undergo PGD and are subsequently implanted seem to suggest that this procedure does not harm the embryo, however, there are some reports that a percentage of embryos do not survive this procedure. In addition, long-term studies would be needed to determine whether this procedure produces subtle or later- developing injury to children born following PGD. Also, it is not known if the single cell removed from the 8-cell stage human embryo has the capacity to become an embryo if cultured in the appropriate environment. NIH is not aware of any published scientific data that has confirmed the establishment of hESC lines from a single cell removed from an 8-cell stage embryo. We are aware of the published research of Dr. Yury Verlinsky in the Reproductive Genetics Institute in Chicago that showed that a hESC line can be derived by culturing a human morula-staged embryo (Reproductive BioMedicine Online, 2004 Vo. 9, No. 6, 623-629, Verlinsky, Strelchenko, et al). It is also worth noting, however, that in these experiments, the entire morula was plated and used to derive the hESC lines. The human morula is generally composed of 10-30 cells and is the stage that immediately precedes the formation of the blastocyst. At the April 26th meeting, NIH agreed that such experiments might be pursued in animals, including non-human primates. That is, animal experiments could be conducted to determine whether it is possible to derive hESCs from a single cell of the 8-cell or morula stage embryo. To date, to the best of our knowledge no such derivations have been successful. NIH also does not know whether these experiments have been tried and failed in animals and/or humans and, therefore, have not been reported in the literature. NIH agreed to explore whether there have been any attempts to use single cells from the 8-cell or morula stage of an animal embryo to start embryonic stem cell lines by consulting with scientists that are currently conducting embryo research. From these discussions, these scientists believe it is worth attempting experiments using a single cell from an early stage embryo or cells from a morula of a non-human primate to establish an embryonic stem cell line. Of note, a recent 2003 paper from Canada shows that when single human blastomeres are cultured from early cleavage stage embryos, before the morula stage, that there is an increased incidence of chromosomal abnormalities. Even with hESCs derived from the inner cell mass of the human blastocyst, the odds of starting a hESC line from a single cell are long, perhaps one in 20 tries. Thus, the odds of being able to start with a single cell from an 8-celled or morula staged embryo are equally challenging. This would make it difficult to accomplish the goal of establishing ``repair kits'' and hESC lines from any single PGD embryo. (Fertil Steril, 2003 June, 79(6):1304-11, Bielanska, et al). It is possible, however, that improvements in technologies for deriving and culturing hESCs may improve these odds. NIH concludes that the possibility of establishing a stem cell line from an 8-cell or morula stage embryo can only be determined with additional research. NIH would welcome receiving an investigator-initiated grant application on this topic using animal embryos. The Human Embryo Research Ban would preclude the use of funds appropriated under the Labor/ HHS Appropriations Act for pursuing this research with human embryos. As with all grant applications, the proposal must be deemed meritorious for funding by peer review and then will be awarded research funds if sufficient funds are available. It also bears keeping in mind that it may take years to determine the answer. At the April 26th meeting, you had mentioned that twins can develop when the inner cell mass splits in the blastocyst and forms two embryos enclosed in a common trophoblast. You asked if cells from the inner cell mass could be safely removed without harming the embryo. In animal studies, it has been shown that the blastocyst can be pierced to remove cells of the inner cell mass and the embryo appears to retain its original form but it is not known whether the embryo will result in the birth of a healthy baby. Since this experiment in human embryos at either the morula or the blastocyst stage would require evaluations of not only normal birth but also unknown long term risks to the person even into adulthood, it would have to be considered a very high risk and ethically questionable endeavor. Because of the risk of harm, this research would also be ineligible for Federal funding. You had also asked NIH about the latest stage in development that an embryo can be artificially implanted into the womb. We know that infertility clinics transfer embryos at the blastocyst stage (approximately Day 5 in human embryo development) as well as at earlier stages. Finally, I am providing an additional resource that was discussed at the April meeting. I have enclosed a copy of a recently released white paper developed by the President's Council on Bioethics (PCB) on Alternative Sources of Human Pluripotent Stem Cells. In this white paper, the PCB raised many ethical, scientific and practical concerns about alternate sources for deriving human pluripotent stem cells without harming the embryo. Your proposal is specifically discussed in this report. I hope this information is helpful. Sincerely, James F. Battey, Jr., M.D., Ph.D., Chairman, NIH Stem Cell Task Force and Director, National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.

Mr. BARTLETT

Mr. BARTLETT. Mr. Speaker, what I want to spend a few moments talking about this evening is something that will be new to most Americans. They will not have heard about this subject. Indeed, nobody knew about this until 1962; that is, no one in this country knew about it. There was an experiment over Johnston Island out in the Pacific Ocean that was called Operation Starfish. It was part of a series of nuclear tests that were called the Fishbowl Series. This was a unique one. The others had all been at ground level or some little distance above the ground. This one was an extra-atmospheric, a detonation above the atmosphere. Nobody knew what was going to happen. It was the first time we had detonated a nuclear weapon in a test series above the atmosphere, and there were a number of ships and airplanes and radar, theater-like, that were tracking the missile that launched this nuclear bomb and noted its explosion. The explosion occurred about 400 kilometers above Johnston Island. That is well above the atmosphere. Now, the Soviets have had very extensive experience with this kind of testing. This was our first and, indeed, our only experience with this. So our knowledge about this phenomenon comes from this single test, what we have learned from the Soviets and now the Russians and the number of simulations that we have done since that time. There were no diagnostics to test the effects on Hawaii, which was about 800 miles away, because nobody expected there to be any effect there. Many of the instruments we were using for testing around Johnston Island were pegged; that is, they did not have enough capacity to register the effects that were produced by this extra-atmospheric explosion. What happened in Hawaii may be open to some controversy, but there were some lights that went out. This was largely electrical. In those days it was not all of the electronics that we have today. A number of lights went out, and in the last couple of years, some of the evidence of what happened to that equipment was shown to a commission that I will talk about in a little bit that was set up in 2001 to investigate this phenomenon, and they submitted their report in 2004. This phenomenon that we observed there that exceeded the capacity of the instruments at the test site, that went all the way, 800 miles away, to Hawaii, have been called electromagnetic pulse, EMP. We have learned since then that every extra-atmospheric explosion produces an EMP. You can develop a nuclear weapon, as we designed but as I understand never built and the Soviets both designed and have built, enhanced EMP weapons that limit the explosion but increased the electromagnetic effects. What are the implications of EMP and why are we talking about it tonight? EMP could be probably the most asymmetric weapon that any adversary could use against us. By asymmetric, we mean a weapon that has a relatively small impact in terms of its local effect but could have an enormous impact on our military or our society because of its effect. There are a number of asymmetric weapons. Terrorism is an asymmetric weapon. It does not cost them much money or take very big explosives, but it has a big effect on us. 9/11, of course, was a major asymmetric attack on us because those few people in those four airplanes have cost us billions and billions of dollars and totally changed our society. This is an example of an asymmetric attack. Most Americans will not know about electromagnetic pulse and what it could do to our military, to our society, but I will guarantee my colleagues, Mr. Speaker, that all of our potential enemies know everything about EMP. In a little bit, I will show you some quotes from countries that could be our enemy that will indicate that they know all about EMP. In 1999, I was sitting in a hotel room in Vienna, Austria. We were there near the end of the Kosovo conflict. There were eleven Members of Congress there, several staff members, three members of the Russian Duma and a personal representative, Slobodan Milosevic. We developed a framework agreement for ending the Kosovo conflict that was adopted 8 days later by the G-8. One of the Russians who was there was a very senior Russian. His name is Vladimir Lukin. He was the ambassador to this country at the end of Bush I and the beginning of Clinton. At that time he was chair of their equivalent of our Committee on International Relations, a very senior and very respected Russian. He is a little short fellow with short arms and stocky build. He sat in that hotel room in Vienna for 2 days with his arms folded across his chest, looking at the ceiling. He was very angry. He said at one point, You spit on us; now why should we help you? What he meant by that was that the United States, the Clinton administration at that time, had indicated to the Russians that they really were not needed to help resolve this conflict, that we were big boys and we would handle this on our own. It soon became obvious to the Clinton administration that the only country in the world that had the real confidence of the Serbs was Russia, and they were added to the G-7 to make the G-8, which 5 days after we came back resolved the Kosovo conflict with the framework agreement that we had developed there. The statement that Vladimir Lukin made was a startling statement. The chairman of our delegation was the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Weldon) who had been to Russia thirty-some times and he speaks some Russian and understands more. When Vladimir Lukin was speaking, he turned to me and said, Did you hear what he said? Yes, I heard what he said, but of course, I did not understand it; I just heard Russian words. When it was translated, this was what he said, and by the way, he did not need a translator. Vladimir Lukin speaks very good English, but when you are talking with these folks, they frequently will speak in their native tongue so it has to be translated and then translated back to them when we speak so that gives them twice as long to formulate their answer. So if you do not know both languages, you are at somewhat of a disadvantage in dialoguing with them because they have twice as long to formulate an answer. This was what surprised the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Weldon), and this is what he said: If we really wanted to hurt you, with no fear of retaliation, we would launch an SLBM. That's a submarine-launched ballistic missile. We would launch an SLBM. We would detonate a nuclear weapon high above your country, and we would shut down your power grid for 6 months or so. Now, he made the observation that without fear of retaliation, because you would not know for certain where it came from, particularly today. Factor in the Cold War with only two superpowers, we absolutely would have known where it came from, but today, how would you know? There are many countries out there who can get a tramp steamer and a Scud launcher and a crude nuclear weapon and that is all it would take to produce an EMP attack because a Scud launcher goes about 180 miles apogee, and that is plenty high. It would not cover all of the United States, of course. The third ranking Communist was there, a handsome, tall, blond fellow by the name of Alexander Shurbanov, and he smiled and said, if one weapon would not do it, we have some spares. I think at that time it was something like 7,000 spares that they had. This was a very startling remark, and what it said was that the detonation of a single, large, appropriately designed nuclear weapon above our country could shut down our power grid and shut down our communications, he said, for 6 months or so. If that were true, and there is increasing evidence, as I will indicate, from the report that this commission gave us that it is true, that would mean that you would be in a world, Mr. Speaker, where the only person you could talk to was the person next to you unless you happened to have a vacuum tube handset, then you could talk because they are about a million times less susceptible to EMP than our current microelectronic systems, and the only way you could go anywhere was to walk. Several years ago, we had a field hearing at Johns Hopkins University applied physics lab, and a Dr. Lowell Wood was there. I met Dr. Lowell Wood through Tom Clancy who lives on the eastern shore of Maryland and I know him. He has come to do several political events for me. I knew that he had done a book where EMP was a part of the scenario, and I knew he did very good research and he could tell me something about EMP. This was several years ago. I called Tom Clancy and I asked him, and he said, gee, if you read my book you know all about EMP that I know, but he said let me refer you to the smartest man hired by the U.S. government. He referred me to a Dr. Lowell Wood from Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California. We got his pager number. In those days it was pagers rather than cell phones that are so ubiquitous today, and I paged him, believing that he was in California. The pager signal went up to a satellite and back down, and he was in Washington, and within an hour, he was sitting in my office. Dr. Lowell Wood at this field hearing out at the applied physics lab out in Howard County made the observation that an EMP lay down would be the equivalent of a giant continental time machine that would move us back a century in technology. What this would mean, of course, is that we would have no more capability for moving around, for communicating to each other, for plowing our fields, for moving our equipment and our food around than we had 100 years ago. I said that, Dr. Wood, the population we have today, 285 million people and its distribution, largely in large cities and suburbia, could not be supported by the technology of a century ago. His unemotional response was, Yes, I know. The population will shrink until it can be supported by the technology. The point I am trying to make is this could be a devastating asymmetric weapon. It may not be known to most Americans. I suspect not one in 100 have heard of nuclear electromagnetic pulse, but I can assure Members that all of our potential enemies know a great deal about EMP. The first chart shows the effects of a single nuclear weapon. This one is detonated in the northwest corner of Iowa, and it blankets all of the United States. The colors here indicate the intensity of the pulse you get from that. The purple as you can see from the scale is 50 percent. So what this says is whatever the intensity was at ground zero, and we are several hundred miles above that, but the intensity at that level which is the red here in the center, will be half that out at the margins of our country. This little smile here and the distortion here is due to the magnetic field of the Earth that bends the electrons that I will describe in just a moment. What is this electromagnetic pulse? It is produced from strong gamma rays from the nuclear explosion which produce electrons that move at the speed of light. They move now to everything within line of sight. If you are about 3 or 400 miles high over the center of the country, Iowa or Nebraska, that will blanket all of the United States. If the voltage is high enough, it will disrupt or fry these microelectronics. Mr. Speaker, if you want to work on the inside of your computer, you need to be very careful that the static electricity that you produce just by rubbing your clothes together will not damage it. You need to put a little wrist band on and ground yourself. At factories where most of these computers are made, and it is almost all women that I have seen there, this is one area where women do it better than men, and they are grounded to the floor. They have a metal anklet on, and they are grounded to the floor because static from just their movement could damage these very sensitive, very tiny microelectronics. A little later I will show a chart that says the interview with some Russian generals have indicated that they have weapons that can produce 200 kilovolts per meter. They told us, and I cannot tell Members the exact voltage to which we have harkened, but I can say that the Russian generals told us they believe that this signal was several times higher than the voltage to which we had hardened. And even out at the periphery with 50 percent degradation, it was higher than we had hardened. By ``hardening'' I mean we have put some buffers in there that would intercept this pulse, like the surge protectors that we have for our computers which we have for lightning which will do no good for EMP because this pulse has such a rapid rise time measured in nanoseconds. This pulse will be through the surge protector before the protector sees it. If you are 200 kilovolts at ground zero, it is 100 out at the periphery, and that is probably enough to weld, to fry all of our microelectronics, which is why Vladimir Lukin said they would detonate a nuclear weapon high above our country, shut down our power grid and our communications for 6 months or so. From chart 2, I want to give some quotes from potential enemies to indicate that I am not letting the genie out of the bottle this evening. They know all about it. Not one in 50 Americans may know about EMP, but I want to assure Members our potential enemies know all about EMP. This first quote is the quote that I heard myself sitting in that hotel room in Vienna, Austria when Vladimir Lukin said they could shut down our power grid and our communications. That was May 2, 1999. There were 10 other Congressmen there and several staff members. Chinese military writings describe EMP as the key to victory and describe scenarios where EMP is used against U.S. aircraft carriers in a conflict over Taiwan. It is not like our potential enemies not only know about it. And they know that we know about it, so they feel free to put it in their public writings. A survey of worldwide military and scientific literature sponsored by the EMP commission was set up, and they functioned for 2 years. They submitted a report and they are now continuously briefing additional entities, different organizations and people. They found widespread knowledge about EMP and its potential military utility, including in Taiwan, Israel, Egypt, India, Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea. Iran has tested launching a scud missile from a surface vessel, a launch mode that could support a national or transnational terrorist EMP attack against the United States. By the way, we thought that launch was a failure because the device was detonated before it reached land. Now, that is exactly what you would do if you were rehearsing an EMP attack. By the way, there is no way that a nuclear weapon could do anywhere near as much damage against a sophisticated country like ours by dropping it on one of our cities as you could do to our country by detonating it at altitude. And you would not know it happened unless you were looking at it. We are totally immune to EMP. It will not hurt us or damage buildings. All it does is to knock out all of our microelectronics, which means all of our computers. For instance, your car has several computers. Indeed, if you have a new car, they cannot even work on it in a shop without hooking it up to a computer to tell what is wrong with the vehicle. So an EMP with a high enough pulse would fry the computers in the car. They would not run. If you happen to have an old car with a coil and a distributor, that is probably going to work. That is probably less susceptible to EMP. This chart shows additional quotes: ``If the world's industrial countries fail to devise effective ways to defend themselves against dangerous electronic assaults, they will disintegrate within a few years. 150,000 computers belong to the U.S. Army. If the enemy forces succeed in infiltrating the information network of the U.S. Army, then the whole organization would collapse. The American soldiers could not find food to eat nor would they be able to fire a single shot.'' This is from Iranian Journal, December 1998. ``Terrorist information warfare includes using the technology directed energy weapons or electromagnetic pulse.'' This is from Iranian Journal of March 2000. Terrorists have attempted to acquire non-nuclear radio frequency weapons. These are the weapons that would produce the directed energy effect. These produce a similar kind of pulse to EMP but does not have the broad spectrum. It only has part of the frequency involved. But if intense enough, if set up in this room, for instance, it could fry the computers in the cloak room which is not that far away. If it was set up in a van and went down Wall Street, if it were a really sophisticated device, it could take out all of the computers there, which would shut down our trading for quite a while if they were all taken down. Some people might think that things similar to a Pearl Harbor incident are unlikely to take place during the Information Age. And this is a writing from China. Yet it could be regarded as a Pearl Harbor incident of the 21st century, if a surprise attack is conducted against the enemy's crucial information systems of command, control, and communication by such means as EMP weapons. Even a superpower, China says, like the United States, which possesses nuclear missiles and powerful armed forces, cannot guarantee its immunity. In their words, an open society like the United States is extremely vulnerable to electronic attacks. This is May 14, 1996 from a Chinese journal. Iran has conducted tests with Shahab-3 missiles which have been described as failures. I mention that because they detonated it before it reached the ground. That is exactly what they would do if they were planning for an EMP attack. Iran Shahab-3 is a medium-range mobile missile that could be driven onto a freighter and transported to a point near the United States for an EMP attack. By the way, an EMP laydown is always an early event in Chinese and Russian war games because it is the most asymmetric attack that they could lodge against our country. Just a little bit of a time line here. Operation Starfish occurred in 1962. In 1995, there was a very interesting event that nearly started World War III. It has been written up in several books now. Most people never knew about it, but the Norwegians launched an atmospheric test rocket. They are fairly close to Russia, and they told the Russians that they were launching this rocket; but in the bureaucracy of Russia, that did not get communicated to the right people and when they launched it, it was interpreted as a first salvo from the United States. You do not have very long to respond if your enemy is about a half hour away in terms of these ballistic missiles. The Russians came very near to launching a major salvo of missiles with nuclear warheads on them against our country. This was a very narrow brush with destiny that tells us how important it is that we understand the potential of these weapons and how they could be misunderstood by an enemy. In 1997, I sat in a hearing here on Capitol Hill and General Marsh was there. He was the general in charge of the President's Commission on Critical Infrastructure. He was looking at the critical infrastructure of our country and its vulnerability to enemy attack. I asked him if he had looked at EMP. He said, yes, he did. Well? Well, the commission thought there was not a high probability there would be an EMP attack, so they had not considered it any further. My observation to that was, Gee, if you have not already, I am sure when you go home tonight you are going to cancel the fire insurance on your home because there is not a very high probability that your home will burn. When you have an event like a potential fire in your home or an EMP attack, which is a very high-impact, but low-probability, event, that is just the kind of an event that you purchase insurance to protect you from. It is unlikely to happen; but if it happened, it would be so devastating you would need insurance to cover that. Mr. Speaker, what we need is the equivalent in our country of the insurance policy that you bought on your home. We need to make an investment in the equivalent of an insurance policy so we will be able to anticipate if we can survive an EMP attack. In 2001, we had some very interesting tests at Aberdeen with a directed energy weapon that was put together. This was really interesting, because we asked these engineers to put together the kind of a weapon that terrorists might put together if they were buying equipment only from Radio Shack. So they went to places like Radio Shack and they bought the equipment and they put it together in this van that could go down the street and it was kind of camouflaged so it was not sure what it was and this directed energy weapon had the ability to take out microelectronic equipment at considerable distance from it. In 2001 because of my concerns about the potential for EMP, I had put in the authorization that year legislation that set up a commission to look at this eventuality. The next chart shows the commissioners that were on this. These are all very well known people. The first person that heads the list there is Dr. Johnny Foster who is the father of most of our modern nuclear weapons. He is the Edward Teller of today. Another one of our commission members, Dr. Lowell Wood that I have mentioned already, kind of inherited the mantle of Edward Teller. There were several other people. They had nine people altogether. Dr. Bill Graham who chaired it was the deputy chair of the emerging ballistic missile threat that was chaired by Donald Rumsfeld before he was the Secretary of Defense. Dr. Bill Graham has been the presidential science adviser. He has held a lot of very high posts. He is really very well known. Commissioner Richard Lawson was a USAF general, served on the Joint Chiefs of Staff and was Deputy Commander in Chief of the U.S.- European Command. The last member listed here, Dr. Joan Woodard, I had a very interesting experience with her. I did not remember the names of all the commission members and they had just been set up a little while and I went out to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to visit my son who works there in the laboratory. He brought home from the lab a little internal report that they were passing around that indicated to me that they might have some expertise at the lab there that would be useful in the work of the commission. And so I asked to have a briefing on it and, big surprise, Dr. Joan Woodard was one of the commissioners and she had been working for several months and had a number of her staff working with her and I had a 5-hour classified briefing on the potential effects of EMP not just on our military because they were spending most of their time on our national infrastructure. So we had this body of real experts that was working for 2 years. Ordinarily a commission works for 1 year. This one worked for 2 years and brought forth a big report. They are still writing, I think, the third volume of this report. They have now briefed the House, they have briefed the Senate, they are briefing a lot of key people. A lot more people are now knowing something about EMP and its potential effects. What I want to do now in the next four charts, and we will look at this next one now, I want to quote directly from the EMP commission report. This is the EMP commission report that was Public Law 106-398, title 14. This was the law that set up this commission and all of this is from their report. Over at the left of this chart, Mr. Speaker, you see the effects of an extra-atmospheric detonation above our country and the concentric circles there show the range that would be covered by detonations at different altitudes. You see you need to get up about 300 miles high, that is about 500 kilometers, before it covers all of the United States. These are direct quotes from the commission: EMP is one of a small number of threats--indeed, I do not know any other threat--EMP is one of a small number of threats that may, one, hold at risk the continued existence of today's U.S. civil society. We need to put that in everyday kitchen language, Mr. Speaker. What they are saying is that this would end life as we know it in the United States. Let me read it again in their carefully couched language: Hold at risk the continued existence of today's U.S. civil society. If, Mr. Speaker, this EMP attack really did what Vladimir Lukin said it would do and that is to shut down our power grid and our communications for 6 months or so, if the only person you could talk to is the person next to you and the only way you could go anywhere was to walk, I think it is very obvious that that would end life as we know it in this country. Hold at risk, they say, the continued existence of today's U.S. civil society. Also, it has the power to disrupt our military forces and our ability to project military power. That is because, Mr. Speaker, for the last decade, more than the last decade, we have been waiving EMP hardening on almost all of our weapons systems. You see, when we had so little money to buy weapons, particularly during the Clinton years when they called it a build-down, I called it a teardown of the military, we could get a few more percent weapons systems that cost somewhere between 1 percent and 10 percent to harden, so you could get 1 percent to 10 percent more weapons systems if you did not harden, and so they just ran a calculated risk that we would not need the hardening. But, Mr. Speaker, the time when we are really going to need these weapons is when we are at war against a peer, and there will be a peer, a resurgent Russia or a China of the future and the first thing they are going to do, they say so in their writings, they say so in their war games, the first thing they are going to do is an EMP laydown which will then deny us the use of all of our military equipment which is not hardened. I am not sure why we are building it, we do not need it, to defeat countries like Iraq. We will really need it to defeat a peer and if it is not hardened, then it will not be available to us. The number of U.S. adversaries capable of EMP attack is greater than during the Cold War. Yes, that is true. There was one then, the Soviet Union. Now there are a whole bunch. Let us try Iran if it gets a weapon, North Korea, India, Pakistan, a number of countries that are today our friends, England and France and Israel and the list goes on. Quotes again from the commission, not my quotes. Potential adversaries are aware of the EMP's strategic attack option, obviously from what Vladimir Lukin said and you can glean that from their writings. The threat is not adequately addressed in U.S. national and homeland security programs, and that is a gross understatement. It is not only not adequately addressed, it is hardly addressed at all. The second chart is again quotes from the EMP commission and we have redacted some names here. I am not sure the Russian generals would want the world to know who they were, but these are the two Russian generals that I mentioned. They claim that Russia has designed a super EMP nuclear weapon capable of generating 200 kilovolts per meter. I cannot tell you what we hardened to, but I can tell you that the Russian generals believe that this is several times the level to which we have hardened. Chinese, Russian, Pakistani scientists are working in North Korea and could enable that country to develop an EMP weapon in the near future. This is not my statement, Mr. Speaker. This is a direct quote from the EMP commission. The next chart shows additional quotes from the EMP commission. States or terrorists may well calculate that using a nuclear weapon for EMP attack offers the greatest utility. Indeed, if they had a single weapon, taking out Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia, Washington would have nowhere near the effect on our society as simply taking out all of our computers. EMP offers a bigger bang for the buck against U.S. military forces in a regional conflict or a means of damaging the U.S. homeland. Again, these are not my words. These are quotes from the EMP commission. This is a really interesting one. EMP may be less provocative of U.S. massive retaliation compared to a nuclear attack on a U.S. city that inflicts many prompt casualties. Even, Mr. Speaker, if we knew where it came from, if all they have done is take out our computers, are we justified in incinerating their grandmothers and their babies? Maybe we should respond in kind and take out all the computers in North Korea. I doubt that very few people in North Korea would care that we took out all their computers. This, Mr. Speaker, is really a very asymmetric attack because if we responded in kind, there are none of our enemies that are anywhere near as vulnerable as we are and some of them could hardly care less if we took out their computers and the few that the military has could easily be hardened if they were anticipating that they might need them hardened. Strategically and politically, an EMP attack can threaten entire regional or national infrastructures that are vital to U.S. military strength and societal survival, challenge the integrity of allied regional coalitions, and pose an asymmetrical threat more dangerous to the high-tech West than to rogue states. Indeed, if we responded in kind, it would really be an asymmetric attack, because they would be little affected by taking out their computers since they little depend on their computers. Technically and operationally, EMP attacks can compensate for deficiencies in missile accuracy, fusing, range, reentry. Suppose they are really lousy in the kind of missiles they have, their aim is very poor. If they missed the target by 100 miles, Mr. Speaker, it really does not matter. One hundred miles is as pretty much as good as a dead hit because 100 miles away really will not make that much difference in the very large areas that are covered by this EMP attack. Terrorists could steal, purchase or be provided a nuclear weapon for an EMP attack against the United States simply by launching a primitive Scud missile off a freighter near our shores. We would have, Mr. Speaker, 3 or 4 minutes' notice. Scud missiles can be purchased on the world market today for less than $100,000. Al Qaeda is estimated to own about 80 freighters. So what they need is $100,000 to buy a Scud missile and a crude nuclear weapon that who knows where they might get that. Maybe some Russian scientist who has not been paid for 4 or 5 years. Certain types of low-yield weapons can generate potentially catastrophic EMP effects. These are the enhanced EMP weapons that the Soviets, the Russians, have developed. Mr. Speaker, we have every reason to believe that these secrets are now held by China. There is no reason to entertain the thought that they do not have these secrets. And if China has them, who else has them? I think the safest thing to assume is that any potential enemy has them. The last chart from the commission shows a very interesting little schematic on the right which shows the interrelationships of our very complex infrastructure. This was commented on a number of years ago by a scientist at Cal Tech who held a series of seminars called The Next 100 Years. He was theorizing, could we indeed recover from something, he did not know about EMP, so he was talking about a nuclear war, because he noted that we had developed a very interconnected, complicated infrastructure where one part depended on another part and we developed that from a base of high quality, readily available raw materials, oil that almost oozed out of the ground at Oil City, Pennsylvania, coal that was exposed by a heavy rain when the dirt was washed off, iron ore in the central part of our country that was such high quality that you could almost smelt it in a backyard smelter. Indeed, there is one of those, you can drive up and see it just south of Thurmont on Route 15. It is called Catoctin Furnace and they denuded the hills up there to produce coke to make iron there. You see here a very interrelated infrastructure. The point they are making is that if one part of that comes down, suppose you do not have electric power, they have not drawn all the arrows they should have drawn because you are not going to have oil or gas, you are not going to have communications, you are not going to have water, you are not going to have banking or finance, you are not going to have government services, you are not going to have emergency services, you are not going to have transportation without electricity. So if you take down just that one thing, everything comes down. Of course, if you do not have any banking services, pretty soon everything will grind to a halt because they will not have the finances to keep the thing going. One or a few high altitude nuclear detonations can produce EMPs simultaneously over wide geographic areas. Again, I am quoting from the commission. Unprecedented catastrophic failure of our electronics- dependent infrastructure could result. I think that you should almost put the verb in there, Mr. Speaker, would result. You may have noted in the paper just today, I think, or yesterday, there was an account that we almost had another big blackout, just almost tripped that big blackout and there is no catastrophic insult like an EMP laydown to cause that. Power, energy, transport, telecom and financial systems are particularly vulnerable and interdependent. We just talked about that, very vulnerable, lots of computers, very interdependent. One goes down and they all come down. EMP disruption of these sectors could cause large scale infrastructure failures for all aspects of the Nation's life. Both civilian and military capabilities depend on these infrastructures. Without adequate protection, recovery could be prolonged months to years. What would happen if that was prolonged months to years? Increased dependence on advanced electronic systems results in the potential for an increased EMP vulnerability of our technologically advanced forces, making EMP probably the most attractive asymmetric weapon. EMP threatens the ability of the United States and Western nations to project influence and military power. We could be easily blackmailed by a country that has the ability to produce an EMP laydown if we are not prepared to protect ourselves from it. Degradation of the infrastructures could have irreversible effects on the country's ability to support its population, and this one brief three-word sentence, ``millions could die.'' That is what Dr. Lowell Wood said when I asked him how could the technology of a century ago support our present population and its distribution. And his unemotional answer was, ``Yes, I know. The population will shrink until it can be supported by the technology.'' That shrink could easily, easily, Mr. Speaker, be in the millions or hundreds of millions of people. There are two other charts that I want to show the Members, and this is what other people are saying. This is from an op-ed piece by Senator John Kyl, and I am delighted that Senator Kyl is helping with spreading the word about this and the caution that we really need to be doing something. This was in The Washington Post, and he says: ``Last week the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security, which I chair,'' this was John Kyl, ``held a hearing on a major threat to the United States not only from terrorists but from rogue nations like North Korea. An electromagnetic pulse, EMP, attack is one of only a few ways that America could be essentially defeated by our enemies, terrorists or otherwise. Few if any people would die right away, but the long-term loss of electricity would essentially bring our society to a halt. Few can conceive of the possibility that terrorists could bring American society to its knees by knocking out our power supply from several miles in the atmosphere, but this time we have been warned and we better be prepared.'' And this is his comment. Another comment here, and this is from the Washington Times and just a couple of brief paragraphs here. This is from Major Franz Gayl: ``The impact of EMP is asymmetric in relation to our adversaries. The less developed societies of North Korea, Iran, and other potential EMP attack perpetrators are less electronically dependent and less specialized while more capable of continued functionality in the absence of modern convenience.'' That is an easy way to say they are not dependent upon computers like we are and we would suffer a whole lot more than them. And then in the next paragraph he pointed out that because of our enormous complexity, how technologically developed we are, that our great strength has become potentially our great weakness when we are talking about EMP. Now, Mr. Speaker, I would like to close with some observations. Again, from the commission's report, the EMP threat is one of a few potentially catastrophic threats to the United States. By taking action, the EMP threat can be reduced to manageable levels. I would like to say, Mr. Speaker, that the EMP Commission report is really a good-news story. One would not think it was good news pointing out how very vulnerable we are, but the good news is that we now know how vulnerable we are, and we know that this is fixable; and it is fixable for far, far less cost than the Iraq war. We just need, Mr. Speaker, to do it. It is not going to happen overnight. It is going to happen quicker in our military than in our private sector because we turn over our weapons programs quicker than we turn over our big transformers and our power grid and so forth. But we can little by little, year by year, fix our national infrastructure and fix our military so that we are not as vulnerable. Mr. Speaker, being vulnerable like this, and I pointed out comments from the writings of a number of our potential enemies, it is not that they do not know this. Not one person in 50 in the United States will know it, but it is very obvious that all of our potential enemies know about this. Our very vulnerability invites that attack. Because we are so vulnerable, because it is so asymmetric, we invite that attack. Mr. Speaker, we need to do everything we can to lessen the probability of attack. And the longer we go unprotected from EMP, the more we invite this attack and the more vulnerable we are. U.S. strategy to address the EMP threat should balance prevention, preparation, protection, and recovery. We have been talking primarily, Mr. Speaker, about prevention, about hardening, so that those pulses will not get through so that it will not fry the equipment and our infrastructure can keep working. There are a number of things we need to do in preparation. One of the things we need to do is to have the equivalent of the old civil defense. In our homeland security we really are not looking at civil defense. Those who are my age and maybe a little younger but mostly my age can very well remember all those fallout shelters, and the young people may have noticed some of those rusting signs and wondered what they were because there were fall-out shelters almost everywhere a generation ago. In the 1950s, IBM was lending their employees money interest-free to build backyard shelters. We were expecting the potential of a bolt out of the blue, that nuclear weapons would be rained down on us. And there were brochures put out by the government telling us how to build a fall-out shelter, what to put in the fall-out shelter, what we needed to buy. EMP is not going to be anywhere near as hard to protect ourselves against as a nuclear explosion and all that fall-out. But to the extent that each of us and our families and our communities are prepared for this, our country is going to be enormously stronger should this happen to us. And, Mr. Speaker, whether one is preparing for an EMP attack or for a terrorist attack or anything that disrupts our usual economy, we have about 3 days' supply of food in any one of our big cities. If the trucks do not keep coming, the supermarket may be open 24 hours a day, but when we are in there, Mr. Speaker, we are going to see that as we are taking it off the shelf, they are stocking the shelves. This goes on continually because there are only about 3 days of food. What would happen if our trucks could not run? What would our cities do after those 3 days after the food was gone? It is very easy, Mr. Speaker, to stock far more than 3 days of food in one's house. A number of years ago, there was a very well-known economist by the name of Howard Ruff. He had made some predictions about the stock market that made him kind of an icon in his day, and people would come to him for advice. And a very interesting story, when they came with their money and said, How should we invest our money Mr. Ruff, he would say, Do you have a year's supply of food for your family? They would say, No. He would say, If you do not have a year's supply of food for your family, you do not have any money to invest. The first thing you need to do is buy a year's supply of food for your family, and then come back and we will talk about how to invest the rest of your money because that is the best investment that you need to make. They would come back, and he would say, You have a year's supply of food? Yes, sir. Well, he said, do you have a bag of silver? A bag of silver is a bag of junk silver and one may do something else but they need the equivalent of this. That is junk silver. It is silver that has no numanistic value, and it is in bags that are sealed and they have a $1,000 face value. He said, Unless you have a bag of silver for each member of your family, you have not made the second most important investment you could make; so go buy that and come back and we will talk about what to do with the rest your money. These are the kinds of things that Americans need to be thinking about. What can they do, Mr. Speaker, what can their family do, what can their church group do so that they are not going to be a liability on the society should there be a terrorist attack that shuts down these services or should there be a national EMP attack that shuts them down all over our country? We can do something, Mr. Speaker, to prepare ourselves so that we are going to have some sense that we can make it through so that we are not going to be a liability on the system. Let me show the last chart here now in our conclusion. The fiscal year 2006 defense authorization bill contains a provision that extends the EMP Commission's life to ensure that their recommendations will be implemented. We want them watching to see what we are doing. We want them to tell us and to tell the public. We are a representative government here; and when our people call in and say, Are you doing this, are you doing that, my wife points out that if we do not represent our constituents, we will not represent our constituents. So if the people across our country demand that we be prepared, that we tell them how to be prepared themselves, then we will do this. The terrorists are looking for vulnerabilities to attack, and our civilian infrastructure is particularly susceptible to this kind of an attack. Our very vulnerability invites this attack. Mr. Speaker, we obviously cannot do it yesterday. We certainty need to do it today and tomorrow to begin to protect ourselves against it. The Department of Homeland Security needs to identify critical infrastructures. What are the first things, Mr. Speaker, that we need to turn our attention to? Where would a minimal investment pay the biggest dividends? And we need to have people studying this. The EMP Commission has made a lot of very good suggestions. If we simply followed those suggestions, we would be a long way to where we need to be. The Department of Homeland Security also needs to develop a plan to help citizens deal with such an attack should it occur, and then the little note that our citizens need to become as self-sufficient as possible. Mr. Speaker, we have spent the better part of an hour talking about something that one might expect to see in a science fiction movie or in some magazine that is talking about the improbable. But what we are talking about here is a very possible, and I think probable, event. It is something that the American people have not been very much aware of. We hope that this awareness, as the EMP Commission continues its work, will be more widespread. We hope that the American people will respond by doing two things: one, demanding that their government, that their Representative make the right kinds of choices and appropriate the right kinds of moneys to start on the path to developing a military that is immune to EMP attacks and to, as quickly as possible, develop a national infrastructure that will not collapse like a house of cards with an EMP attack. And, also, I believe that our citizens will demand that we tell them what they can do. There is an interesting phenomenon, Mr. Speaker. If in anticipation of a hurricane this fall, one goes to the grocery store now and stocks up on some things that they need, they are going to be a patriot because they are improving the economy. If they wait until the hurricane is on its way and then they go to the store to stock up on what they need, they are no longer a patriot. They are now a hoarder. So exactly the same act is really a very good act or a very bad act depending upon when they do it. If they buy it in long anticipation of the event, they are now a real patriot. They are providing some assurance that they will not be a liability and they are helping the economy. If they wait until the threat is at their door and they now buy it, now they are a hoarder and nobody wants a hoarder. So our homeland security needs to help us to know what we need to do so that we will be as self-sufficient as possible, an asset and not a liability. Mr. Speaker, there is an old saying that to be forewarned is to be forearmed. I know that probably not even one in 50 Americans has ever heard of EMP, but I will assure the Members that all of our potential enemies know all about EMP. We see it in their writings. We see it in their war games. And what we need to do, Mr. Speaker, is to proceed as rapidly as we can to develop a military that is immune to EMP, to develop an infrastructure that as quickly as possible will be less and less damaged by EMP, and to provide each American citizen with the information they need so that they, their family, their social club, their church, as individuals, as families, as groups, can plan so that they will be as self-sufficient as possible in whatever emergency occurs. And who knows what the terrorists might do to us. This is clearly the most devastating, the most asymmetric attack that could be made on our country; but there could be lesser ones that could for one's family, one's locality be just as devastating as an EMP attack. Mr. Speaker, I know the American people will respond and know when our enemies see us responding that the risk of this kind of attack will be immensurably lessened because the less vulnerable we are, the less likely they are to attack.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, the subject that I want to spend a few moments talking about this afternoon really began for our country in 1962. We were still testing nuclear weapons then, and for the first time the United States tested a weapon above the atmosphere. This weapon was detonated over Johnston Island in the Pacific. This was a part of a series of tests called the Fishbowl Series, and this was Operation Starfish in 1962. We had no prior experience with the detonation of a weapon above the atmosphere. We prepared for this test with airplanes and ships using radar and theodelites and instrumentation to measure the effects on the ground from a blast that was some 400 kilometers in altitude. In conversations just today with Dr. Lowell Wood from Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, I learned more of the details of the results of that test. They had not anticipated the magnitude of the effects at the ground under the blast; so many of their instruments simply pegged and they were not able to get a clear indication of the effects. I might note that the Soviets had extensive testing experience with EMP over their own territory. They had a much larger territory than we and some of it quite remote; so they were able to instrument more extensively and had a lot more experience than we have had. This was our first and only experience with a superatmospheric detonation of a nuclear weapon. The effects over Hawaii, which was about 800 miles away, included several totally unexpected things; so there was no instrumentation on Hawaii to record the effects. So all they can divine from the effects is what happened. Some street lights went out, and analysis after the fact indicated that these were the street lights that were oriented so that there was a very long line effect. In other words, the wires feeding the street lights constituted a very long antenna which received the signals from the detonation in space such that there was arcing and some of the street lights went out. This was investigated, and some of the failures were retained and were shown to a commission that I will talk about in a few minutes, Mr. Speaker, that spent 2 years studying these effects and the risk to our military and to our country. There were other effects in communications and so forth. As I said, none of this was expected; so there was no instrumentation. We have since tried to determine the effects of what is called electromagnetic pulse produced by a nuclear detonation. We have done that with laboratory devices, some of them quite large that could expose a whole airplane, but none of them obviously large enough to include miles and miles of long-line effect. The EMP pulse at that distance was estimated to be about five kilovolts per meter. We will have occasion in a little bit to talk about that in light of present capabilities. Because there was intense activity above the atmosphere, the Van Allen belts were pumped up; so there were a number of low Earth orbit satellites that decayed very rapidly as they passed through the Van Allen belts. Mr. Speaker, I want to kind of put what we are going to say in context. So I want to indicate here some of the seriousness of EMP and its implications. In 1999, I sat in a hotel room in Vienna, Austria. I was there with 10 other Members of Congress and several staff members. We had there three members of the Russian Duma and a representative of Slobodan Milosevic. This was just prior to the resolution of the Kosovo conflict. We developed with them a framework agreement that was adopted about 5 days later by the G-8, which the Members may remember ended the Kosovo conflict. One of the members of the Russian Duma was Vladimir Lukin, who was well known to this country because he was the ambassador here at the end of Bush I and the beginning of the Clinton administration. At that time he was a very senior member of the Russian Duma. He was very angry and sat for 2 days in that hotel room with his arms crossed looking at the ceiling. We had not early asked the Russians for help and they felt offended about that, and the statement he made expressing that sentiment was that ``you spit on us. Now why should we help you?'' And then he made a statement that stunned us. The leader of that delegation was the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Weldon), who speaks and understands some Russian. And when Vladimir Lukin was speaking, he turned to me and he said, ``Did you hear what he said?'' Of course I heard what he said, but I did not understand it because I do not understand Russian. But then it was translated, and this is what he said: ``If we really wanted to hurt you with no fear of retaliation, we would launch an SLBM,'' which if it was launched in a submarine at sea, we really would not know for certain where it came from. ``We would launch an SLBM, we would detonate a nuclear weapon high above your country, and we would shut down your power grid and your communications for 6 months or so.'' The third-ranking communist was there in the country. His name is Alexander Shurbanov, and he smiled and said, ``And if one weapon would not do it, we have some spares.'' I think the number of those spares now is something like 6,000 weapons. This likely consequence of a high-altitude nuclear burst was corroborated by Dr. Lowell Wood, who in a field hearing at the Johns Hopkins University applied physics laboratory, made the observation that a burst like this above our atmosphere creating this electromagnetic pulse would be like a giant continental time machine turning us back to the technology of 100 years ago. It is very obvious that the population of today in its distribution could not be supported by the technology of 100 years ago. And I asked Dr. Wood, I said, ``Dr. Wood, clearly the technology of 100 years ago could not support our present population in its distribution,'' and his unemotional response was, ``Yes, I know. The population will shrink until it can be supported by the technology.'' Just a word, Mr. Speaker, about what this EMP is. It is very much like a really giant solar storm. All of us are familiar with solar storms and with the disruption to our communication systems. And this is like a really giant solar storm. It is kind of like really intense static electricity everywhere all at once, all over the whole country. It is sort of like a lightning strike that is not just isolated to one spot. Different than a lightning strike in terms of the intensities and so forth and the spectrum, but it would be everywhere all at once over a very large area. I have here in front of me the report, and I will have occasion to refer to that again a little later, the report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack. This is the executive summary. The report itself is very thick and there is a big classified addendum to the big report. And I just want to turn to one page here, and this is page 4, and it says: ``What is significant about an EMP attack is that one or a few high-altitude nuclear detonations can produce EMP effects that can potentially disrupt or damage electronic and electrical systems over much of the United States virtually simultaneously at a time determined by an adversary.'' I talked a little bit about what EMP is. It produces a large number of Compton electrons above our atmosphere which are trapped by the magnetic fields around the Earth. They move at the speed of light. The prompt effects are such that if the voltage is high enough, all electronic equipment within line of sight is damaged or destroyed. These are called prompt effects. And, of course, satellites are very soft because it costs about $10,000 a pound to launch a satellite; so they do not launch a lot of hardening on the satellite if they do not need to. So all of the satellites within line of sight would be taken out by prompt effects. It would not go so high, by the way, as the satellites that are 22,500 miles above the Earth. And it would pump up the Van Allen belts so that satellites that were not in line of sight would die very quickly and one could not reconstitute the satellite network by launching new ones because they also would die quickly. Let me show a chart here that shows the effects of this bomb exploding over the United States, and this shows a single weapon. This shows a single weapon detonated at the northwest corner of Iowa, and it shows it at about 600 kilometers high, and this would blanket all of the United States. And the concentric circles here, not true circles because there is a little distortion of the electrical fields by the magnetic waves around the Earth, but these represent the intensity of the field that is produced by this. At the center we can see it is 100 percent. But even out at the margins of our country, it is down to 50 percent. Now, a little later I will show a statement from some Russian generals that were reviewed by the people who put together this report, and they said that the Russians had developed weapons that produced 200 kilovolts per meter. Remember, the effects in Hawaii were judged to be the result of five kilovolts per meter. So this is a force about 200 times higher. The Russian generals said that they believed that to be several times higher than the hardening that we had provided for our military platforms that they could resist EMP. Others know about EMP. I did not want anybody to believe that we were letting the genie out of the bottle and others did not know about that. I mentioned earlier the statement by Vladimir Lukin, the Russian member of their Duma, and this is the statement that I referred to here, and that was in May 2, 1999: ``Chinese military writings described EMP as the key to victory and described scenarios where EMP is used against U.S. aircraft carriers in the conflict over Taiwan.'' So it is not like our potential enemies do not know that this exists. The Soviets had very wide experience with this, and there is a lot of information in the public domain relative to this. ``A survey of worldwide military and scientific literature sponsored by the commission,'' that is the commission that wrote this report, ``found widespread knowledge about EMP and its potential military utility including in Taiwan, Israel, Egypt, India, Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea. Terrorist information warfare includes using the technology of directed energy weapons. These are little weapons that produce an EMP- like effect, but over a very much more restricted area, and also electromagnetic pulse produced from nuclear weapons. By the way, an enemy no more sophisticated than Saddam Hussein would need no more than a tramp steamer, a Scud missile and a crude nuclear weapon like is probably available in North Korea or might be bought or stolen from some Russian source. That would not shut down the whole United States, because the Scud missile could not carry it high enough, but it would certainly shut down the whole Northeast. By the way, this is not like the Northeast blackout that we had a couple of years ago. This would produce damage that you would not recover from simply by turning a switch. It would probably destroy large transformers. These very large transformers are made to order, and if you need one, they will build you one, not in this country, we do not build the big ones anymore, they will build you one over in Europe or Scandinavia, and it will take maybe a year-and-a-half to 2 years to get it. So it is not like you are going to recover from this tomorrow. Iran has tested launching of a Scud missile from a surface vessel, a launch mode that could support a national or transnational EMP attack against the United States. We have a second chart which shows more of the evidence that potential enemies out there know that this is a potential weapon. ``If the world's industrial countries fail to devise effective ways to defend themselves against dangerous electronic assaults, then they will disintegrate within a few years. 150,000 computers belong to the U.S. Army. If the enemy forces succeed in infiltrating the information network of the U.S. Army, then the whole organization would collapse, the American soldiers could not find food to eat, nor would they be able to fire a single shot.'' I kind of think they would be able to find food to eat. This is from an Iranian journal, so you know they know about this and they are thinking about this. ``Terrorist information warfare includes using the technology of directed energy weapons, magnetic pulse.'' I referred to that earlier. Iran has conducted tests with its Shahab-3 missile that have been described as failures by the Western media because the missiles did not complete their ballistic trajectories, but were deliberately exploded at high altitude. This, of course, would be exactly what you would want to do if you were going to use an EMP weapon. Today we are very much concerned, Mr. Speaker, about asymmetric weapons. We are a big, powerful country. Nobody can contend with us shoulder-to-shoulder, face-to-face. So all of our potential adversaries are looking for what we refer to as asymmetric weapons. That is a weapon that overcomes our superior capabilities. There is no asymmetric weapon that has anywhere near the potential of EMP. Iran described these tests as successful. We said they were a failure because they blew up in flight. They described them as successful. Of course, they would be, if Iran's intent was practicing for an EMP attack. Iran's Shahab-3 is a medium-range mobile missile that could be driven on to a freighter and transported to a point near the United States for an EMP attack. I might state that an early use of EMP is a common occurrence in Russia and Chinese war games. I just would like to spend a moment or two talking about kind of the history of how we got here and why the big concern about EMP and the risk that it poses to us. I mentioned Operation Starfish in 1962. Then we really had a scary event which we did not know about for quite some time that happened in 1995 when there was a Norwegian weather rocket that was set off. The Norwegians had told the Russians that they were going to fire this weapon, but that did not get to the proper level. When the weapon was fired, it was interpreted by the Russians as a potential first strike of the United States against them and they had alerted their nuclear missile response. They came very close to launching that, and we did not know about that until some time after. In 1997 I had a very interesting experience. I am on the Committee on Armed Services. This was during the Clinton administration, and he had set up a Commission on Critical Infrastructure. General Marsh, retired, was chairing that Commission on Critical Infrastructure. This was infrastructure that was so critical that if an enemy could take it out, we would be very much disadvantaged by it. I asked him about EMP, had they looked at that? His answer was, yes, they looked at it. Well? He said, well, we did not think there was a high probability that would happen, so we did not continue to look at it anymore. I told him, gee, with that attitude, if you have not already, I am sure when you go home tonight you are going to cancel the fire insurance on your home. What one needs when there is the potential for a very high-impact, low-probability event, is what we call insurance. I think that every American citizen has the right to ask their government, have you made the proper insurance investment to protect me, to protect my country, in the event, which we hope is not a high probability, in the event that there is an EMP attack against our country? Your home burning, by the way, is not a high probability event. You may have a $300,000 home and it may cost you $300 for fire insurance for the year. So you can do the simple arithmetic that tells you the insurance company does not expect very many homes to burn that year. Then the next event in this little timeline was my trip to Vienna, Austria, when I met there in that hotel room with Members of the Russian Duma. In 2001 we had some tests at Aberdeen with a device that was made using only the equipment that a terrorist might buy from Radio Shack or a place like that to see if you could put together a directed energy weapon, a weapon, by the way, that if sophisticated enough one might drive down Wall Street and take out all the computers in the financial market. It would not go further than that, but if it did that, that would, of course, be an enormous blow. In 2001, the Commission was set up and then in 2004, last year, we have the report of the Commission. I just would like to show you a chart now of the commissioners. We will not have time to talk about the capabilities of all of these commissioners, but I will assure you that these are all giants in their area. They were appointed from among the foremost scientists, experts and military officers in the United States to achieve a mix of talent on scientific aspects of EMP, nuclear weapon design, military implications of EMP and the effects of EMP on civilian and military infrastructures. Dr. William Graham, the Commission chairman, was science advisor to President Reagan. He ran NASA and was one of the first scientists to study the EMP phenomenon when it was first discovered by its United States in 1962. Commissioner John Foster, Johnny Foster, who designed most of the nuclear weapons in the inventory the United States today, was a director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and for decades has been a close adviser to the Department of Defense on nuclear matters. Dr. Lowell Wood is a member of the director's staff at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where he inherited the scientific mantel of Dr. Edward Teller, the inventor of the hydrogen bomb. I had a very interesting personal experience related to Dr. Lowell Wood. When I became interested a number of years ago in EMP and the potential implications, I knew that Tom Clancy, who lives in Maryland and he has come to do several events for me, I knew that he had a novel in which EMP was one of the sequences in his novel. I know that Tom Clancy does very good research. So I called to ask him about EMP and its implications. He said that if I had read his book, I probably knew as much about EMP as he knew, but he was going to refer me to what he said was in his view was the smartest person hired by the U.S. Government, and that was Dr. Lowell Wood. So Dr. Lowell Wood comes with great recommendations. Commissioner Richard Lawson was a USAF general, served on the Joint Chiefs of Staff and was Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the U.S.-European Command. Dr. Joan Woodard, I had a very interesting experience with Dr. Woodard. I was visiting my son and daughter and children out in Albuquerque, he works at the Sandia Labs, and he brought home a little note talking about a seminar they were having which was exploring some issues that I thought would be relevant to the work that the Commission was doing. I did not know at that time that she was a member of the Commission. So I asked for a briefing, and I spent 5 hours in a classified briefing at Sandia Labs. And it was not just Dr. Joan Woodard, it was a large number of people at the labs there that were focusing primarily on the national infrastructure consequences of this. What I would like to do now is go through some of the statements and recommendations of the report. The next chart shows the threat and the nature and magnitude of EMP threats within the next 15 years. On the right you see the coverage that is produced by weapons detonated at various altitudes. I mentioned 600 kilometers. Actually 500 kilometers pretty much covers the margins of our country and, of course, the lower the altitude you detonate it, the less area that it covers, but the higher will be the intensity of the pulse that is produced. This is a direct quote from the EMP Commission report: ``EMP is one of a small number of threats that may hold at risk the continued existence of today's U.S. civil society.'' Now, that is couched in the careful kind of scientific terms, but what that really means is that a really robust EMP laydown, which, as Vladimir Lukin in that hotel room in Vienna, Austria said, would shut down our power grid and communications for 6 months or so. And if one weapon would not do it, as Alexander Shaponov said, four absolutely would do it, particularly with the power of the weapons that the Russian generals say that they have developed. What this would do is to produce a society in which the only person you could talk to was the person next to you, unless you happened to be a ham operator with a vacuum tube set, which, by the way, is 1 million times less susceptible to EMP than your present equipment that the hams use. And the only way you could get anywhere was to walk, because, you see, if the pulse is intense enough, it turns off all the computers in your car. There will be no electricity, so even if the car ran, you could not get gas. By the way, if you have a car that still has a coil and distributor, you are probably okay, because those are pretty robust structures compared to today's cars with so much microelectronics in them. It would disrupt our military forces and our ability to project military power. For the last decade, Mr. Speaker, we have been waiving hardening on essentially all of our military platforms because it costs maybe as little as 1 percent, maybe like 5 percent more to harden. It can be done. That is the good news story. If you do not harden, you can get 5 percent more weapons systems. And since we have had so little money during those years, the Pentagon opted to run this risk. With terrorists about, I think that is probably a risk we do not want to continue to run. The number of U.S. adversaries capable of EMP attack is greater than during the Cold War. We may look back with some fondness on the Cold War. We then had only one potential adversary. We knew him quite well. Now we have who knows how many potential adversaries, and they come from very different cultures than we, and we have a great deal of difficulty in understanding them and communicating with them. Potential adversaries are aware of the EMP's strategic attack option. I started, Mr. Speaker, with talking about the fact that I was not letting the genie out of the bottle. Ninety-nine percent of Americans may not know very much about EMP, but I will assure you, Mr. Speaker, that 100 percent of our potential enemies know all about EMP. I think that the American people need to know about EMP because they need to demand that their government do the prudent thing so that we will be less and less susceptible, less and less at risk to an EMP attack year by year. The threat is not adequately addressed in U.S. national and homeland security programs. Not only is it not adequately addressed; it is usually ignored, not even mentioned, and it certainly needs to be considered. I might note that Senator John Kyl, with whom I served in the House on the Committee on Armed Services, wrote just a couple of weeks ago a very nice editorial in the Washington Post, and we will have his quote a little later, on EMP effects and how we need to be about preparing ourselves for that. Terrorists could steal, purchase, or be provided a nuclear weapon and perform an EMP attack against the United States simply by launching a primitive Scud missile off a freighter near our shores. We do not need to be thinking about missiles coming over the Pole. There are thousands of ships out there, particularly in the North Atlantic shipping lanes, and any one of them could have a Scud missile on board. If you put a canvas over it, we cannot see through the thinnest canvas. We would not know whether it was bailed hay or bananas or a Scud launcher. You cannot see through any cover on ship. The Commission on the Emerging Ballistic Missile Threat chaired by Secretary Rumsfeld before he was Secretary, and Dr. Bill Graham, the chairman of this commission was his vice-chair, found that ships had been modified so that they had missile-launching tubes in ordinary freighters. You can read that in their report. Scud missiles can be purchased on the world market today for less than $100,000. Al Qaeda is estimated to own about 80 freighters, so all they need, Mr. Speaker, is $100,000, which I am sure they can get, for the missile and a crude nuclear weapon. Certain types of low-yield nuclear weapons can generate potentially catastrophic EMP effects. These certain types of weapons are weapons that have been designed for enhanced EMP effects. They may have little explosive effect, but very high EMP effects over wide geographic areas, and designs for various such weapons may have been illicitly trafficked for a quarter of a century. We are certain that the Chinese have them. Of course the Russians have them; they developed probably better or at least as good designs as we developed. We designed them, by the way, but never built them. The Russians we understand have both designed and built them, and we now believe those designs to be pretty widespread out around the world. The next chart shows the comments from the Russian generals, and to protect the Russian generals we have redacted their names. But the commission met with Russian generals, and they claim that Russia has designed a super-EMP nuclear weapon capable of generating 200 kilovolts per meter. And the Russian generals told our commission people that they believe that to be several times higher than the level two, which we had hardened our weapons systems; even those that are hardened and, as I mentioned, Mr. Speaker, most of our weapons systems now procured are not hardened. Russian, Chinese, and Pakistani scientists are working in North Korea and could enable that country to develop an EMP weapon in the near future. Now, this is not what the commission said; this is what the commission reported the Russian generals to have said. The next chart shows additional comments from the EMP Commission report. States or terrorists may well calculate that using a nuclear weapon for EMP attack offers the greatest utility. Mr. Speaker, there is no way that a country could use a nuclear weapon against the United States that would be as devastating as using it to produce an EMP lay- down. I had not noted, but I should note, Mr. Speaker, that there is no effect on you or me from this weapon. We are quite immune to that. We will not be damaged by that. Buildings will not be damaged by that. It will affect only electric and electronic equipment. EMP offers a bigger bang for the buck. Now, this is from their report; I am not saying this. EMP offers a bigger bang for the buck against U.S. military forces in a regional conflict or a means of damaging the U.S. homeland. EMP may be less provocative of U.S. massive retaliation compared to a nuclear attack on a U.S. city that inflicts many prompt calories. Just a couple of words about this. As Vladimir Lukin said, if it were launched from the ocean, we would not know who launched it. So against whom would we retaliate? Even if we knew who launched it, Mr. Speaker, if all they have done is to disable our computers, do we respond in kind, or do you incinerate their grandmothers and their babies? This would be a really tough call. Responding in kind might do very little good. There is no other country in the world that has anything like our sophistication in electronic equipment, and no other country in the world is so dependent as we are on our national infrastructure. So this is a real problem and a big incentive to use this weapon without fear of retaliation, as Vladimir Lukin says, with no fear of retaliation. EMP could, compared to a nuclear attack on the city, kill many more Americans in the long run from indirect effects of collapsed infrastructures of power, communications, transportation, food, and water. Can you imagine our country, Mr. Speaker, with 285 million people, no electricity, and there will be no electricity, no transportation, no communication? The only way you can go anywhere is to walk, and the only person you can talk to is the person next to you. What would we do? How many of our people might not survive the transition from that situation to where you had established a sort of infrastructure that could support civil society as we know it today. Strategically and politically, an EMP attack can threaten entire regional or national infrastructures that are vital to U.S. military strength and societal survival, challenge the integrity of allied regional coalitions, and pose an asymmetrical threat more dangerous to the high-tech West than to rogue states. This makes the point that I was making that because we are the most sophisticated, we are the most vulnerable. Technically and operationally, EMP attacks can compensate for deficiencies in missile accuracy, fusing range, reentry, velocity design, target location, intelligence, and missile defense penetration. We are really superior in all of these areas, and none of our enemies out there, except for Russia and China, and we would not expect an attack like this from either of them, but there is nobody else out there who really can be very good shots with their missiles. But what the EMP Commission report is pointing out is, they do not need to be. Anywhere over the northeastern United States will shut down all of the northeastern United States, and anywhere near the middle of our country, you can miss it by 100 miles and it really will not matter. Anything near the middle of our country detonated high enough with the right kind of weapon will blanket the whole country with an EMP force that could knock out all of our electronic equipment. The next chart shows some other comments in the EMP report. One or a few high-altitude nuclear detonations can produce EMP simultaneously over wide geographical areas. As the chart we showed earlier, the whole country can be blanketed with one about 600 kilometers high. The thing they were really concerned about, because we have a very sophisticated infrastructure with lots of interdependencies, they were really concerned about the cascading failure, unprecedented cascading failure of our electronics-based infrastructures, which could result in power, energy, transport, telecom, and financial systems and are particularly vulnerable and interdependent. And if one of them comes down, if you bring down the power grid, Mr. Speaker, you have brought down all of these other parts of our national infrastructure. EMP disruption of these sectors could cause large-scale infrastructure failures for all aspects of the Nation's life. Now, these are not my words; these are taken from the EMP Commission report. This commission was set up as a part of public law, and that is noted here on this chart. Both civilian and military capabilities depend on these infrastructures. Without adequate protection, recovery could be prolonged months to years for recovery. And here on the right is a little depiction showing some, and there are more than that, showing some of the interrelationships. For instance, electric power is not shown as important for water or for banking and finance, and for government services; and of course it is. So if you do not have electric power, for instance, you do not have any of these other things. There was a number of years ago a scientist by the name of Harrison Scott Brown. I think that he worked at CalTech, and he offered a series of seminars called the ``Next 100 Years.'' This was during the Cold War. And one of the questions that it was appropriate to ask during the Cold War was, What would you do after the nuclear attack? You may remember, Mr. Speaker, your parents talking about the backyard shelters that were built during the 1960s. Sometime after that I went to work for IBM and they were still talking about the fact that IBM had loaned its employees money interest-free to build a backyard shelter. There was a real concern that there could be a bolt out of the blue and that we could have a nuclear attack. We had a big civil defense organization with lots of shelters. They were stocked, and you were given pamphlets and you were told where to go. I think, Mr. Speaker, that today, with the potential for terrorist attack, we need to turn back a few pages and learn from our experience during the Cold War when we recognized that the more prepared an individual and a family was to be self-sufficient during that attack, the stronger we would be as a whole; and I think that we could profit, at least have a more intense focus on civil defense in our homeland security efforts. Harrison Scott Brown was concerned about what you would do after you came out of the fallout shelter and how you would reconstitute your society to reestablish the kind of an infrastructure that you had before the attack. His concern was that in the United States, and this was a number of years ago, his concern would be even greater were he alive today, his concern then was that we had developed such a sophisticated, interrelated infrastructure, that if it came down like a house of cards, that it might be very difficult, maybe, he thought, and I will explain in a moment why, maybe impossible to reestablish that infrastructure. Because, he noted, that this infrastructure was built up gradually from very simple to very complex, when there was available to us a rich resource of raw materials, high-quality iron ore. That is all gone. Our best ores now, I think, are \1/2\ of 1 percent taconite ores. When oil essentially oozed out of the ground, when the water washed the dirt away, you could see coal exposed in some of the hills of Pennsylvania. The oil now is deep and hard to get or offshore or in the Arctic. All the good coal has been burned. Now, to get oil and to get coal, we have to have the infrastructure. You have to have diesel fuel shipped to you. You have to have large excavators. His concern was that if our infrastructure collapsed as a result of a nuclear attack, today we are talking about an EMP attack, which does not blow up buildings, but it shuts down the infrastructure because it would destroy, disrupt all of the electronic equipment if the pulse was high enough; and a determined, sophisticated enemy could make sure that it was high enough. So he was concerned that maybe it would not be possible now without that high-quality, readily available resource of raw materials that might be very difficult without massive help from other parts of the world that we could reconstitute our society. I think, Mr. Speaker, that we need to be looking at that threat to our country today. I am sure it is no less a threat now than it was when Harrison Scott Brown was holding those seminars. In 2004, the EMP Commission met with very senior Russian officers, and we showed that on the sign. They warned that the knowledge and technology to develop what they called super EMP weapons had been transferred to North Korea and that North Korea could probably develop these weapons in the near future, within a few years. The Russian officers said that the threat that would be posed to global security by a North Korean armed with super EMP weapons was, in their view, and I am sure, Mr. Speaker, in your view and mine, unacceptable. You know, why use EMP, as we noted in a previous chart? A terrorist or rogue state might be so inaccurate that they could not even use a nuclear weapon to take out New York City. They might hit the countryside somewhere near. But it would not really matter with that low accuracy if they were doing an EMP laydown. Because anywhere over New England would be quite good enough, and there is no way that they could do as much damage to our country by a ground burst, even if it hit the city, than if they could do a high altitude burst, which produced EMP and took down, if it was intense enough, all of our infrastructure. EMP has such a wide area of effect that if the weapon is large enough or several are used, covering potentially an entire continent, that even a highly inaccurate missile could not miss its target in an EMP effect. EMP attack involves exoatmospheric detonation, meaning that attack, this is really interesting, Mr. Speaker, this attack would occur before the weapon ever reentered the atmosphere. So even if we were really good at taking out weapons before they hit us, it really would not matter, because this is detonated before it starts to reenter. So any weapon that would take out a missile on its final descent would be useless, because it has already detonated and the damage is done at altitude. Increased dependence on advanced electronic systems results in the potential for an increased EMP vulnerability. And what this does is to make that attack more attractive to our assailants. The fact that we are ever more sophisticated and therefore ever more vulnerable makes it ever more attractive to our adversaries, because this really becomes the ultimate asymmetric weapon. EMP threatens the ability of the United States and western nations to project influence and military power, because a third-world country with a crude missile and a crude nuclear weapon could, in effect, hold us hostage. This is why it is so important that we stop the spread of nuclear weapons. EMP can cause catastrophic damage to the Nation by destroying the electric power infrastructure, causing cascading failures in the infrastructure for everything: telecommunications, energy, transportation, finance, food, and water. I live on a farm. I cannot even get a drink of water without electricity, because the pump in my well that supplies my water has to have electricity. So we are all really dependent on this infrastructure. Degradation, and this is really minimized, degradation of the infrastructures could have irreversible effects on the country's ability to support its population, and then millions could die. That is true. In the final analysis, Mr. Speaker, the EMP Commission report is really a good news story. So far what we have been talking about does not really sound like good news, does it? It sounds like the worst of all news that you could get. But there really is good news here, and the good news is that we do not have to be this vulnerable. It is really not all that expensive to protect our systems against EMP. You just have to do it. But we have a problem, and that is the cheapest way to do it is when you are making them, if you design it in. Then it may cost as little as 1 percent more. For really sophisticated electronic stuff, probably not more than 10 percent more. But if you are trying to add it after it is built, then it can cost you as much as the device itself, which means that we need to start, you can only do what you can do, and we need to start in our national infrastructure by deciding what is most essential to protect and then expeditiously protecting that as fast as we can. Every new water system we put in, every new sewage system we put in, every new power line we run, every new distribution system we put in needs to be hardened. It is not all that expensive to do. You just need to do it. Now we have hardened in the military our command and control. We are pretty sure that we can talk to each other after an EMP laydown. But that does not give me much solace, Mr. Speaker, because that is the equivalent of me having my brain and spinal cord work, but my arms and my hands will not work. I am not sure just having the capability of my brain communicating with my spinal cord does me much good if my arms and my legs will not respond to those signals. The EMP Commission has proposed a 5-year plan that, if implemented, would protect the United States from the catastrophic consequences of EMP attack and make recovery possible at surprisingly modest cost. I would like now to turn to a statement that was made by Dr. John Kyl. I mentioned his name earlier. Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security, which I chair, his words in his op-ed piece, held a hearing on a major threat to the United States not only from terrorists but from rogue nations like North Korea. An EMP attack is one of only a few ways that America could be essentially defeated by our enemies, terrorists or otherwise. Few if any people would die right away, but the long-term loss of electricity would essentially bring our society to a halt. Few can conceive of the possibility that terrorists could bring American society to its knees by knocking out our power supply from several miles in the atmosphere. But this time we have been warned, and we better be prepared to respond. We really do need to respond. Here is another statement from Major Franz Gayl. The impact that EMP is asymmetric in relation to our adversaries, now these are all in the public domain. I want to be very careful, Mr. Speaker, that I do not leave the impression that I am letting the genie out of the bottle. Ninety-nine percent of Americans may not know about EMP, but I will guarantee you 100 percent of our adversaries know about EMP. And we need to know about EMP, because to be forewarned is to be forearmed, and we need to do something about that. The impact that EMP is asymmetric in relation to our adversaries, the less developed societies in North Korea, Iran and other potential EMP attack perpetrators are less electronically dependent and less specialized, while more capable of continued functionality in the absence of modern conveniences. I do not know that outside of Pyongyang that many people in North Korea would even know if electricity went out. I am not sure they depend much on electricity. Conversely, the United States would be subject to widespread paralysis and doubtful recovery following a surprise EMP attack. Therefore, terrorists and their coincidentally allied state sponsors may determine that, given just a few nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles, that subjecting the United States to a potentially non- attributable EMP attack, we would not even know where it came from if it came from the oceans, is more desirable than the destruction of selected cities. Delayed mass lethality is assured over time through the cascade of EMPs' indirect effects that would bring our highly specialized and urbanized society to a disorderly halt. The vulnerability of the United States to EMP attack serves as the latest revelation that societal protections associated with our national security can no longer be assured by traditional nuclear deterrence and battlefield preparations on their own. Let me put up now a conclusion chart. The EMP threat is one of a few potentially catastrophic threats to the United States. By taking action, the EMP threat can be reduced to manageable levels, but we should have started yesterday, Mr. Speaker. We just must start today. U.S. strategy to address the EMP threat should balance prevention, preparation, protection and recovery. We need to be studying all four of these. Critical military capabilities must be survivable and endurable to underwrite U.S. strategy. If they can bring down our military, that really puts us at risk. The 2006 Defense Authorization Bill contains a provision extending the EMP Commission to ensure that their recommendations will be implemented. We need to have them around to make sure that we are following through on their recommendations. Terrorists are looking for vulnerabilities to attack, and our civilian infrastructure is particularly susceptible to this kind of attack. It needs to be hardened. When you have a weak underbelly, you are inviting attack there. They are going to attack at the weakest link, and our infrastructure complexity is certainly our weakest link. The Department of Homeland Security needs to identify critical infrastructures. What do we need to protect first? Then we need to have a plan for what would we do if we had the EMP attack tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, the next year, 5 years from now. How far along would we be in protecting ourselves? But we need to have a plan for what we would do in the event that that happens. The Department of Homeland Security also needs to develop a plan, I really want to emphasize this, Mr. Speaker, to help citizens deal with such an attack should it occur. Each of us as individuals, each of us as families, each of us as a church group, each of us as a community, needs to have plans for what we would do in the event of an EMP attack. We need to know what we need to do to prepare so that we are not going to be a liability on the system. Our strength as a Nation is going to be greatly increased if each of us as a family, a church group, a community, is prepared so that we will be less susceptible to the loss of these infrastructure supports. Mr. Speaker, this is really a good news story. We know about this problem. It has not happened yet. We have a great study with great detailed recommendations of what we need to be doing. The good news is that if we do these things we will have reduced our vulnerability and we will have now taken from the enemy an enormous strategic capability that they now have because we are such a sophisticated society, depend so much on our infrastructure, and if they can bring down an infrastructure they can bring us down. We have a mighty Army. It will not be much good if the folks back home do not have anything to eat. Mr. Speaker, to be forewarned is to be forearmed. I am sure Americans will respond to this challenge. And challenges are really exhilarating. You feel really good at night if you have met a challenge and you have had some successes in meeting that challenge. Mr. Speaker, I think we have a bright future ahead, and it is going to be even brighter if we respond appropriately to the warnings that are here.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to give my Special Order at this time.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, several times during the past few weeks, I have stood on this floor to talk about peak oil. The chart I have here symbolically shows what we are talking about. The blue curve here represents the amount of oil that the world produces and uses. Of course, over a period of time, the world will use as much oil as it has been producing and that has been going on now for 100 years. Currently, the increase in use rate of oil is about 2 percent. That is what this curve represents. Knowing that, we can put some time on the abscissa of this curve because a 2 percent compound growth will double in 35 years. This use curve, which goes up from here to here, has doubled in that amount of time, so that is a 35-year period. What this chart shows is that at some point in time, and the only argument is when, the world will peak in its oil production. But before the world peaks in oil production, it is noted from this curve that the demand will be exceeding for several years, it is like a decade, if this is the curve which is followed, the demand will be exceeding supply. What this has given rise to, of course, is a look for oil around the world. The second largest importer of oil in the world, which is China, has been scouring the world for oil. This chart shows the places where China has secured leases for oil. It is in Canada, it is in Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, negotiating in Russia, in Africa and all over the Middle East, of course; and we have a symbol here showing that they were negotiating for an oil company in our country, Unocal. When I spoke on the floor the last time about this, I noted that Chevron had bought this oil company, had bought Unocal; but now just in the June 6 issue, this year, just this week, Time magazine, there is an article called ``The Great Grab.'' It says: ``In quest of oil, China is on a collision course with U.S. firms and U.S. policy. Chevron, one of the world's oil giants, announced in early April that it was buying Unocal, a smaller rival, for about $17 billion. The Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation, CNOOC, may make a counteroffer for Unocal, the world's ninth largest oil company. If it does, it would mark the first major takeover fight between a U.S. company and a Chinese competitor.'' Think about it, Mr. Speaker. The Chinese have now secured rights for oil north of us in Canada, to our neighbors to the south, and now they are about to buy a major oil company, the ninth largest oil company in the world, right on our soil. Competitors are worried, the article says, that China is so eager to do deals that it will warp the market. Western oil majors are concerned that they won't be able to compete, according to Gary Ross, CEO of Petroleum Industry Research Associates, because the Chinese companies, most still state-owned, are willing to accept a lower rate of return. To acquire Unocal, CNOOC would have to offer more than the $17 billion that Chevron said they would pay for it, plus the $500 million breakup fee that Chevron booby-trapped to its Unocal bid. This is not the only place in the world that China is doing the great oil grab. It says: ``But Beijing is completing a long-term $70 billion oil and gas deal with the Iranian regime.'' I would like to note, Mr. Speaker, that this crisis is not just noted now, because almost a year ago, Jane Bryant Quinn, in an article in Newsweek, it was August 16, 2004, called ``Gas Guzzlers' Shock Therapy,'' had this to say: My fellow Americans, drop the fantasy that we'll return to cheap gasoline, that was a year ago, it was a lot cheaper, and pump it for as long as our withered hands can steer an SUV. As the prophet saith, the end is nigh. Demand for oil is running high. In fact, we're gobbling up the stuff. But world production grew by only 0.6 percent a year for the past 5 years. At some point, supplies will shrink, not grow. Mr. Speaker, this is really quite alarming, that in our country the second largest importer of oil in the world is now buying a major company.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, a couple of weeks ago on this floor there was a very prolonged and serious debate on stem cells. Now that we have had time for emotions to subside, I thought it might be productive to spend a little while this evening talking about the subject of stem cells and why there is so much interest in it across the country. A few months ago there was so much interest in this subject in California, for instance, that the voters voted favorably for a resolution that would make $3 billion from California taxpayers available to do research on embryonic stem cells. What are stem cells? We have a chart here which kind of shows this. There are fundamentally two types of stem cells. There are adult stem cells and there are embryonic stem cells. I guess the ultimate stem cell is the fertilized ovum, which is referred to here as a zygote, because from that cell develops all the cells of the body. That single cell, produced from the union of the egg and the sperm, divides and divides again and again until finally it is a blastocyst; and then it goes to the gastrula stage, and at that stage the three germ layers begin to sort out the cells that are already differentiating, is the technical term that is used for that. Every cell in our body, of course, has all of the same gene complement. And by mechanisms that are not clearly understood, during the embryonic process genes get turned on and get turned off, and the cells that are destined to produce your skin, for instance, the genes that are producing all the other tissues of the body are turned off, and only those genes necessary for producing the skin are still active. Here we have the three germ layers: The ectoderm, which is the outer layer, and from that will develop your skin and your nervous system. Then we have the mesoderm, that will be the middle layer, meso meaning middle, and from that will develop most of the weight of your body, all of your skeletal muscle, your cardiac muscle, much of the kidney, the blood cells, the smooth muscle in your intestines and stomach and so forth. Then from the innermost layer of this inner cell mass as it is called here, the mass of cells that differentiates into these three germ layers, the endoderm, the internal layer, produces not very much of the mass of your body, the pancreatic cell and the thyroid gland and the line of the things like your lung and intestines and so forth are produced from the endoderm. Then, of course, there are the unique germ cells produced, the sperm in the male and the egg or the ova in the female. The reason for the intense interest in these stem cells is because of the perceived potential for affecting the course of many diseases and hopefully curing many of our diseases. We have fundamentally two kinds of problems with our health. One is from tissue deficiencies when the tissue no longer does the kind of thing that it was destined to do and this embryonic development is wearing out or diseased. Then we have diseases from pathogens. These are organisms that can be outside that invade us. Primarily, the hope is that stem cells will be useful in treating diseases of tissue deficiency. Although if the pathogens have destroyed a tissue and then the body has marshaled its resources with the help of the doctors with the antibiotics and so forth so that the pathogen is destroyed, then there is some hope that through the use of stem cells that you might be able to repair or replace the tissue damaged by the pathogen. There are a lot of examples of diseases that might be amenable to cure or at least assistance through these stem cells. One is diabetes, which is a deficiency of insulin. Insulin is produced by some little cells that look like islands under the microscope because they are very dissimilar to the cells that they find themselves in. These cells are distributed through the tissue of the pancreas. The pancreas is a big gland that produces a lot of enzymes. When the food leaves the stomach and goes into the small intestine, the pancreas produces enzymes for the digestion of fats, carbohydrates and proteins. So it is a very important digestive gland. There is no real reason why these little islands of tissues, called the islets of Langerhans, named for the person who first described them, need to be in the pancreas, but that is where they are. They could, in fact, be any part of your body and do the same thing, which is secreting insulin. We use insulin to treat persons with diabetes, but everyone knows, particularly the family of those and the patients who have diabetes, that insulin does not cure the disease. It simply prolongs life, but, ultimately, even with insulin, many of the people who have diabetes will end up having peripheral vascular problems with maybe amputation of toes or limbs, usually the lower limb, have problems in the eyes with the peripheral vascular there in the eyes and have vision problems. Diabetes is the most expensive disease that we have. It costs more to maintain and treat the people with diabetes than any other disease. There is the hope that if we could generate islets of Langerhans cells from these stem cells that you could eradicate diabetes, that you could implant these cells in the body, and it could be in any tissue. It could be in muscle tissue or under the skin. You could implant these islets of Langerhans cells there that produce insulin and whatever else these cells do that is not done simply by replacing the insulin which is lost. We might be able to eradicate diabetes, which, of course, would be an enormous contribution. This is one of the most heart-wrenching things that the congressmen see, is when these little kids come to your office, they have to prick their finger maybe a dozen times a day, and they need insulin so frequently that they have an embedded little pump under their skin, about the size of a hockey puck. They may have to wake up during the night and prick their finger so that they can set the pump so it produces the right amount of insulin. This is just one of many diseases that authorities in medicine and the general public believes might be helped with stem cell research: multiple sclerosis, lateral sclerosis, Lou Gehrig's disease. That is one that I am personally very familiar with. My grandmother died from that disease. This was a long time ago, and it took quite a long time to diagnose that disease. She was falling. For quite a while they did not know why, and finally they diagnosed it as Lou Gehrig's disease, as was the common name for it then. I remember watching my grandmother deteriorate until the only motion that she had left, that she could communicate with us, was blinking her eyes: once for yes and two for no. Then she slowly died when she could no longer eat or drink. She did not want to be force fed. We did not have any dream then of stem cells and what they might do for that disease, but I can understand the hope that families have who have a loved one who has a disease like this and the hope that they have that there may be a medical advance and a miracle cure for the disease. Alzheimer's disease, my mother had Alzheimer's disease. How nice it would have been to have turned back the clock in her mind so that she was the mother that I spent the first 60 years with. Then, of course, there is a very large category of autoimmune diseases. I have a list here of 63 autoimmune diseases. That is an interesting type of disease. When we are developing in our mother's womb very early and our heart is beating and we have a circulatory system and we have white cells, there is a particular kind of white cell called the T cells. Very early in our embryonic development those T cells are imprinted with who we are, and that is very necessary because they have to understand who we are, who you are, who I am, so that if some foreign invader comes in there or virus or bacterium or something, they recognize that as being foreign so that they can reject it. For reasons that we do not understand, occasionally our autoimmune mechanisms get confused, and they see some of us as not being us, as being foreign, and so they attack it. We call those autoimmune diseases, and there are a lot of those autoimmune diseases: Addison's disease, autoimmune hemolytic anemia, autoimmune hepatitis. It goes on for 63 of these diseases. Multiple sclerosis is one of those, by the way. Lupus was one of the first of these diseases that was identified as an autoimmune disease. There is a hope that stem cells could be useful in treating all of these diseases. Then, of course, there are the injuries of central nervous tissue. We have two kinds of nervous tissue in our body, the central nervous tissue that is in our brain and spinal cord and then the peripheral nerves. That is the nerves that run to and from the brain and spinal cord. For reasons that is difficult to understand, they have two very different responses to injury. Peripheral nerves regrow very easily. There is a classic phenomenon known as Wallerian degeneration and then regeneration of the nerve. If you cut a nerve well up in your leg that goes to your toe, it may be a long while before you get feeling back to your toe, almost always, unless a lot of scar tissue develops where the nerve was cut. But for some reason that we do not yet understand central nervous tissue has no power to regenerate. Of course, what we are trying to do medically is to find out why central nervous tissue is different than peripheral nervous tissue, but absent finding out why so that you can turn that around there is the hope that with these stem cells we could grow nerve tissue that could then be placed in the body, injected in the body to help repair. So there are a lot of diseases out there that medical specialists and the public generally believe could be cured or at least the course of the disease quite favorably changed with the use of stem cell technology. There are, of course, two kinds of stem cells: embryonic stem cells and adult stem cells. Most of the work that we have done so far is with adult stem cells because we have been working with them for over three decades. We have been working with embryonic stem cells just a little over 6 years, and so the techniques for using adult stem cells are far better developed. So there are more medical applications from adult stem cells than there are from embryonic stem cells, but we have not had enough time working with embryonic stem cells to determine whether or not they have the increased potential that most people believe they should have. The medical specialists believe this. The general public understands this. If you are dealing with a cell that is not differentiated, that is, that it has not developed far enough along so that genes are turned off, a lot of leads are turned off, it could then develop into anything and everything with proper manipulation in the laboratory. So that if you are using embryonic stem cells there is the hope that they should have a wider application than adult stem cells. There is another interesting characteristic of embryonic stem cells, and I do not know how important it will be. Only research will determine that. At least 50 years ago, embryologists had determined that you could take a mother white mouse and a mother black mouse, each of which was pregnant and they have multiple babies in their uterus, and you could go into the uterus of the black mouse and take a little patch of skin out of the black mice, you could sew it into the skin of one of the white mice. When the white mouse is born, it has a little patch of black skin. Quite amazingly, it is not rejected. Everybody knows when you transplant an organ from one person to another, there is a big rejection reaction to that. So we have a lot of anti-rejection drugs that we give. The person who gets that organ transplant must take those anti-rejection drugs. As soon as they stop taking them, the T-cells recognize this thing as foreign and start to attack it. Its use in the body is destroyed. I do not know whether this little mouse experiment, whether the miracle of no rejection is a donor phenomenon or host phenomenon; but when you take skin from one embryo to another, there is no rejection. So using embryo stem cells, they might be less rejected. That would be good news. I would like to spend just a couple of moments reflecting on some of the elements of a debate here in this Chamber. These debates are a bit like a battle. They are a battle; you are fighting for your position. Like all battles, emotions rise and sometimes things are exaggerated a little by one side or another. Now that emotions have subsided and we are dealing with other issues, I thought it might be instructive to look at some of the arguments made on both sides. The argument on the pro-life side was that life is sacred, that these little embryos are human life, and the President has a position which I very strongly support, that it is just morally wrong to take one life hoping you can help another life. There has got to be another way to do it. The bill we were debating said we should take some of those 400,000 surplus embryos that were produced in the in vitro fertilization clinics that were going to be discarded anyhow, we should take those embryos and use them to produce embryonic stem cell lines. For the last 4 years we have been dealing with what started out as maybe 60 cell lines, which has now dwindled down to 22, all of them contaminated with mouse feeder cells so they are only good for research. They would not be good for medical use so there is a need for additional embryo stem cell lines. These are the only stem cell lines we can use Federal money exploring. The private sector can destroy all of the embryos they wish; there is no prohibition. You just cannot use Federal money so there are only 22 cell lines we can use Federal money to explore. The argument on the pro-life side, and I subscribe to that argument, that for any one embryo, there is no certainty that embryo is going to be destroyed, that it is going to be abandoned. The argument on the other side is there are 400,000 of them. Of course they are, you cannot keep them frozen forever, and by and by they will be discarded. But not all of them, because we now have, I understand, over 100 babies who have been born from adoption of these snowflake embryos. We have surplus embryos because when you go for in vitro fertilization, under hormone stimulation the mother produces more than one ovum; and they are put in a petri dish and exposed to sperm and fertilized. Then the doctor watches their growth, and the doctor chooses generally several because they do not all adhere to the uterus and grow to become babies, and so he wants to be sure there will be at least a baby. So he implants several in the uterus, and there are several left over that are then frozen in the event none of those take or the mother wants to have a baby later. I remember when I was running a farm several years ago, I was breeding cattle to a bull that had been dead for 8 years. I do not know how long the sperm and the ovum or these embryos will survive frozen, but they will survive for quite a long time. The argument on the pro-life side is that for any one of those embryos, it could be adopted; and that is true. If you have a reverence for life, as I do, you need to find another way to pursue embryonic stem cell research without destroying embryos, and we have a bill that does just that. We have talked to experts from NIH and others around the country, and in a few moments I will be talking about that bill. One of the arguments made by the pro-life people is we have had 58 medical applications from adult stem cells and none from embryonic stem cells, and that is true. But as Paul Harvey would say, the rest of the story is maybe the reason it is true because we have spent 3 decades working with adult stem cells and only about 6 years working with embryonic stem cells, and you will not know if they have the same potential until you have an equivalent amount of time to work with them. The arguments on the other side were that these cells are going to be thrown away anyhow and why not get some use from them. I have just reiterated my argument, which is the argument of the pro-life community, which is for any one of those embryos, they could be adopted. In fact, some of these snowflake babies came to the White House during this debate, so they can be adopted. There was another bill that we voted on that night and that was the umbilical cord blood bill which many mothers are now having frozen because there are some stem cell-like cells there that might be useful. But the argument is although they might be useful, they would not be as useful as the embryonic stem cells themselves. ``As a physician-scientist,'' and this is a direct quote from Curt Civin, co-director, Division of Immunology and Hematopoiesis Sydney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center, one of the centers at John Hopkins University School of Medicine, and we are fortunate in our State to have one of the best universities and one of the best medical schools in the world, that is Johns Hopkins, he says, ``As a physician- scientist who has done research involving umbilical blood cord stem cells for over 20 years, I am frequently surprised by the thought from nonscientists that cord blood stem cells may provide an alternative to embryonic stem cells for research. This is simply wrong,'' he says. By the way, all of the 58 diseases that have had applications from adult stem cells, all of them are represented by organizations that support embryonic stem cell research because the general belief is there ought to be more potential from embryonic stem cells than from adult stem cells. Just a little history why I am standing here this evening and how I got involved in this. I did not come to this Congress until, and this was 13 years ago, until I was 66 years old, and so I had a former life. In that former life, I was a scientist. I have a Ph.D. in human physiology. I taught medical school and postgraduate medicine and spent a number of years doing research at medical schools and at the National Institutes of Health. Several years ago, in 2001, I believe it was, there was a little like symposium at the National Institutes of Health where staff and members went out. I went out with a fairly large number of staff members where the experts from NIH were briefing the staff and members who were there on stem cell research. This was just before the President came down with his executive order on stem cells, and this was kind of an educational activity on the part of NIH. There were several researchers there; and as we can see in the next chart, I suggested it ought to be possible to take cells from an early embryo without hurting the embryo and that was because of my knowledge of what happens in twinning. Now, the first chart here shows the usual type of twinning. That is where you have two zygotes. That is the mother sloughed two ovum, not just one, and both were fertilized and both came down and were implanted in the uterus and they grew two fetuses, and they are called womb mates because they share the womb. Well, we also can have twins, and the next chart shows identical twins and what happens with identical twins. This can occur apparently in at least two different stages in the development of the embryo. Here we have the zygote, which is the union of the egg and the sperm, and that then divides to two cells; and they have left out a lot of stages here because there is a lot of stages between the two cell and the inner mass cell stage. These embryos can split at the two-cell stage or later on when they grow two inner cell masses. You can tell at what time they split by how they present themselves. If they are presented in two placenta, they split early and they go their separate ways. If they split later, they are generally presented at birth in a single placenta so the doctor knows the approximate time they split. I recognized what was really happening here was in a sense you were taking half of the cells away from the original embryo, and both halves went on to produce a perfectly normal baby. So it seemed perfectly logical to me that you ought to be able to take a cell or two from an early embryo without hurting the embryo. There has been a lot of research since that. By the way, the experts at NIH said, yes, that should be feasible. I mentioned this to the President at an event where we had just a few moments to talk about it, and he turned the pursuit of this over to Karl Rove who went to NIH and asked them about my suggestion that you might be able to take cells from an early embryo, and he came back and called me and said they tell me they cannot do that. I said either they did not understand the question or there is some confusion, because these are the same people that can take a single cell and take the nucleus out of that cell and put another one in it. That is what you do in cloning. If you can do that in a single cell, obviously you have the capability of taking a single cell out of a fairly large mass of cells. So he went back a second time and asked them and they told him the same thing, and so the President came down a few days later with his executive order that all the stem cell lines we have produced by destroying embryos; and since he was opposed to taking one life with the hope that you might help another life, he could not support the destruction of any additional embryos, but that Federal money could be used in pursuing research and medical applications using what he was told was roughly 60 lines of stem cells that were in existence at that time. Several years later in my office, just this year, as a matter of fact, talking with the people from NIH, they explained how this misunderstanding occurred. It is awfully easy to have misunderstandings when your backgrounds are very different, which is one of the problems we have in dialogues, of course. You can think that you are carrying on a dialogue when you are really carrying on simultaneous monologues, which was apparently sort of what happened in this discussion between Karl Rove and NIH. Because what they had really told him was that they did not know if they could make a stem cell line from such an early embryo, and that is true, and that is why I wanted animal experimentation to determine whether you could do that or not. Our next chart shows some of this progression, and it shows what we are talking about and what we were talking about there. This is half of the reproductive life of a mother. It shows an ovary, and there is one on each side, of course. Then it shows a funnel-like thing that sweeps over the ovum, it is called the infundibulum, and then the fallopian tube and down to the uterus. This shows just half of the tract. There is a mirror image of this over on the other side. By the way, there is an interesting thing that sometimes happens. These sperm are very energetic. They are released, of course, in the vagina of the mother, and they then make their way up into the uterus, through the cervix into the uterus, and then they swim all the way up the fallopian tube, and they can swim out through the end of the fallopian tube out into the body cavity. Sometimes the egg is not picked up by the cilia in the fallopian tube, and it also floats out into the body cavity, and the egg can be fertilized there. We call this an ectopic pregnancy and, of course, the baby cannot grow there, so that has to be removed. The ovum starts down the fallopian tube and very high up in the fallopian tube, it is fertilized. Then it divides into two cells and four cells and eight cells. It is at the eight-cell stage in the laboratory. This same process of fertilization and growth occurs in the petri dish in the laboratory, and it is at the eight-cell stage in the laboratory that they ordinarily implant the embryos. This goes on, of course, to produce the inner cell mass that we saw in the earlier chart there which then differentiates into the germ layers. It is at these later stages that it actually implants in the mother's uterus. The convention is ordinarily that implantation is done at the eight- cell stage. So my suggestion was that you could take a cell from the eight-cell stage, and it would not harm the embryo. As a matter of fact, if the embryo splits at this stage or at the two-cell stage or down here at the inner cell mass stage of the two inner cell masses, both groups of cells go on to produce a perfectly normal baby. So, obviously, there was the potential that you could take a cell from an early embryo without harming the embryo. I have been carrying on this dialogue with the pro-life community and with the scientists at NIH now for these 4 years. During one of these discussions, the representative of the Catholic bishops, Mr. Dorflinger, made a suggestion. There are some things that you see in life that are just so obvious that you say, gee, why didn't I think of that. His contribution was just that kind of thing. He said, in addition to taking a cell out of that inner cell mass, and, by the way, this is now done more than a thousand times around the world. We do not know how many more than a thousand times. But in the laboratory they want to know that this embryo they are going to implant in the mother does not have any genetic defects so that they are going to have a healthy baby. So they take a cell out of the eight-cell stage and they do a preimplantation genetic diagnosis on it and then they implant those remaining cells in the mother and more than a thousand times they have had a normal baby born. Mr. Dorflinger's suggestion was, and in addition to doing that preimplantation genetic diagnosis that you also establish a repair kit. That is kind of what you hope you are doing when you freeze umbilical cord blood. You hope that there are some stem-cell-like cells in there, that if there are future medical problems and stem cell research development has gone on to the point that you can make some meaningful applications that you could then be using tissues that would not be rejected like the tissues from an embryonic stem cell from another person. But clearly if the repair kit was established from a cell taken from an early embryo, it would be exactly the genetic composition of the child, of the person, of the adult as they grew, and so any defect could then be very effectively treated with tissues that would not be rejected. The President has a group of people, the President's Council on Bioethics, and because of the enormous expected potential from stem cell research, they have been looking at alternatives for embryonic stem cell research that might be ethically acceptable and they have just fairly recently issued a report, Alternative Sources of Human Pluripotent Stem Cells. It is called a white paper. In the body of that white paper they describe four different techniques. The next chart shows a little paragraph from that, and I have highlighted a part of it. It says it may be some time before stem cells can be reliably derived from single cells extracted from early embryos and in ways that do no harm to the embryo, thus biopsied. But the initial success of the Verlinsky's Group's efforts at least raises the future possibility that pluripotent stem cells could be derived from single blastomeres. A blastomere is simply a cell from the blastula. It merely means a cell removed from the early human embryos without apparently harming them. Then there is a little asterisk. If you go to the bottom of the page you see, ``A similar idea was proposed by Representative Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland as far back as 2001.'' This is the proposal that I made to the President that was pursued by Karl Rove with the misunderstandings that we talked about a few minutes ago. In the body of their paper, they talk about four different approaches. One of the approaches is to use embryos that obviously are not going to live because they are really bad and they are going to die. You could take cells from them like taking an organ from a person who is brain dead. I would have a little concern, Mr. Speaker, about how good a stem cell I was getting from an embryo that was dead. Another suggestion is to manipulate the genes of the cells so that if they develop they will never produce a baby. It would be kind of a freak, I guess, and since it is not going to be a baby, then you could take cells from that. Again, I would have a little concern, was I really getting a normal cell when I was taking it from something that was genetically engineered so that it was not going to grow to be a baby? In the text of their white paper, they do a very good job of talking about developing the repair kit and the fact that the cells could probably be taken without hurting the embryo. They look at all of the pluses and minuses of this. But then it looks like almost, Mr. Speaker, that somebody else wrote the recommendations, because let me read from the recommendations here. The recommendations say, the second proposal, blastomere extraction from living embryos, we find this proposal to be ethically unacceptable in humans owing to the reasons given in the ethical analysis: We should not impose risk on living embryos destined to become children for the sake of getting stem cells for research. I agree. That is not what they talked about in the text of their white paper. There they talked about preimplantation genetic diagnosis. This clearly has to be for the benefit of the baby. The mother does not want to have a baby that is going to have a less than optimum opportunity for a good life with a genetic defect, and she has the opportunity to determine that and so she does it. And then they also talk about developing the repair kit. So what we were proposing is that there would be cells made available, surplus cells from the repair kit, only after the parents had made three decisions which were in the interest of their baby. The first decision was to do in vitro fertilization. I know that there are those who do not believe that we ought to be doing in vitro fertilization. They kind of think that is like playing God. But there is an old axiom that I really subscribe to, Mr. Speaker, and that is that man's extremity is God's opportunity and God is not going to do for us what we can do for ourselves. And these parents have made the decision they want a baby and in vitro fertilization is the only way they are going to get one, so they have made the decision. Then they have made the decision they really want a healthy baby, so they are going to do preimplantation genetic diagnosis. And, by the way, they refreeze the embryo that was defective. It could be adopted. There are some families and, God bless them, that are really fulfilled by taking into their home handicapped babies, babies with defects, that they are going to be with them for a lifetime and these people feel fulfilled in taking these children into their homes, children who have HIV, crack cocaine babies and so forth and so these embryos could be adopted. By the way, this is not genetic engineering. There have been some suggestions that this is an unacceptable technique. Just looking at what kind of genes are there, Mr. Speaker, that is not genetic engineering. That is not a very believable argument against this. Then the parents have made a third choice, and that is to establish a repair kit for their baby. And only after the parents have made those three what I think are ethical choices, they want to have their own baby, they do not want their baby to have a genetic defect and they want their baby to have a repair kit and only after they have made those three decisions, then we would ask for some surplus cells from the repair kit to establish a new stem cell line. There are two things that I want to refer to here. One is a letter from Dr. Battey, who is the spokesperson at NIH for stem cell research. He wrote me on May 23, fairly recently, a three-page letter in which he says, live births resulting from embryos which undergo preimplantation genetic diagnosis and are subsequently implanted seem to suggest that this procedure does not harm the embryo. At least for a thousand times we have had a normal baby. They are not adults yet, and so the clock has to run for a while before we determine whether there is any defect. I would be very surprised, Mr. Speaker, if there is a defect. Because you can take half the cells away from an early embryo to produce identical twins, and both halves produce what looks like perfectly normal people. So I would be surprised if there is any long-term effects from this. Also, it is not known if the single cell removed from the eight-cell stage human embryo has the capacity to become an embryo if cultured in the appropriate environment. Then I would like to turn, Mr. Speaker, to the Science section, Monday, June 6, just yesterday, Stem Cell Advances May Make Moral Issue Moot. A Dr. Lanza, and our office has spoken to Dr. Lanza, he is publishing a paper imminently. Some of the details could not be in this article because he was holding those for his paper. In one approach pioneered by Robert Lanza and colleagues at Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Massachusetts, researchers plucked single cells from eight-cell embryos, embryos so young they do not have stem cells yet. Stem cells are ordinarily derived from inner cell mass. I do not understand saying that these are not the conventional stem cells but they certainly, I think, have the capacity to produce stem cells. Fertility doctors have known for years that early embryos seem unfazed by the removal of any one of their eight virtually identical cells called blastomeres. In fact, it is common today to remove a single representative blastomere from a laboratory conceived embryo and test that cell for diseased genes before deciding whether to transfer that embryo into a woman's womb. If this technique were applied to humans, and I skipped a couple of paragraphs where he talks about work with animals, if this technique were applied to humans, then a single cell taken from an eight-cell fertility clinic embryo could give rise to a self-replicating line of embryonic stem cells without compromising the donor embryo's odds of someday growing into a baby. So the thing that Dr. Battey said had not yet been, and he was correct because this paper is yet to be published, I think it may be published today or tomorrow, but he has now in mice, and if it is doable in mice it is probably doable in higher animals, including humans, that they have developed stem cell lines from a single cell taken from an early blastomere. I would just like to spend a few moments now talking about the bill which we have filed. It has a number of cosponsors, and I am very pleased that several doctors in the House have signed on to our bill. Our bill really has nothing to do with working on humans because we think that we ought to do some animal experimentation before we start working with humans. So what our bill does is simply to make some moneys available for a several-year study, and we ought to go up to nonhuman primates. These are animals like chimpanzees and the great apes. To make sure that what has been done in mice and what has been done more than 1,000 times in these clinics, and what has been done, of course, is taking cells from an early embryo without apparently hurting the embryo, that we could develop these cells into a stem cell line. That has now been done, as was noted in the paper yesterday. This is the science section of The Washington Post. So the potential is there to do this. And all that our research does is to ask for animal experimentation so that we can check and double-check and make really sure that this is a safe procedure for humans. I would like to put up the last chart that we are going to refer to now. This is a little bit like one that we looked at previously. This shows again half of the reproductive tract of the female; and, of course, what we are talking about are procedures that are done in the laboratory. But they are mimicking what happens in the body. By the way, when the little baby girl is born, she has in her ovary all of the ova that will ever be there, and they mature generally during her reproductive life, which may span 30, 40 years. They generally mature from one side or the other one a month. But they are all in there. And this shows the development of these ovum. And finally they grow and there is like a little blister on the side of the ovary, and then it breaks and the ovum is free. In the laboratory, of course, these have been washed out of the reproductive tract of the female, and they are now put in petri dishes and exposed to sperm. In the body, the sperm is deposited in the vagina, makes its way through the cervix, up through the uterus, and swims clear up through the Fallopian tube. In a laboratory, of course, they simply with a pipette put the sperm in the petri dish with the ovum. And there will be many sperm. There are millions of sperm. And really quite a miraculous and very rapid transformation takes place. As soon as one sperm enters the egg, the egg then sets up a defense so that no more sperm can enter because if another sperm were able to make its way in and they had three sets of chromosomes instead of two, that would be fatal. By the way, in flowers that is not fatal. That is called polyploidi, and that is how we get bigger flowers and better smell and so forth. But plants react very differently to extra hormones than humans do. Tisomy-21 produces mongoloid babies. That is just having one extra of one chromosome. So we do not react well to extra chromosomes; and so the ovum, after one sperm has entered, it sets up this defense so that no more sperm can enter. The same thing happens in the laboratory. And then it divides, and the doctor watches that division. And down at eight-cell stage, they take a cell out and do preimplantation genetic diagnosis; and as recent research has demonstrated, the paper that is going to be published very shortly by Dr. Lanza, they have done this in mice, but if it is possible there, it ought to be possible in higher animals, and our research would determine that. They have produced stem cell lines from a single cell taken. What this means is, Mr. Speaker, that we now have been able to produce, we will be able to produce, embryonic stem cell lines without harming an embryo. I have heard people say that they are just unalterably opposed to embryonic stem cell research. I hope that is not what they mean. I hope what they are mean is that they are unalterably opposed to embryonic stem cell research if it means killing an embryo. I am unalterably opposed to embryonic stem cell research if it means taking one life with the hope that we will be able to help another life. But with these recent advances in medicine and research in the laboratory, there is the real hope that we can take cells from an early embryo to benefit the embryo. And I would like to say again the reasons that the parents are taking cells from this early embryo, the fundamental reason they are taking the cell is to do a preimplantation genetic diagnosis. And the President's Council on Bioethics mentions the possibility of creating a repair kit, which certainly would benefit the baby. So the parent has now done three things which they think is ethical. I think that they are ethical, and there ought to be surplus cells from the repair kit, and it is those surplus cells that would be made available for additional stem cell lines. But I want to reiterate again that the bill which we have just looks at animal experimentation. Although human research, human developments, human applications have gone beyond some of the exploration that we have done with animals, we still think that it is prudent to work with animals where we can determine with more cases and more intense experimental observation to make sure that there are no untoward effects of doing this. I hope that this research can bring the two sides together. We had a couple of weeks ago a very heated debate. The emotions on both sides were rather obvious: those who wanted to take some of these more than 400,000 frozen embryos that they said were going to be discarded anyhow to get some good from them, and they were so convinced of this in California that they voted for $3 billion to proceed with this. The argument on the other side, which position I take, is that morally I have big problems with taking one life, and this little embryo could become under the right circumstances a baby. More than 100 times it has. From these frozen 400,000, there are about 100 or so, we call Snowflake babies, because this is a program to offer these embryos for adoption, and more than 100 times they have been adopted, and the President had some of those babies at the White House a couple of weeks ago when we were having that debate, and they came to the Hill also when we were having that debate here on the floor. With the ability to take cells from an early embryo not to establish a stem cell line, that is not why the parents took it. They took the cell to do a preimplantation genetic diagnosis. They then would like to establish a repair kit. We know they would like to do that because they are more and more freezing umbilical cord blood, which, as the one doctor I read from said, is a poor second choice to an embryonic stem cell line, but it is better than nothing. So we know that parents would like to do that. And it is only after that if the animal experimentation supported by our bill shows that this is efficacious and will not harm the baby, only after that would stem cell lines be derived from surplus cells from repair kits that the parents had decided to establish for the benefit of their baby. I think, Mr. Speaker, that this ought to remove all of the ethical objections. But there is just one more, and I just want to spend a moment talking about that, and this is a good chart to talk about it from. Since these cells at the eight-cell stage are quite undifferentiated, which means they have not really decided what they are going to be, it is possible that they might take that one cell and establish another embryo. The President's Council on Bioethics thinks that is very unlikely. But what I would like to see them pursue is the development of stem cell lines and the preimplantation genetic diagnosis from the inner cell mass stage. Now, that is the stage at which embryonic stem cells are ordinarily taken from when the embryo is destroyed. That is before the embryo is implanted in the normal process. Here is the inner cell mass, and here is where it is implanted a couple of days later, 2 or 3 days later, in the uterus. Ordinarily, and I am not sure why they use the eight cell stage in the clinical laboratories, but I would like to see cells taken from the inner cell mass. There is no ethical question involved there because these cells in the inner cell mass cannot produce a baby because they have already lost their ability to produce decidua. The decidua is the amnion and chorion which is commonly known as the placenta, and they have lost the ability to do that, so they cannot produce a baby, but they can produce all of the tissues of a person, because these are what produce, back to our first chart that shows the inner cell mass differentiating into these three germ layers. So the last possible ethical objection to deriving stem cells from pre-implantation genetic diagnosis and the development of a repair kit would be gone if we could take the cell from the inner cell mass, because the inner cell mass, those cells could not possibly produce a baby, because they are sufficiently differentiated that they cannot produce the decidium. I have used this term ``differentiation'' a number of times, and what we try to do with adult stem cells, because they are already differentiated, we try to de-differentiate them. We try to confuse them with ques, with chemicals, with exposing them to other cells and the products from other cells so that they can kind of forget their development and they now go back to a prior less-differentiated state where they could produce more variety of cells. But you avoid those problems with the embryonic stem cell, because it has the capability to produce any and every cell in the body. Mr. Speaker, I believe that with these recent medical advances, with the knowledge that we have, that it is perfectly feasible to ethically develop embryonic stem cell lines from embryos which should have, in the view of many of the experts, and clearly in the view of most Americans if you poll them, should have more potential than adult stem cells. Only research will tell that, and only time will tell whether or not that is true. But with the hope that these large numbers of diseases so devastating to our people could be affected or maybe cured with embryonic stem cells, we really must pursue this, and now we have the opportunity to do that without offending those who have a problem with taking one life so that we might help another life. I think, Mr. Speaker, that we now are on the cusp of advances that will bring these two sides together. We have enough things to be concerned about and to discuss in our country, we do not need to be discussing this, and I think the two sides with these present advances can come together. I hope that we will have an early vote on our bill and it will reach the President's desk so that he has a bill that he can sign that will promote embryonic stem cell research.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, we want to spend some moments this evening talking about a subject which is a very high priority for a lot of Americans, including a number of us here in the Congress, and that has to do with embryonic stem cell research. I want to start out by telling you what the essence of a bill that we have dropped is. We filed this bill a couple of days ago. And then I will come back to this later on, to a more detailed discussion of it. What I have here, Mr. Speaker, is a little depiction of what happens in the human body. This shows one-half of the reproductive tract of a female. This would be replicated, mirror image, on the other side, because here we are seeing only one ovary and one Fallopian tube and one-half of the uterus; and what this depicts, Mr. Speaker, is the sequence of events in the fertilization and the growth and the ultimate implantation of the embryo, this whole trip, not an unhazardous trip for the embryo, because not all of them make that trip successfully. In fact, probably about as many as two-thirds of those that are fertilized here never are implanted down in the uterus. But this is a sequence of events which takes 10 days, perhaps, to make the trip down to finally be implanted in the uterus. Fertilization, as is noted here, occurs very far up in the Fallopian tube, and then there is a single cell called a zygote, and that splits to form two cells. They split to form four cells and eight cells. And we are going to come back and talk about those eight cells because that is the focus of a lot of attention in today's world, particularly in infertility clinics where they are doing in vitro fertilization. Let us imagine now that that sequence of events is not occurring in the uterus and the fallopian tube of the mother, but it is occurring in a petri dish in the laboratory. For some reason, the mother cannot become pregnant, and so they, with the use of hormones, take eggs, generally more than one, from the mother, and they take sperm, of which there are millions, from the male, and they expose these eggs to sperm, and they are fertilized. And so the doctor has a number, generally several, of these fertilized embryos. And he looks under a microscope and determines the embryos which look the strongest, and then he implants them in the mother. Because not every embryo takes when it is implanted in the mother, he will usually implant more than one. One of my good friends here in the Congress, the gentleman from California (Mr. Rohrabacher), his wife had three babies because all of the embryos that were implanted took. And so now they are the very happy parents of triplets that were born. Well, at this eight-cell stage, in clinics, it started in England a couple of years ago; it has now spread to this country. At the eight- cell stage, the doctors are able, with a very fine pipette, to remove a cell or two from that embryo, and they then do a genetic diagnosis on that cell. It is called a preimplantation genetic diagnosis because they are doing it before they implant the embryo in the uterus. The parents want to make sure that their baby is not going to have a genetic defect. If there is no genetic defect, they put the egg, minus a cell or two, in the uterus. And more than 600 times in the clinic in England, and well more than 1,000 times worldwide, we have had a perfectly normal baby born. Now, the hope is that ultimately, but that is not what our bill is. I will come to that in a moment. The hope is, ultimately you could take that cell and do two other things with it, that cell or two that you have removed. One of the other things that you would do with it is to establish a repair kit for your baby. We are now attempting to sort of do that when we are freezing umbilical cord blood, Mr. Speaker, and I know you have heard of that, with the hope that the stem cells, they are not really a true embryonic stem cell because they are already differentiated somewhat, that is, they have already decided ultimately what they are going to be, at least to some measure, that the baby can get, or the adult later on can get, some help from that. We hope that we will be able to develop a repair kit from the cell that is taken. If that is true, then you could take some of the cells from the repair kit to produce a new stem cell line. And as you know, Mr. Speaker, we are now down to 22 stem cell lines of humans that we can use Federal money working with. They are all contaminated with mouse ``feeder'' cells, and so there is a need in the medical research community for additional stem cell lines. There is, Mr. Speaker, the hint of a moral ethical problem here, and that is that maybe the cell that I take out of this eight-cell-stage embryo could, under proper circumstances, become another embryo and, therefore, another baby. There is some cause to reflect on that, Mr. Speaker, because nature, on occasion, at some point between the two- cell stage and the inner cell mass, which is clear down here, will split the embryo and then end up with two embryos, and obviously, half of the cells went to each embryo and those half cells, each one, develops into a perfectly normal identical twin. But if we could take the cell for preimplantation genetic diagnosis, if we could take that cell from the inner cell mass, then it is already differentiated, so that it cannot produce decidua. Now the decidua, Mr. Speaker, is the amnion, chorion. These are elements of the placenta. And already the cells that are the inner cell mass, which will become the baby, have lost the ability to produce the decidua, so there would be no concern that the cells you took could produce another embryo and, if implanted, another baby. Our bill looks only at animal experimentation because we need to determine several things. First of all, we need to determine, can you, in fact, from these single cells? By the way, one of the additional advantages of the inner cell mass is that there are a lot of cells there. So you could potentially take much more than one cell, which would give you an enhanced capability of producing a stem cell line and a repair kit, because these cells do not like being alone. And what we want to do is have animal experimentation on nonhuman primates, which are the great apes, which are 99.99 percent genetically identical to humans. That may reflect something on who you think you are, but the truth is that the gene differences between the great apes and humans is very, very small. If, in fact, we can do these things with cells taken from embryos and cells taken from nonhuman primates, then we will have increased confidence that it will be safe in humans, that we can, in fact, develop the repair kit and the stem cell line that we would like to develop. Let me take just a moment, and then I am going to recognize my friend, the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey). Let me take just a moment to talk about what stem cells are. There are fundamentally two types of stem cells. There are adult stem cells and there are embryonic stem cells. Here we show the growth of the embryo, and as you notice, there are fewer stages here than that previous chart we had, because they have skipped the morula and they go to the blastula, and then they skip the gastrula, well, here is the gastrula, and then they go on to the three derm layers. These cells start differentiating. They first differentiate into the inner cell mass and the tissues which will become the decidua, and then the inner cell mass differentiates into three types of cells, the ectoderm and the mesoderm and the endoderm. And at the bottom here it shows the kinds of tissues that will develop from those. From ectoderm will develop your skin and your nervous system, the brain and spinal cord and all the nerves that run to and fro in the body. From the mesoderm, that is in the middle. From the mesoderm the middle layer will develop most of what you are, all of your muscle, all of your bone, all of your heart and so forth, the smooth muscle of your gut. And then we have small but important contributions of the endoderm. And this is some of the glands in the body and the lining of the digestive system and the lining of the lungs and so forth. Now, adult stem cells, and a good example of those is a stem cell that produces red blood cells here, that cell produces more than that. It is in the bone marrow and it produces red blood cells. It produces the thrombocytes for clotting. It produces the polymorphonuclear leukocytes, that is some of the white cells. Now, maybe you can take that stem cell, which is not totally differentiated, and you can put it in an environment where it will be confused as to what it really is, so that it might be able to produce for you something else. And that is what we do, at least partially, with adult stem cells. The embryonic stem cell is a cell taken from the embryo no later than the blastocyst, which has the inner cell mass, because only then will it be purely embryonic. In the morula, the eight-cell stage we talked about, it is totally undifferentiated. Conceivably, it might produce an embryo. The President's Commission on Bioethics does not think so, but conceivably, it might. But if you take that cell or cells from the inner cell mass, it certainly will not, because it is already differentiated to the point that these cells in the inner cell mass will become the baby, and these cells in the trophoblast will become the decidua, the amnion and chorion, the placenta. Mr. Speaker, now I would like to yield to my good friend, the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey).

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman so much. I am honored he has come, and I really appreciate your articulate description of the situation we are in in the country where I think that a vast majority of Americans believe that there is considerable potential from embryonic stem cell research. And yet we have this big divide in our country where a lot of our citizens in this country and a lot of our Members here in the Congress have real problems taking a life, the life of one of these early embryos. By the way, this has in it the blueprint for a completely unique individual. There are now 6\1/2\ billion people in the world and no two alike. And so each of these embryos created in the laboratory has in it a completely unique genetic blueprint. It is not that we know which of these embryos is going to be implanted because they are frozen, could be implanted in the future. But one thing we do know, one thing we do know is that if you take the embryo and destroy it, that that potential life is gone. Now you may argue, you may argue that you really ought to opt for the greater good and there could be enormous potential from embryonic stem cell research. If that were the only argument, Mr. Speaker, I would engage in that argument, but it is not because we do not have to kill embryos. You do not have to hurt embryos to get stem cell lines. I have here a piece today from Roll Call which is kind of an inside paper here on the Hill. And it is quoting from freshman Senator Tom Coburn. He is a freshman there because fairly recently he was here in the House. He came in 2 years after I came in. He is a doctor. He has delivered a lot of babies in Oklahoma. And I called him the other day and he said, I will carry this bill in the Senate. This is what he is quoted as saying in Roll Call just today: ``Coburn said, It is possible to harvest stem cells without destroying embryos and would focus his efforts on amending the bill,'' that is the bill that will be going through the Senate, ``amending the bill to promote this procedure.'' I also want to note in this week's edition of Time magazine, the first story, a pretty big story on stem cells, ``Why Bush's Ban Could Be Reversed.'' Now, we voted yesterday to reverse that ban. It needs to be voted in the Senate, and then it needs to go to conference and then it needs to go to the President's desk and the President has assured the world that he will veto this because of his respect for life. I hope that the bill we are discussing tonight reaches the President's desk at the same time as the bill we voted on yesterday so the President has before him the option of signing a bill which opens up all of the promises of embryonic stem cell medical application and still preserves life. I want to emphasize again, Mr. Speaker, that our bill deals only with the animal experimentation because we want to know that in fact it is efficacious and safe to do the procedures that will need to be done if we are going to reach the potential for medical application of embryonic stem cells. I would like to for just a moment talk about the general potential from stem cells, whether they are embryonic or whether they are adult stem cells. There are two basic kinds of diseases in the body. There are diseases from tissue or organ deficiencies, and there are diseases from pathogens. Mostly what we are talking about are diseases from tissue or organ deficiencies, although if there is a pathogen that destroys an organ or a tissue and it might be replaced through embryonic or adult stem cell application, that would be included also. But there are a large number of diseases that represent tissue or organ deficiencies, which appear to hold promise for stem cell medical application. My colleague mentioned Type 1 diabetes. This is really a very tragic disease. It represents the largest cost of any disease in our country. I see diabetics come through my office and the most heart-wrenching are those little children, juvenile diabetes, sometimes very virulent. They have to sample, several times a day, their blood. Thank God, we have improved techniques which require just a fraction of a drop of blood. And they have, many of them, embedded in their side a little hockey-puck-size pump that pumps insulin. But they have to sample their blood to know what the sugar level is so they know how to set the pump, so it is pumping the right dose of insulin. This they have to do 24 hours a day. And some of them are so brittle that they have to wake up at night to do this. When they come to your office with diseases like this, or like multiple sclerosis, or like lateral sclerosis that my grandmother died from, then your heart really goes out to these people. I remember my grandmother's death. I was a teenager. They had misdiagnosed it for quite a while, because this is Lou Gehrig's disease, and it was not all that common. When they finally figured out what it was, there was nothing that could be done for it. We hope in the future, with stem cell application, there will be something that can be done for it. My grandmother went from falling now and then to degenerating slowly, until just before she died the only motion she had was blinking her eyes. And that was the only way she could communicate with us. One blink for ``yes,'' two blinks for ``no.'' So from a personal perspective, and I suspect many families are like my family, that they have a relative, if not a relative, a friend who has one of these many diseases, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, lateral sclerosis, or Alzheimer's disease. And, Mr. Speaker, there are a whole host. I have here 63 different autoimmune diseases. These are diseases where the body gets confused as to what is really body. You see, very early in our embryonic development there are certain miracle cells in our body called T-cells that are imprinted with who we are. And that is very essential, because in the future there are going to be a lot of foreign invaders, mainly bacteria and particularly viruses, that would like to occupy us and live there comfortably without being rejected; and that, of course, would be hazardous and frequently fatal. So these T-cells are imprinted with who we are so that they reject everything that is not us. Well, in many people, and there are 63 diseases here that are listed, in many people these immune reactions get confused, and so we have what are called autoimmune diseases where the body starts attacking its own tissues. Well, the body marshals its resources and many times it has overcome this deficiency, but by that time, the tissues are decimated. So we have the potential that we could provide enormous medical help in a great number of diseases. There is another potential, which is much debated and explored, and that is the potential difference between adult stem cells and embryonic stem cells. And there are many people who will tell you that adult stem cells have the most potential because they have presently the most medical applications, 58 as compared to zero for embryonic stem cells. The reason for that, Mr. Speaker, or at least one reason, is that we have been working with adult stem cells for over 3 decades and just over 6 years with embryonic stem cells. And so there has not really been time for medical applications. But all of the professionals in the area will tell you that, theoretically, because of what embryonic stem cells are, embryonic stem cells way back here in early development of the embryo, that they retain, or they have the ability to make any and every tissue in the body. So, theoretically, they ought to have the most potential. You will hear, Mr. Speaker, debates on this issue, and it is well to remember that from a teleological perspective, the embryonic stem cells ought to have more application than adult stem cells, which is why all the clamor, why the $3 billion in California voted by the voters for embryonic stem cell research, because the professionals and most people who think about it believe that there is more potential from embryonic stem cells. There may not be, but that is why we need to do the research so that we know what is feasible here. I just want to spend a moment, Mr. Speaker, going over my personal involvement with this field. As was mentioned by my good friend, the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey), I was privileged in a former life to work in a scientific medical environment. I taught medical school for 4 years, I taught postgraduate medicine at the School of Aviation Medicine in Pensacola, Florida. I had the opportunity, while studying for my doctorate, to take a course in advanced embryology. And so when I went to NIH in 2001 with a group from the Hill here, most of them staff members, quite a large number as I remember, for a briefing at NIH on the potential for embryonic stem cell applications, and this was in 2001 before the President came down with his executive order that we could not kill any more embryos; that there were 60 cell lines, maybe not quite 60, but 60 cell lines in existence and that Federal money could be spent only on those, we knew then that these cell lines would eventually run out. Now they are down to 22 and all of them contaminated with mouse ``feeder'' cells, so there is now a need, if this research is going to continue with Federal funding, there is a need for additional stem cell lines. That is why the bill yesterday and why the bill that we are talking about today. Because I remembered my embryology, and the next chart here will show what happens with ordinary twinning with fraternal twins, in fraternal twins there are two eggs, and those two eggs may implant in the uterus far apart, in which case the babies will present in separate amnions, or they may implant in the uterus close together so that they will present with a single chorion, I guess it is. The next chart shows what happens in identical twinning. In identical twinning, early in the development of the embryo, and you will remember the first chart we looked at that went from one cell to two to four to eight, then 16 and on to the inner-cell mass stage, and the embryo can divide at either the two-cell stage or clear up to the inner-cell mass stage. And the little chart here shows two inner-cell masses. The cell at which it divides determines how the babies will present. Here you see you have two babies in the same chorion and they mimic the two babies that were fraternal twins that happened to implant in the uterus close together. Well, I knew, Mr. Speaker, that in both of these cases half of the cells were taken away from the developing embryo either at the two-cell stage or anything in between clear up to the inner-cell mass, and there are a lot of stages in between here. And when you took half the cells away, the half you took away made a perfectly normal baby, and the half that was left made a perfectly normal baby: identical twins. So it was reasonable to me that you ought to be able to take a cell or two or three or so away and the cells that were left ought to produce a perfectly normal baby. And I asked NIH researchers, is this theoretically possible? They said, yes, it is theoretically possible. A few days later I happened to be at an event with the President, and I knew he was struggling with this decision. So I mentioned to him my visit to NIH and the possibility that this could be done. The President handed the follow-up to this to Karl Rove, and so Karl Rove went to NIH. Now, I did not know he was involved until he called me and he said, Roscoe, they tell me at NIH they cannot do this. I said, Karl, either they did not understand the question or there is some confusion, because these are the same people that can take a nucleus out of a single cell and put another nucleus in it. That is what people do in cloning, and this is now done widely since that Dolly sheep up there in Scotland. In fact, I went to a farm in Maryland that has two cloned cows, and it may be unique in all the world. They have a heifer there, born to a cloned cow, fertilized by a cloned bull. So I knew that it was possible to go in and do this. But they told him again, no, they could not do it. So the President came out with his executive order saying we could use only the stem cell lines in existence. Subsequent to that, a couple years later, in my office talking about this with NIH, they admitted that there was some confusion that permitted Mr. Rove to believe something that they had not said. What they told him was that they were not sure that we could make a stem cell line from such an early embryo, at the eight-cell stage. We make them all the time, by the way, from the inner-cell mass. That is the stage at which they do this. That is true. That is why I wanted then and want now to do the animal experimentation to determine whether this is true or not. I have here a letter, and I submitted this for the Record the last time we spoke about this, so I will not do it again, but this is a letter from Dr. Battey, who is the NIH spokesman, the point person for embryonic stem cell work. It is a large, 3-page letter in which he discusses a number of the things that we are discussing here this evening, Mr. Speaker. There are several statements in his letter which indicate the probability that what we want to do in fact can be done, which could have enormous potential applications for good to the people that have diseases that could be cured, well, maybe not cured, but where defective tissues and organs could be replaced. We were talking about diabetes, Mr. Speaker. That has a really high potential application. The problem in the diabetic is that the cells of Langerhans, these are little island cells. They are called the islands of Langerhans for the gentleman who first described them. They happen to be located in the pancreas. They do not need to be there. They have nothing to do with what the pancreas does. The pancreas secretes a large number of enzymes in the intestine that help digest all three classes of food in the intestine: fats, carbohydrates, and protein. The islands of Langerhans, if we could make them from stem cells and they could be placed in people, anywhere, their earlobe, their groin, under the skin in their side, anywhere, they would then secrete the insulin that is so essential. And by the way, it is more than just insulin, because giving insulin to a diabetic prolongs their life and helps a great deal, but it does not cure the disease. There still would be potential eye problems and potential circulation problems. Many people, Mr. Speaker, have friends and relatives that have diabetes and they see this progression. What we want to do in our bill is to provide an opportunity to explore in nonhuman primates the potential for making a repair kit so that that individuals, through all of their life, would have the possibility of applications with completely genetically compatible material. And then with surplus cells from the repair kit, we could establish new embryonic stem cell lines. But our research aims only at the animal experiments which would determine the efficacy and the safety of doing this. There is debate, and you, Mr. Speaker, heard the debate yesterday. That was a really good illustration of something my wife notes frequently, that during those debates everything has been said, but they go on and on because everybody has not said it. We heard yesterday people from both sides repeating. And since repetition is the soul of learning, I am sure the message from both sides got through. And what was that message? From the side that voted for the Castle bill, the message was that we have 400,000 frozen embryos out there. They are not all going to be used; some will die because they are frozen too long. Ultimately, some will be discarded so why should we not get some potential medical benefit since they are going to be discarded? The argument on the other side, and I am on the other side because I have a true reverence for life, the argument on the other side is that for any one of those 400,000 embryos, you do not know that is not the embryo that could be adopted in the snowflake operation and become a much longed for and loved child. At the end of the day, if you have taken one of these embryos and destroyed it in your pursuit of embryonic stem cell research, you have destroyed the potential life of a unique individual with a genetic blueprint unlike any other individual on the planet, another Albert Einstein, another Ronald Reagan. I think the reverence for life argues very strongly in favor of the President's position that he will veto the bill. I hope that my bill can get to his desk at the same time because this is a bill that is reverent of life, and everything that is done is done for the benefit of the embryo. The parents cannot conceive normally, so they have in vitro fertilization. They would like to know, since they have the ability to know, that their baby is not going to have a genetic defect. So what happens to the embryo with the genetic defect? Mr. Speaker, I hope it is refrozen and made available for adoption. There are many people in the world that get genuine fulfillment in adopting children that are handicapped. That is why they adopt crack cocaine babies or babies with AIDS. I would not want to preclude that this baby with a genetic defect might not be wanted by another family. If the family decides that they want to ensure that their baby is going to have a high quality of life and does pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, if the potential is there, and our research in animals will help determine that, if the potential is there, they will certainly go on to develop a repair kit so their baby will have more than just a potential of frozen cord blood. And then once they have established the repair kit, hopefully if it is needed, they will donate a few cells so we can start another stem cell line to do the research and the medical applications that are necessary to determine the full potential of embryonic stem cells in medicine. Mr. Speaker, I want to spend a few moments on a white paper produced by the President's Council on Bioethics called ``Alternative Sources of Pluripotent Stem Cells.'' What it really means is you can go into this early embryo that I talked about, and let me put that up on the board. This is from page 25 in their paper. The highlighted part says it may be some time before stem cell lines can be reliably derived from single cells. If we go to the cell mass stage, we may be able to get several cells since there are a lot of them there. And, of course, our chances will be enhanced with single cells extracted from early embryos and in ways that do no harm to the embryo. So they are saying this is possible. But the initial success of the Verlinsky Group's effort, and this is a group that says they have done this, that needs to be corroborated by other scientists, and our research would determine whether or not that is feasible through animal experimentation; but it raises the future possibility that pluripotent stem cells could be derived from single blastomeres removed from early human embryos without apparently harming them. They do a really good job of talking about the potential opportunities, and I want to note the asterisk; and a similar idea was proposed by the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Bartlett) as far back as 2001. This was a suggestion that I made to the people at NIH and then to the President, and that was well before the President came down with his executive order on the stem cell lines that could be used for further experimentation with Federal money. They do a really good job in the body of this text. They talk about all of the potential benefits. They talk about developing the repair kit and taking cells in the repair kit to produce the stem cell line. And they said here at the beginning of it that all of this may be possible. But then it almost looks to me like somebody else wrote their recommendation section because going to the back to the recommendation section, they said the second proposal, blastomere extraction from living embryos, we find this proposal to be ethically unacceptable in humans owing to the reasons given. We would not impose risk on living embryos destined to become children for the sake of getting stem cells for research. Mr. Speaker, that is not what they said in the first part of it. They said they were getting the stem cells to do preimplantation genetic diagnosis and getting the stem cells to develop a repair kit. I, too, have some concern about getting cells if the only reason for getting the cells is for research, but that is not the reason that the parents decide to do preimplantation genetic diagnosis; they do that because they want to have a baby that does not have a genetic defect. That is not the reason that they have the cells cultured to produce a repair kit, because they want their baby to have the potential miracle of embryonic stem cells for the rest of their life. It is only at that time, after successful animal experimentation, as outlined in our bill, it is only at that time you would ask the parents, if you have surplus cells from your repair kit, might we start a stem cell line with them. So although they do a very good job of discussing in the body of the text, please go back to the body of the text and read what they said there because they really short circuit the whole thing in their recommendations because the presumption in the recommendation is that we are taking the cells only for research. That was never the presumption, that we were taking the cells only for research. In closing, I would like to look again, and this is a different chart, but it shows the same sequence of events, come back to what we are proposing so there is no misunderstanding of what we are proposing. Again, I will go through what happens in normal fertilization, and then you have to imagine this is not occurring in the body of the mother, but it is occurring in a petri dish in a laboratory, in a fertility clinic. This is the ovary and this is the funnel end called the infundibulum and this is the fallopian tube, and we come down to the uterus. This is half of the uterus, and there is a mirror image on this on the other side. It takes about 10 days until the egg implants in the uterus. This is occurring now in the petri dish. We know at the 8-cell stage here that you can take a cell or two out, they have done it more than a thousand times, and get a perfectly normal baby after taking that cell or two out for preimplantation genetic diagnosis. There is the possibility, although the authors of the ``Alternative Sources of Pluripotent Stem Cells'' argue that it is probably not possible, but there is a faint possibility, perhaps, if you put this in the proper environment you might have another embryo. Therefore, you start the ethical argument all over again. But if you can wait, and I believe you can, if you wait until the inner cell mass to take that cell, now you have completely avoided that argument because at the inner cell mass there has already been enough differentiation that the cells in the inner cell mass will become the baby, but they can only become the baby if there are the cells in the trophoblast which will produce the decidua which is the amnion and the chorion, and they have not yet done this because there is no reason to do this. The inner cell mass stage is the stage at which the embryos are ordinarily taken to produce stem cell lines. Again, our bill deals only with animal experimentation in nonhuman primates, and those are the great apes which I emphasized previously were genetically very similar, and they are widely used in research that would affect humans to determine the efficacy and the safety of those procedures on humans. I would like to return for just a moment to the fundamentals of this debate: Christopher Reeves, Ronald Reagan, ever so many people out there that have diseases that one can imagine could be cured with applications of stem cell research. The real challenge is to be able to do that without what I think is a morally unacceptable procedure of destroying another potential human being in doing that. I know that there are 400,000 embryos out there. I know that not all of them will probably be implanted; but for any one of those embryos, Mr. Speaker, it could be implanted. It could be tomorrow's Albert Einstein; it could be tomorrow's Ronald Reagan. Mr. Speaker, I do not want to be in the position of making the decision that it is okay to take this potential baby, it is a life, to take this potential baby and destroy it because in doing so I might help some other people. We do not have to do that because as Dr. Coburn said in the Senate and as this letter from NIH says, it is completely feasible that we can reach these objectives by taking cells from an early embryo for the benefit of the embryo. Let me stress again that these cells would be taken at the parents' request to benefit their baby, to do a preimplantation genetic diagnosis to develop a repair kit. Mr. Speaker, it would be wonderful if the 6.5 million people in the world today had repair kits. How much human suffering could be alleviated by that. The parents would have made these three decisions: in vitro fertilization because they cannot have a baby otherwise; to do a preimplantation genetic diagnosis because they want a baby that is going to have the highest possible quality of life; and to develop a repair kit. It is only at that time that we would ask them if you have surplus cells from your repair kit, might we not start another stem cell line with them. Mr. Speaker, again, I want to emphasize that our bill is just preparatory to all of this because it deals with none of this. It deals only with the animal experimentation that would determine the efficacy of developing repair kits and stem cell lines from this early embryo. I hope my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, I have now cosponsors on both sides of the aisle, hopefully we will have a large number of cosponsors because this bill meets both the objectives and the objections of any Member who is concerned with the potential for embryonic stem cell application to medicine.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Chairman, I agree with the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Beauprez) that the Surface Ship Torpedo Defense program is extremely important for the protection of our high-value ships and sailors at sea. I will encourage the Navy to move expeditiously to field this system with the Anti-Torpedo Torpedo.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Chairman, before proceeding as chairman of the Subcommittee on Projection Forces, I believe it appropriate to underscore the magnificent service rendered the Nation by the men and women serving in our Armed Forces around the world who so steadfastly meet every challenge with true dedication and commitment. We thank each and every one of them for their service. And we thank all Americans, specifically the families of servicemembers, for their unwavering support of our servicemen and -women. History has repeatedly taught us that peace is only achieved through strength. We have sought to apply the lessons learned from the ongoing global operations to the committee markup of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2006 in order to strengthen our Armed Forces. Oceans cover three-quarters of the Earth's surface. The vast majority of the world's population lives within a few miles of a sea coast. Seventy percent of our trade moves by sea. Thus, maintaining America's naval superiority is an imperative. I am pleased to report that the National Defense Authorization Act that we will consider initiates a program to infuse our shipyards with leading-edge manufacturing technology and management systems that reduce shipbuilding costs and to return our shipyards to global competitiveness. We have also taken steps to confront excessive shipbuilding cost growth by capping costs on specific ship types, recognizing that both the Navy and industry must work together to design and build affordable ships with adequate capability. Authorization for Department of Defense programs within the jurisdiction of the Projection Forces Subcommittee are increased by $2.3 billion above the budget request. $538 million of the additional authorization is for programs on the military service chiefs' unfunded requirements list. Authorization is included for two additional Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers, an additional T-AKE ship, and to accelerate fielding of the new amphibious assault ship. This is three more ships than the budget requested. Also included is a recommendation to authorize a multi-year procurement for the C-17. We have also taken several initiatives to begin to address shortfalls in important requirements to the Department of Defense. These programs include: $418 million to accelerate the development of the amphibious assault ship replacement; $20 million to upgrade the fleet of B-2 bombers; $60 million to complete development and evaluation of the Affordable Weapon System, a low-cost cruise missile, and increased authorization for several procurement, research and development programs of the services. While there is much more to do, the National Defense Authorization Act of 2006 is an important step in making our country more secure. I urge all of my colleagues to support the bill. I would like to thank the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Taylor), ranking member of our subcommittee, for his extraordinary partnership, dedication, and support. I would like to thank all my colleagues on the subcommittee for their diligence, commitment, and hard work. I would like to also thank our chairman, the gentleman from California (Mr. Hunter), for his leadership, and our ranking member, the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Skelton). In conclusion, I would like to recognize the contributions and thank the many staff members for their invaluable assistance in preparing H.R. 1815.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Chairman, I would be happy to join my colleague in a colloquy.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, we have just heard an impassioned plea to proceed with embryonic stem cell research. Tomorrow we are going to vote on a bill that would expedite embryonic stem cell research. I have here the latest issue of Time magazine. It just arrived in our office, May 23, and the lead article in it says ``Why Bush's Ban Could Be Reversed.'' It is talking about stem cell research. In view of the interest all across America and in view of the fact that tomorrow we are going to be voting on a bill, I thought it might be well this evening to spend a few minutes putting this debate in context. What are stem cells? This is a new term to many Americans. Our first chart is a depiction of the development of early embryos and then all of the tissues in the body which develop from this embryo. The ultimate stem cell here is the zygote itself. The zygote is produced by the union of the egg from the mother and the sperm from the father. A stem cell is a cell which has the capability of differentiating into a number of other cells. Of course, that is the hope of embryonic stem cell research, that we might induce a cell to develop into a tissue, an organ or cells which will be useful in treating diseases. This is a very abbreviated depiction of the early development of the embryo because it skips the morula stage, and we will come back to that in a few moments because that is the stage where most of the attention is focused now. This goes from the zygote through the morula and finally, to the blastula and then to the gastrula. Here we see in the gastrula the development of what we call the germ layers. I guess you would say that a cell from each of these three germ layers, a cell from the endoderm, a cell from the mesoderm or a cell from the ectoderm, are all stem cells because they are destined to become a lot of different tissues and organs in the body. From the ectoderm develops our nervous system and the skin. From the mesoderm develops most of the mass of the body, all of the bones and all of the muscles, the heart, the red blood cells and so forth. And then the endoderm, although widely dispersed in the body represents less mass in the body because it is the lining of the lung and the digestive tract. My chart shows the germ cells, the sperm in the male and the egg in the female. Now there are cells in all of these that one could say were stem cells. Tissue, and blood is a tissue, the tissue which has the most obvious stem cell that students were taught at least 50 years ago when I first was studying these things, is the stem cell in the bone marrow from which a number of different blood cells develop. When you are working with adult stem cells, if you want something other than the organs from which this cell could differentiate, then you need to de-differentiate the cell. In other words, you need to convince the cell that it is not exactly what it is as a result of the development process, that it returns to its original undifferentiated, or relatively undifferentiated state, and then it can make other tissues. The embryonic stem cells philosophically certainly hold the most promise because they are cells from which all of the tissues and organs of the body develop. There is the rationale then that these embryonic stem cells hold the promise of producing anything and everything that might be needed for fighting diseases. There is enormous theoretical potential from working with stem cells. They are useful in treating diseases that result from tissue or organ deficiencies. We need to differentiate these diseases that result from the action of pathogens. There is a very large list of diseases that theoretically might be treated by stem cell application. Diabetes is one of those. It, by the way, represents the largest cost of all the diseases in this country. This is probably the one that in my experience is the most heart wrenching because I have seen these little children come to my office. Many times during the day and frequently at night they have to prick their finger, their hand, their ear lobe, something in their body to get a drop of blood, and now we have new instruments that require a pretty small drop of blood, and then this new almost miracle instrumentation analyzes that blood to see what the glucose content is so that they know how to set that pump. Many of them have embedded in their side a little hockey puck size pump that pumps insulin. This of all the diseases, Mr. Speaker, is the one that perhaps most obviously might lend itself to cure through stem cell research. Giving insulin to a diabetic does not cure the disease. It simply delays the inevitable. The person whether they are young or old will go on to have circulatory problems. They may lose their eyesight. Circulation in their legs may be so bad that their toes become gangrenous and have to be removed. When you see these little children come through your office suffering with this disease, your heart really goes out to them and you want to do everything that you possibly can to make sure that they have every potential for a healthy life. And they will not live so long, they will not live so well as the average person in spite of all the miracles of medicine today because insulin does not cure diabetes. But if through embryonic or adult, for that matter, if you could do it, stem cell research, if you could develop islet of Langerhan cells, you could then put them anywhere in the body. In our bodies, they reside in the pancreas. I am not sure why because what they do and what the pancreas does are two very different things. The pancreas secretes a large number of enzymes for digestion in the small intestine and the islet of Langerhan cells just happen to be resident there. They could be anywhere. They could be in your tongue, they could be in your toe, they could be in your ear lobe. They could be anywhere as long as there is a blood supply there to pick up the insulin that is made by these islet cells. There is a long list of diseases: multiple sclerosis, lateral sclerosis, Lou Gehrig's disease. I have personal familiarity with this because my grandmother died of this a number of years ago, and I remember as a little boy standing by her bedside as she deteriorated and finally the only way that she could communicate with us was by blinking her eyes. She could not move anything else. She had no other way to communicate with us. There is a hope, realizable, who knows, until we conduct the research and do the medical experimentation, but there is a hope that one might develop from stem cells tissues that could be injected into people with multiple sclerosis or lateral sclerosis. Sclerosis, by the way, means a scarring. What happens is that there is a scarring that inhibits the function of these nerves. Alzheimer's disease, that is frequently mentioned. That is a particularly tragic disease. Although it was not specifically diagnosed in my mother because she had other ailments that were easier to diagnose, she lived to be 92 and I am sure that she had Alzheimer's because she had many of the symptoms. It was really tragic to watch a woman who was very bright and vital lose her ability to remember, lose a sense of proportion, to be calling, Roscoe, Roscoe. I would say, I'm here. She said, oh, you're not Roscoe because my father was Roscoe, Sr. and she was way back 50 years earlier in her memory. There is a hope that stem cell research could help cure diseases like this. I have here a very large number of autoimmune diseases. There are 63 of them here. I have mentioned a couple of them. Autoimmune diseases are diseases where the body fails to recognize itself, that is, the parts of the body that have to do with recognizing foreign invaders and assimilating them, ejecting them, killing them. Very early in our embryonic development, we have a very special kind of life cell which we call T cells. Very early in embryonic development, they are imprinted with who you are. There are 6.5 billion of us in the world and these T cells are smart enough to recognize a difference. There may be somebody out there close to you, but nobody out there quite like you; and you try to take their body organ and put it in you, these T cells are going to recognize it as foreign and move to reject it. Sometimes for reasons we do not understand, these immune reactions in the body get confused, and they attack the body itself. We have a large number. Lupus was probably the first widely recognized of these diseases. What has happened is that when the body is attacked, the specific tissues of the body are attacked, they degenerate and become not useful. There is some evidence that the body develops an ability to recognize its own; and so the hope is that after this has happened, if you could replace the damaged tissues, that the person gets returned to normal function. There is enormous potential from use of stem cells, whether they are embryonic or adult, to cure many, many diseases. The argument today is about whether it should be adult stem cells or whether it should be embryonic stem cells. We have been working with adult stem cells, Mr. Speaker, for over 3 decades, and so there have been a fair number of applications to medicine. You will hear the figure 58. We have been working with embryonic stem cells a little over 6 years. There just has not been time to make those applications, but the fact that there are presently no applications to medicine of embryonic stem cell work does not mean that there will not be and it does not mean that those applications might not be more efficacious than adult stem cell applications. Indeed, if you will talk to the researchers and the experts in this area, they will all tell you to a man and to a woman that the potential for embryonic stem cell application to medicine should be greater than adult stem cell application just because embryonic stem cells, they are called totipotent, they can produce anything and everything that is in the body. The adult stem cells have already been differentiated, at least to some extent; and so they are limited in their potential application. There is another very interesting potential that I do not hear often discussed of embryonic stem cells. Fifty years ago when I was studying and teaching in this area, there was an experiment where the researcher went into a mother black mouse and took a little patch of skin in the uterus from one of her little black babies and then he took that little patch of skin, and he went into the uterus of a white mouse with her white babies, and he cut a little patch of skin out of the white mouse and put in that little patch of black skin and when the white mouse was born with that patch of black skin, it did not reject it. This gives the promise, Mr. Speaker, that there may be less rejection of tissues and organs developed from embryonic stem cells than from adult stem cells. I do not know whether this was a host or donor phenomenon. Both were embryos. All we know is that when the black skin was sewed onto the little embryonic mouse that there was no rejection. If you tried to do that after they were born, I do not know if we have determined at precisely what time they lose that ability, it certainly would have been rejected. The debate that we are going to vote on tomorrow and the debate which was the subject of the Special Order just before I spoke has to do with whether or not we can effect the needed cures in medicine from adult stem cells or whether we need to move to embryonic stem cells to make this happen. Early in this debate, I had a personal involvement which was kind of an interesting one. In a former life, I got a doctorate in human physiology. I taught medical school. I did medical research. I went out to NIH in 2001, before the President made his executive order. It was an information meeting at NIH where the scientists working in this field were briefing, they were largely staff members from the Hill. I think I was the only Member there. It occurred to me that you ought to be able to take cells from an early embryo without hurting the embryo, because nature has been doing that forever as far as we know. That is what happens in identical twinning. I would like to look at the next chart. This is two zygotes. This is not identical twinning. I just wanted to contrast this with identical twinning. This is where we have fraternal twins. They are so-called wombmates. They could be two boys, two girls, one of each. They are conceived at the same time. The mother that ordinarily sloughs one ovum a month this month sloughed two ovums and the sperm, and there are a whole lot of those, millions of them, they found both of them and they fertilized both of them and the uterus was receptive so they both were implanted in the uterus. This simply shows how they present at birth, depending upon how they implanted. If they are implanted far apart, they present one way at birth. If they are implanted very close together, they present another way at birth. The next chart shows twins from monozygotic twins, that is, from a single zygote, from a single egg. This presentation looks very much like the dizygotic, that is from two eggs, dizygotic twins that implanted in the uterus very close together. Knowing that in identical twinning, regardless at what stage it occurs and it can occur all the way from the two-cell stage clear up to the inner cell mass and there are several stages between these two, but no matter where it occurs, the embryo has lost half of its cells and both parts go on to produce a perfectly healthy baby. So I reasoned that it should be possible to take cells from an early embryo without hurting the early embryo and I asked the researchers at NIH, was that possible. They said, yes, of course that is possible. But with all the embryos out there that could be simply destroyed to get the stem cells, nobody had determined how easy this was to do. But they said that it certainly was doable. A little bit later, and this was again before the President gave his executive order, I met the President at an event and I told him very briefly that I had met with NIH, and there was this possibility that we could take cells from an early embryo without harming the embryo. He asked Karl Rove to follow up on that. Several days later, Karl Rove called me, Mr. Speaker, and he said, Roscoe, I went to NIH and I told them what you told the President, and they told me they cannot do that. I said, Karl, there is some problem here. Either they misunderstood your question or something because these are the same people that go into a single cell and take out the nucleus and put another nucleus in the cell. Of course they can go into a relatively large embryo and take out a cell or two. He went back to talk with them again and called me back and said, they are telling me the same thing. And so the President came out with his executive order which said that Federal funds could be used in research only on the cell lines that had been developed from embryos that had been killed in the process of developing them, that no new cell lines could begin with embryos that had to be killed. This is only with Federal money, of course. The private sector can do whatever it wishes because there is no law prohibiting the use of embryos. My concern, Mr. Speaker, is that we in Congress ought to be a player in this, and now we are standing on the sidelines. Mr. Speaker, I see that the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey) has joined us, and I yield to the gentleman.

Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate my colleague's coming and entering into this discussion. Before leaving this little experience with NIH, I will, Mr. Speaker, submit for the Record a letter which I received today from Dr. Battey, who is the spokesman for embryonic stem cell at NIH, and what the letter says is, and I will come back to it in a few moments to read a couple parts from it, that what we are proposing to do is certainly possible; that there is no medical or scientific impediment to doing this. I just wanted to put to bed the suggestion that NIH says what we are doing cannot be done in spite of the fact that that is what Karl Rove thought they said. In my office just a few months ago, NIH kind of sheepishly admitted that there was some misunderstanding in conversation because they had never said that we could not go into an early embryo and take a cell. What they had said, which is true, which is why I am proposing this research, was that we have never developed a stem cell line from that early an embryo. Ordinarily, we develop a stem cell line from the inner mass cell stage of the embryo. But the earlier we get the stem cell, the more totipotent it ought to be and the more efficacious it ought to be in treating the diseases. I have here, Mr. Speaker, a little diagram which shows the ontogeny, the development of the embryo. It begins, of course, with the egg that comes from the mother, the oocyte, and then the sperm, and it shows only four or five there. There will be millions there, I assure my colleagues. And there is really a miracle that occurs here because as soon as one of them penetrates that egg, there is a big barrier put up so that there is no other candidate. It would be quite disastrous if two of them penetrated that egg because that would create an embryo which would certainly die. And then the egg, called a zygote, goes on to develop, and it is two cells. And it may split here to make two babies, by the way, identical twins. And then the four-cell and then the eight-cell stage. It is at the eight-cell stage, and I am jumping a little ahead here, it is at the eight-cell stage in a petri dish. This is what happens in the body. If this kind of thing happens, they can fertilize it in a petri dish. It is at this eight-cell stage in more than 1,000 times now in clinics. It started in England. It is now in this country. They have gone into the eight-cell stage and taken out one cell. They might get two. And they then do a preimplantation genetic diagnosis on that. In other words, they determine whether or not there are any genetic defects like Down's disease, for instance, in which case they would not want to implant that embryo. They do this for the benefit of their baby because one would not want, if they had a choice, to bring a child into the world that was going to have a less than optimum quality of life because they had a genetic defect. This is not genetic engineering. Genetic engineering is when they change the genetics. All they are doing here is seeing what genetics are there, and if there is no deficiency in the genetics, they implant the six or seven cells that remain, and more than 1,000 times they have had a normal baby. All of this happened in the intervening years between 2001 and now. This may have been going on when I talked to the President and when I talked to NIH. I did not know that it was going on, but just a few months ago, this report came out, and now I spent the other day, for a half-hour, probably, talking with two investigators here in Virginia who are doing this. I just want to spend a couple of moments talking about the debate. The debate is between the use of discarded embryos that the proponents, and that is what the bill is tomorrow, say are going to be thrown away anyhow and why do we not get some good from them by developing stem cell lines from them since they are going to be discarded anyhow? The argument on the other side is twofold. First of all, it is not certain they are going to be discarded because they can be adopted. What is it? Operation Snowflake where parents can adopt one of these embryos and have them implanted in a mother other than the one from whom the ovum was taken. So it is not certain that they are going to be discarded. The other challenge to this is that this is a life. In the proper environment, this is a human being. It is an embryo. Put it in the mother's womb, and it will become a very distinct human being, unlike any other out of the 6.5 billion people in the world. And there are those who feel that it is immoral. The President is among them, and he has said this, that it is immoral to take one life so that we might help another. The good news is, as the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey) said, we do not have to do that because we can take cells from an early embryo without hurting the embryo. By the way, umbilical cord blood stem cells are not an alternative to embryonic stem cells. Just a little quote here. This is from a scientist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, one of the best medical schools in the world: ``As a physician-scientist who has done research involving umbilical cord blood stem cells for over 20 years, I am frequently surprised by the thought from nonscientists that cord blood stem cells may provide an alternative to embryonic stem cells for research. This is simply wrong,'' he says. Do they have a place in treating? Yes, they do. But they are not a substitute for embryonic stem cells, and he makes that very plain. Opponents of embryonic stem cell research suggested that 58 diseases have been successfully treated using adult stem cells. That is true. I asked NIH, is that true that we had 58 treatments from adult stem cells and none from embryonic stem cells? They said yes, that is true. I said, why is that true? That is true because we have had more than 3 decades' experience with adult stem cells, and just a little over 6 years' experience with embryonic stem cells. There simply has not been time. All of the 58 listed, all of them, are represented by organizations that support stem cell research. So what this says is that all of those physicians that are involved with these 58 applications of adult stem cells, all of them support stem cell research. The argument on the other side is that it is immoral, that we should not take one life to support another life; and in making those claims, they state the following: this kills human embryos. It does. You may not think that is a problem. You may not see this little bit of life that holds the miracle of chromosomes and against that will develop the whole unique individual, not like any other. Out of 6.5 billion in the world, you may not see that as human life, but it clearly is. It kills a human embryo. You may be okay with that, you may not be, but a great number of people are not okay with that. They argue that H.R. 810, which is the bill we will be voting on tomorrow, is an empty promise because the embryonic stem cells have not treated a single human disease, and that is true. We just gave the reason for it: they have not been worked with long enough to know whether they can treat a disease or not. H.R. 810 does not have 400,000 discarded embryos to use, that is true; and the statement is made that if you used these 400,000 embryos, you would only get 275 stem cell lines, and that is because only 2.8 percent of them have been donated for research. That gets you down to 11,000, not 400,000. Only 65 percent of those will survive the thawing. They are frozen. This is not an event that is not traumatic. It is very traumatic to the embryos. A third of them do not survive the freezing and rethawing. Twenty-five percent of those that are still alive after they thaw, only 25 percent will go on through this development stage, through the blastula, gastrula and so forth, so they can be implanted. Then, even if it has gone that far, in one trial only one out of 18 attempts produced a stem cell line, and in another trial only three out of 40 produced a stem cell line. So that now gets you down to about 275. Yes, we have not developed perfection yet in these techniques; but 275 stem cell lines is more than 10 times more than all the stem cell lines we have now, which, by the way, I think are almost all in this country contaminated with mouse feeder cells. I see that we have been joined by my colleague from Nebraska. I would be happy to yield to the gentleman from Nebraska (Mr. Osborne) for his comments.