Tom Harkin

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, how much time remains?

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, we are getting close to the end of the debate, we have some floor time in the next hour or so to go back and forth. I thought I might take a few moments now to talk about why it is so necessary to have NIH do this kind of research, to oversee this research. The Senator from Oklahoma said that a lot of research is going on now on embryonic stem cells. To be sure, it is. It is going on in different States, in private institutions, in England and Australia and France and Japan and Singapore and a few other countries. Why do we want to get the Federal Government involved? First, there is no other area of medical research in which we say the Federal Government should step aside and let the States do it. I know of no other area of medical research. I always look at the human genome project. What if we had said to the States: We are not going to do it. You do it. They might have sequenced one gene or another or let the private sector do it. They would have been getting patents on it or everything like. Now we have the mapping and sequencing of the entire human gene, and you can go online and get it, free to everybody. Any researcher anywhere can get it. Now they may take that and develop it into drugs and therapies. That is fine. That is that sort of symbiotic relationship we have developed very well between the private pharmaceutical industry and the basic research industry, which is NIH. Again, our National Institutes of Health should be involved in overseeing this, because if we don't have a coherent Federal policy on stem cells, each State writes its own rules. That means that different States may have different ethical guidelines. One State would be different from another. You would wind up with a patchwork quilt of laws. Then you would wind up with States competing against each other. So California gets to doing stem cell research, and what it does is, it hires researchers away from Missouri. Then Missouri is hiring people away from Iowa and then Ohio. Then New York is trying to bid people away from Ohio. You get this terrible State-versus-State kind of competition in stem cell research. We don't want that. We ought to be doing it on a national basis, a national effort, and we should not lose the international leadership we have always had in biomedical research. Should we give it up to Singapore or to Korea or England? No. We have always been the leader in the world in biomedical research, and we should continue. Secondly, the issue of why we have to expand our stem cell policy. Again, I repeat, for the sake of emphasis, of those 78 cell lines that were supposedly available on August 9, 2001, only 21 have been available. A lot of them are sick. They are not propagating properly. They are unhealthy. Right now NIH is only using between four and six of these lines and even they, I have been told, are not very healthy. So the restrictions we have had by the Bush administration, since August 9, 2001, have resulted in a situation where fewer and fewer viable good stem cell lines are available for NIH researchers. However, during that same period of time in other sectors, we have derived over 400 different cell lines. Yet no one who gets NIH funding is able to do any research on these healthy embryonic stem cell lines. That is why we need to develop these. We need to expand it. That is what S. 5 does. S. 5 takes off the handcuffs. It lets us use, under strict ethical guidelines, those embryos that are slated to be discarded at IVF clinics. With all due respect to my friend from Georgia, S. 30 does not do that. S. 5, if passed, will do everything that S. 30 wants to do. If S. 5 passes, what they want to do in S. 30 can be done by NIH. The problem with S. 30 is, if S. 30 passes and S. 5 doesn't, then S. 30 is very limited. It says you can only use these few embryos that are naturally dead which, by the way, I don't think there is such a scientific term, but it has been bandied about here and it is in the bill. There is no such scientific delineation of what is naturally dead. So that is the situation we are in. S. 5 will do both. It will open new stem cell lines with ethical guidelines. It will allow them to extract stem cells from these nonviable embryos. S. 30 will not. S. 30 still will not permit us to get the healthy stem cell lines our researchers need. That is why we need to pass S. 5. Mr. President, how much time do I have remaining?

Mr. HARKIN. I will conclude my 2\1/2\ minutes then by referring to the other chart. Again, we have to keep in mind that the policy now in effect, the policy in effect right now says we could use Federal money to examine and do research on embryonic stem cells that were derived prior to 9 p.m., August 9, 2001. But we can't use Federal money to examine or to do research on stem cells derived after 9 p.m., August 9, 2001. Those are morally unacceptable. Before 9 p.m., August 9, 2001, that is morally OK. After 9 p.m., it is not morally OK. Who decided that 9 p.m. on August 9, 2001, was some kind of moral dividing line, that stem cells derived before that, that is OK, but stem cells derived after that, that is not OK? Only one person decided that, and that was President Bush. The people of this country didn't decide that. Ethicists didn't decide that. Theologians didn't decide that. Scientists didn't decide that. President Bush decided that. It is sheer hypocrisy to say we can fund those before, but we can't fund those after. That is the situation we find ourselves in today. Let's take off the handcuffs. Let's get rid of that fake moral dividing line that has no substance in reality and let's get on with finding the cures for people with Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and spinal cord injuries. That is what S. 5 is all about. I yield the floor.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, how much time do we have remaining?

Mr. HARKIN. I yield until 3:45 to the Senator from New York, Senator Schumer.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, again, let me ask, we have, I guess, 20 minutes; is that right?

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Senator Stevens be added as a cosponsor of S. 5.

Mr. HARKIN. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Maryland for her very eloquent statement and for her strong support of hope and health and healing, as encompassed in S. 5. Mr. President, while I wait the arrival of our next speaker, I want to point out that time and time again I hear those who are opposed to S. 5 use the phrase that they are opposed to funds being used for the destruction of embryos. Earlier today I had corrected one Senator who said that. I said: Show me in the bill where it is. Well, then other Senators--the Senator from Kansas and others--have gotten up and talked about not using money for the destruction of embryos. I challenge anyone, any Senator to come and take S. 5 and show me anywhere in there where there is one dime used for the destruction of embryos. It is not there. I get the feeling that a misrepresentation repeated and repeated somehow seems to take hold so that people say: Well, there must be money for the destruction of embryos in this bill. There is not. That is covered by the Dickey-Wicker amendment which pertains to appropriations bills, and I am an appropriator, and that is covered there. So none of this money is used for the destruction of an embryo. All it is used for is for the research on stem cells that have been derived, which is what is being done today, by the way--which are derived. Now, those derivations can come from private entities or State sponsored or wherever, maybe some international, maybe foreign countries--wherever. But none of the money here in our bill, S. 5, can be used for the destruction of an embryo, period. If anyone says so, please come and show us where it is in the bill that says that. Mr. President, I see the distinguished Senator from Missouri is here. I yield 15 minutes to the Senator from Missouri.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. HARKIN. Yes. I yield 5 minutes to the Senator from Utah.

Mr. HARKIN. I thank the Senator from Missouri for a very eloquent and poignant statement. I know the Senator mentioned that recently she came off a campaign in Missouri. I know that, in listening to her statement, she is reflecting the wishes and hopes of so many people in her own State who want to make sure we move ahead and find cures and treatments. I thank her for her eloquence and for her forthright statement on behalf of embryonic stem cell research. Mr. President, I now yield 10 minutes to the distinguished Senator from Colorado.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I thank my colleague, my friend from Utah, for a very strong, very powerful, poignant statement. There has been no stronger leader in this Senate on health, life issues than Senator Hatch. I thank him for his support of S. 5. Mr. President, I yield 5 minutes to Senator Smith of Oregon.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, how much time remains?

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, first, I say to my friend from Tennessee, there is not one dime in S. 5 that would be permitted to be used for the destruction of embryos--not one dime. That is prohibited by the Dickey-Wicker amendment. This bill does not override that amendment. Not one dime in this bill can ever be used for the destruction of any embryos. I just want to make that very clear. Mr. President, I yield 20 minutes to my colleague, someone with whom I have worked on health issues now going back--let me think about this--almost 13 years, I guess, back to 1993, someone with whom I have worked very closely on a number of health issues and for whom I have a great deal of respect for his approach on this issue and so many others. I yield 20 minutes to the distinguished Senator from Utah, Mr. Hatch.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I yield 13 minutes to the distinguished Senator from Oregon, Mr. Smith.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, how much time do I have remaining?

Mr. HARKIN. Yes. We will yield 5 minutes to the Senator.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I yield 10 minutes to the Senator from Massachusetts.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I yield 20 minutes to the Senator from North Dakota. How much time do we have remaining on our side?

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, before I yield the floor to my colleague from Massachusetts, I just want to again bring people up to speed as to where we are in this debate. We will debate the two bills again today, S. 5 and S. 30, all day. We will have two votes later today at a time to be determined by the leaders but I think right prior to 6 p.m, the first vote occurring on S. 5, an up-or-down vote without amendments, and after that would be an up-or-down vote on S. 30, without amendments. I intend to take some time this morning, after the Senator from Massachusetts speaks, again to outline the differences in the two bills, why S. 5 is a preferable bill and why that should be the bill we pass and send to the President for his signature and to point out that S. 5 is truly the compromise bill. I want everyone to know that. There was some talk that S. 30 should be the compromise. Let me point out for clarity that last year we passed the stem cell research bill. There was another bill offered on the floor at the same time called the Specter-Santorum bill. That bill was supported by the Bush administration. Both bills passed, but the Specter-Santorum bill never made it through the House, and therefore the President was given the stem cell research bill. He vetoed it. He exercised the only veto of his administration to veto the stem cell bill. In order to reach out a hand of compromise to the White House, we then incorporated in our bill, S. 5, today, the Specter-Santorum bill of last year, which is part of S. 5. So it seems to me we have gone halfway at least in reaching out to the White House to provide a compromise situation. Now the White House says they want to compromise further. They want something else. You can keep this up until there is nothing left of the stem cell bill. I wish to make it very clear that we have compromised. We have come halfway. We incorporated the bill the President supported last year, so S. 5 really is the compromise measure we are sending to the President. Mr. President, I yield 10 minutes or whatever time he requires to the Senator from Massachusetts.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I thank my colleague from North Dakota for a very eloquent statement about what this is all about. I thank him for that. I thank him for his strong support of S. 5, our legislation to basically do what he encapsulated by saying this is about saving lives. That is what it is all about. I ask unanimous consent that the previous order be modified to provide that the vote on passage of S. 5 occur at 5:55 p.m., that the Republican leader be recognized at 5:25 p.m., with the other provisions remaining in order; provided further, that the additional 10 minutes be equally divided between Senators Harkin and Coleman, Isakson, and Senator Brownback, or their designees.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I concur with my friend from Georgia in that if people want to speak, they should come over now. We have a list of speakers, and I think Senator Isakson does, too, for later on in the day. I can only say to Senators, as the clock ticks, your time is going to get squeezed more and more. So that if you are scheduled to speak for, say, 10 minutes this afternoon, you may get squeezed to 3 minutes or 2 minutes or 1 minute. So if you would like to have your say about this embryonic stem cell bill, I would say now would be the time to come over. I say to all the Senators who may be in their offices right now, call the cloakrooms, and we will make the time available right now. Mr. President, what is the situation, might I ask, right now with the time existing?

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.