Congressman Dave Weldon is a Florida physician who's persuaded the House of Representatives once already to ban all human cloning, but today he's in a crowded Senate hearing room on the other side of the Capitol, lifting a thick notebook for senators, media and spectators to see. The notebook contains 80 studies that show the success of adult stem-cell therapy, studies he thinks should persuade the Senate to prohibit research involving stem cells extracted from cloned human embryos.
"I've got adult stem-cell successes for brain damage," Weldon tells the Subcommittee on Science, Technology and Space. "I've got adult stem-cell successes for cancer. I've got adult stem-cell successes for cerebral palsy, adult stem-cell successes for diabetes, adult stem-cell successes for eye disease, adult stem-cell successes for heart disease. I mean, it's not like if you take the time and look at the medical literature, there isn't a lot of evidence here."
Setting down the notebook, Weldon draws a bright red zero on a piece of cardboard and holds it up.
"There's zero [successes] using embryonic stem cells, zero using embryonic stem cells in humans, zero using [cloned cells] in humans. For animal [studies], it's the same number."
Then Weldon gets personal.
"I'm a physician. I took care of hundreds of patients with Parkinson's disease, paralysis, diabetes," he says. "I had an uncle I was very close to [who] died of Parkinson's disease. My father died of the complications of diabetes. And so I just want to set the record straight. I do not pursue this in a trivial fashion. If it were scientifically valid to make the claims that there are all these great promises of cloning, I would very, very seriously look at that."
Weldon is talking to the Senate because that's where his effort to ban cloning died last year. Then-Majority Leader Tom Daschle, the South Dakota Democrat, reneged on a promise to bring a cloning ban to a vote.
Now Bill Frist, the Republican from Tennessee, runs the Senate, and he could bring anti-cloning legislation to a vote any day ― perhaps as early as the week this edition is scheduled to arrive in homes, in mid-March.
Expert Witness
Congressman David Weldon, from Florida's 15th district, including Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center―launch site for the shuttle:
CREDENTIALS
* Degree in internal medicine from the State University of New York at Buffalo.
* Residency in internal medicine at Letterman Army Medical Center, San Francisco, where he treated AIDS patients in the early 1980s, before physicians knew much about the disease.
* Practiced medicine at Melbourne (Fla.) Internal Medicine Associates, where he treated people with Parkinson's disease and multiple sclerosis.
* Still sees patients one day a month at the Veterans Administration clinic in his district.
EVIDENCE Eighty studies showing success using adult stem cells in treating:
Cancer
British media reported last June that a male nurse, 31-year-old Stephen Knox, was cured of leukemia after receiving an injection of stem cells from umbilical cord blood.
A British medical journal, The Lancet, reported in January 2002 that a 52-year-old woman with severe cancer of the thymus gland showed significant improvement after she received a transfusion of stem cells from her daughter.
Diabetes
David Ellis, a 44-year-old diabetic in Spokane, Wash., has cut his insulin doses in half since receiving an infusion of islet cells obtained from the pancreases of cadavers.
Eye disease
The clinical journal Ophthalmology reported last July that stems cells obtained from one eye can help reconstruct the damaged cornea of a patient's other eye.
Heart disease
Doctors in Germany reported in January that they injected stem cells in six patients' hearts and found five experienced improved blood flow.
