Parkinson's disease
A 57-year-old patient's motor skills improved markedly after he received neural stem cells harvested from his own brain, according to a report in April 2002 presented at the American Association of Neurological Surgeons' annual meeting in Chicago.
Multiple sclerosis
Eighty percent of patients with advanced MS showed mild improvement after receiving their own previously collected stem cells, according to researchers at the University of Washington Medical Center.
Weldon introduced his bill (H.R. 234) just after the 108th Congress was sworn in. His ally in the Senate, Republican Sam Brownback of Kansas, submitted an identical bill (S. 245) three weeks later. But even with Republican control of the Senate, Weldon and Brownback face a difficult task: how to make the dangers of cloning vivid and compelling enough for the 20-odd swing votes in the Senate to gain a majority and pass a ban.
The next day, Brownback chaired a Senate subcommittee hearing on cloning that revealed just how low a standard some members of Congress are prepared to adopt. Leading the way was Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. He testified that, while he opposes "reproductive" cloning ― creating a clone and allowing it to live ― he supports "therapeutic" cloning ― creating a clone and killing it under "strict moral and ethical guidelines."
Hatch is a co-sponsor with Sens. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, of a bill by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., that would permit therapeutic cloning.
Combating the Illogical How does a senator who once sponsored a constitutional amendment outlawing abortion justify cloning and killing a human embryo?
Hatch left the subcommittee hearing without taking questions from Brownback or other senators on the panel, but he read from his prepared statement that "human life does not begin in the petri dish. I believe that human life requires and begins in a mother's nurturing womb," a conclusion he reached "after many conversations with scientists, ethicists, patient advocates and religious leaders and many hours of thought, reflection and prayer."
Weldon told Citizen in an interview before the hearing that such reasoning is illogical. What makes an embryo distinctly human, he said, is not its location or method of production but its genetic profile.
Brownback, speaking at the subcommittee hearing, described the distinction between therapeutic and reproductive cloning as "misleading."
"However one would like to describe the process of destructive cloning, it is certainly not therapeutic for the clone who's been created and then disemboweled," he said.
Brownback later introduced another ally as a committee witness ― Leon Kass, chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, which last July called for a four-year moratorium on human cloning.
"I offer four objections to human cloning to produce children," Kass testified. "One, it involves unethical experimentation on the unborn. Two, it threatens identity and individuality. Three, it turns procreation into manufacture. And four, it means despotism over children * giving one generation unprecedented control over the next and marking a major step toward a eugenic world in which children become objects of manipulation and products of will."
The subcommittee's ranking Democrat, Ron Wyden of Oregon, challenged Kass' caution, insisting that "suffering Americans" cannot afford to wait for Congress to sort out its moral and ethical concerns.
"All of those with Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and these dread diseases, they want to see the federal government get behind them," Wyden said. "They want to see the federal government go out and push as hard as it possibly can to find these cures."
Kass leaned forward, his voice quickening:
"Look, I don't think I take second place in the concern for the needs of suffering humanity. * One runs a terrible risk of cruelly exploiting the needs and wishes of patients with the promise that the cures are just around the corner. We don't know." Earlier, Kass was even more emphatic, describing the idea of embryonic stem-cell therapy as a "pipe dream."
