The Battle of the Ban

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: