Iowa Congressman Steve King says those who’re pushing a bill to expanded stem cell research are wrongly saying there’s a need for federal funding. King, a republican from Kiron, says he voted against the stem cell bill that passed the House.He says, “There’s no prohibition towards experimenting with stem cells in the United States. The private sector can do whatever they choose to do with regard to those experiments. So the debate isn’t about whether we will experiment on embryonic stem cells, it’s about whether we’re going to compel taxpayers to fund that. One of the reasons scientists are coming to Congress and asking for public funding is because the success of the embryonic stem cell research hasn’t earned private sector dollar support.” Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, a democrat, is pushing the Senate to quickly take up the stem cell bill. King says research on adult stem cells and umbilical cord cells has proven to be more successful. He says, “We did also pass legislation to federally fund adult stem cell research, umbilical cord research, because those, that type of research has produced cures or partial cures in at least 58 different diseases. We can name the patients that have been helped. Tom Harkin can’t name a single patient that has been helped by embryonic stem cell research.”King says embryonic stem cell research ends what could be a human life, while the other stem cell research does not. He says, “We’re asking people to subsidize the ending of human life in the form of embryos so we can experiment on them. This is the first time in history that we’ve passed an appropriation for money to do that.” Supporters say there are embryos available for research that are going to be discarded — but King disagrees. He says,”The 400-thousand embryos that’re continually cited by Tom Harkin and the people on his side of this argument, do not equate into 400-thousand stem cell lines. They don’t even equate into 400-thousand embryos. All but 11-thousand are spoken for. They’re wanted by the people who have control of them.” King says the embryos wanted for research are more than tissue for research. He says he held in his arms three little boys that had been frozen embryos for nine years and are now healthy boys. He says there we shouldn’t experiment on them and there are other things we can do to help people. King says those against the House bill easily have the votes to sustain a presidential veto of the bill. King says the opposition to embryonic stem cell research is growing and “I do not believe that we will federally fund experimenting on human embryos.”
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