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Republican Senator Plans to Show His Anger Over Bush's Stem Cell Restrictions
By Laurie Kellman
Associated Press Writer
12 July 2005
WASHINGTON (AP) - A Republican senator who is suffering from cancer said he plans to take public his anger over the government's restrictions on funding for studies on human embryonic stem cells.
"I think it's time that a little hell was raised about this subject," Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, said in a telephone interview Monday.
That time will arrive Tuesday, Specter said, when he gavels open the Senate's first hearing on his bill to lift President George W. Bush's restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. It carries the greatest promise among such studies searching for cures to Alzheimer's disease and other ailments.
Set to testify Tuesday are four scientists whose research -- to date neither published nor performed on human cells -- could receive federal funding instead as alternatives to using human embryonic stem cells.
Bush and conservatives who believe studies on human embryos are immoral are considering bills to pay for such research in part to peel votes from Specter's bill.
That makes the Pennsylvania Republican, bald and gravelly voiced from cancer treatments, angry.
"Yeah, well, I am, as a matter of fact," Specter said. "Try a few chemotherapy treatments and see how you feel" watching the debate over medical funding.
Whatever the scientists have to say at the Labor, Health and Human Services subcommittee hearing, Specter wants his bill signed into law and federal money flowing to studies on human embryonic stem cells.
"The potential for stem cells has been held in abeyance much too long," he said.
Specter has plans beyond the hearing. He said he will lift his self-imposed ban on discussing personal matters on the Senate floor and frame the debate in intimate terms -- including a "long list of my medicines and my ailments."
"And I'd like to see a million-person march on the Mall," Specter said. "That's an idea that has run through my chemotherapy-occupied cerebrum."
Bush halted federal funding for embryonic stem cell research on lines not already developed by Aug. 9, 2001, saying that taxpayers should not be forced to fund research that many find immoral. Other senators agree and are considering offering as many as five alternatives to Specter's bill, preferring to finance science that meets their ethical standards even if it is in its infancy.
"We certainly appreciate the strong emotions on all sides of this very sensitive debate, and that's precisely why the president believes that we should think carefully and long and hard about these decisions," said White House spokesman Trent Duffy.
"I don't want to see us destroy additional human lives with taxpayer dollars," said Sen. Sam Brownback, a Kansas Republican, who may offer one of the alternatives debated on the Senate floor.
Leon Kass, chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, declined Specter's invitation to testify on the panel's report in May on four theoretical alternatives to human embryonic stem cell research, citing scheduling conflicts.
"I know the guy from the White House did not want to testify, which is his business," Specter said. "But we're going to go right about our business."
That starts with the hearing Tuesday and a press conference Wednesday featuring actor Michael J. Fox, who has Parkinson's disease, and actress Dana Reeve, whose late husband, "Superman" star Christopher Reeve, suffered a devastating spinal cord injury.
Among those scheduled to testify Tuesday is James Battey, chairman of the National Institutes of Health Stem Cell Task Force, who will discuss four alternative research procedures on stem cells. Robert Lanza, vice president of medical and scientific research for Advanced Cell Technology, will discuss his research into deriving stem cells from a single animal cell without destroying the embryo.
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On the Net:
U.S. Senate: http://www.senate.gov
President's Council on Bioethics: http://www.bioethics.gov
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