If you believe in the slippery slope here, it means that our entire society is perched on the slippery slope. It means that regulation has no value w… - Christopher Reeve

[W]hile the budget for research is negotiated annually on Capitol Hill, Alzheimer's has crippled 4 million Americans. This disease alone costs our nation 100 billion dollars every year and this number is expected to rise dramatically as baby boomers continue to age. Parkinson's afflicts nearly half a million Americans and costs us at least 6 million a year. Another half million Americans suffer strokes each year, costing more than 30 million in medical treatment, rehabilitation, and long-term care. Diabetes afflicts nearly 16 million people. It is the leading cause of blindness, kidney disease, and limb amputations; and it costs our nation between 90 and 140 billion dollars a year.

So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable.

[Y]ou have to understand that therapeutic cloning is a very nascent technology that's not ready for use in humans. But knowing that it will not . . . provided our scientists are allowed to go ahead with the research, it really shouldn't take that long before they're ready for humans. However, knowing that there is a better technology out there than just using embryonic stemcells, he as a doctor feels, given the immune rejection problem for people with spinal cord injuries, he's not going to go ahead, as he had planned to. There was a plan to actually use embryonic stem cells as soon as it would be allowed by the FDA. He is not going to do that until therapeutic cloning gets to the point where it could be applied to humans. And I just want to make one other very quick comment and that is in England, just a month ago, Dr. Ann Bishop, who works with the tissue engineering corporation over there, was able to take mouse embryonic stem cells that derived . . . had been made obviously therapeutic cloning, and they turned those cells into tissue that is applied to the lungs, to deficient cell types or cell tissues in the lungs, and said, have already reported, I guess it's public knowledge, that they feel they are now ready to do it in humans, so the idea that it would be decades before you could get to human application, I think that is one example I'm giving you right now of the fact that that's not true. I can give you another example. Doctor Oswald Stewart, of the Reeve Research Center, UC Irvine has said that you could probably get to the use of therapeutic cloning in humans within about three to five years. So I absolutely dispute the time line that's been put up before.