Free Nothing Is Impossible by Christopher Reeve Page B

spinal cord patient could travel to England for therapy, then return to the United States,
walk
off the airplane, and be arrested on the spot. Senators EdwardKennedy and Dianne Feinstein countered with a far more rational bill, S.1758, which would criminalize reproductive cloning but allow therapeutic cloning to proceed, funded and regulated by the NIH. In March 2002 I testified before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, stating in part:
    Any powerful new technology comes with the potential for abuse. But when we decide that the benefit to society is worth the risk, we take every possible precaution and go forward. The unfertilized eggs that will be used for nucleus transplantation (aka therapeutic cloning) will never leave the laboratory and will never be implanted in a womb. But if we don’t make this research legal, if we don’t use government funding and oversight, it will happen privately, dangerously unregulated and uncontrolled.
    Our country is about to lose its preeminence in science and medicine. We took a giant step backwards in the 1970s when the NIH was not allowed to fund in vitro research until an advisory commission could be formed to consider the issue. In the meantime there was rapid progress in England and the first “test tube baby” was born in 1978. For purely political reasons we did not succeeduntil 1981. Now IV clinics are commonplace; so far 177,000 children have been conceived in 400 facilities around the country.
    Today human trials using cloned human embryos to defeat Parkinson’s are under way in Sweden. In Israel macrophages, scavenger cells that eat debris in the body, are being used to repair the damaged spinal cord within two weeks of injury. The first human subject was a nineteen-year-old girl from Colorado. Last week the House of Lords in the UK passed legislation permitting research on cloned human embryos for the second time.
    Those are not rogue nations behaving irresponsibly. They are allies, no less moral than we are. If we act now, we still have a chance to catch up. I urge the Senate to defeat Senator Brownback’s bill S.1899 and pass S.1758.
    When I started out as a patient advocate, I thought the major obstacles to achieving a cure for spinal cord injury would be a lack of funding and a shortage of scientists willing to dedicate their careers to an orphan condition. As it turned out, those would not be the problems. NIH × 2 actually succeeded: in 1998 the NIH research budget was $12 billion, but the budget for FY 2003 is just over $27.2 billion. Today regenerative medicineis attracting thousands of young postdocs all over the world who believe that effective therapies for Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, brain injury, stroke, MS, ALS, and other disorders of the central nervous system can be achieved. Instead, the main obstacle is the controversy over embryonic stem cells and therapeutic cloning. The NIH has not been allowed to fund a single grant for embryonic stem cell research using excess embryos from IVF clinics. Because of the questionable viability of the stem cell lines approved by President Bush, for many months the NIH received an alarmingly low number of grant applications, even though Health and Human Services secretary Tommy Thompson stated that some $15 million was available. By May 2002 the restrictions had eased considerably. An additional seventeen lines had been created without mouse feeder cells and the number of grant applications increased dramatically, even though the issue of therapeutic cloning remained unresolved.
    I’ve often talked about the transition I have to make almost every morning: I have to emerge from the dreams in which I’m completely healthy and able to do anything and adjust to the reality of paralysis. In the weeks and months after my injury, that transition was often very difficult. After a few years it became less so, because I believed that the scientists were progressingwell, that more funding would become