Even after former President Bill Clinton gave direct authority to fund human embryo research in 1993, a recent CNN interview reveals he may be confused about what a human embryonic stem cell is.
In an interview yesterday with Dr. Sanjay Gupta, chief medical correspondent for CNN, Clinton said Americans should support President Obama’s decision to lift federal funding limits on the research if the embryos cannot “be fertilized and become little babies.”
Gupta asked Clinton, “[L]et me just ask you, as someone who studied this, is this going to always be as divisive an issue as it is now? Is this going to be the abortion of the next generation? Or are people going to come around?”
Clinton told Gupta, “If it’s obvious that we’re not taking embryos that can – that under any conceivable scenario would be used for a process that would allow them to be fertilized and become little babies, and I think if it’s obvious that we’re not talking about some science fiction cloning of human beings, then I think the American people will support this.”
When Gupta asked Clinton if he had any reservations about the research, the former president called the choice to use “unfertilized embryos” a “pro-life decision.”
“I don’t know that I have any reservations, but I was – he has apparently decided to leave to the relevant professional committees the definition of which frozen embryos are basically going to be discarded, because they’re not going to be fertilized,” he said. “I think the American people believe it’s a pro-life decision to use an embryo that’s frozen that’s never going to be fertilized for embryonic stem cell research. …”
Clinton said scientists must be careful to use only embryos that “have been placed beyond the pale of being fertilized before their use.”
 Human embroyo at approximately five weeks |
During the interview, Gupta, a neurosurgeon and Obama’s former pick for surgeon general, failed to clarify that a human embryo is by definition an egg that has been fertilized for several days and that creation of stem cell lines requires its destruction.
In 1993, Clinton signed legislation authorizing the National Institutes of Health authority to begin conducting and funding human embryo research for the first time. Two years later, Congress passed the Dickey-Wicker Amendment, banning creation or destruction of embryos for research purposes using federal funds. But on Aug. 2, 2001, President George Bush announced his decision to allow federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research for only a small number of existing stem cell lines.
On March 9, Obama issued an executive order allowing taxpayer funds to be used for expanded embryonic stem cell research.
Obama’s order comes in the face of scientific evidence that more than two decades of embryonic stem cell research have failed to produce medically valuable results, while adult stem cell research has resulted in successful medical treatments for a wide range of illnesses.
WND reported the Food and Drug Administration approved within three days of President Obama’s inauguration the first permission ever granted to begin testing embryonic stem cell treatments on human subjects. The FDA approved an application from Geron Corporation, based in Menlo Park, Calif., to inject stem cells derived from human embryos into people paralyzed from the chest down by spinal cord injuries.
WND also reported that the medical journal PLoS Medicine recently detailed the case of a boy treated for a rare condition with fetal stem cell injections who developed cancerous tumors as a result.
In this week’s CNN interview, Clinton suggested he would oppose stem cell experimentation if there were any chance that an embryo – a fertilized egg with DNA of two parents – could become a human being.
“But there are values involved that we all ought to feel free to discuss in all scientific research,” he told Gupta. “And that is the one thing that I think these committees need to make it clear that they’re not going to fool with any embryos where there’s any possibility, even if it’s somewhat remote, that they could be fertilized and become human beings.”
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