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Mr. Chairman, thank you for your leadership on this issue. And thank you for expediting the committee's work, at my request, to move this very important legislation drafted by our colleague from Michigan, Vern Ehlers. Vern is a trained physicist who has devoted considerable time to this issue, and he deserves great credit for his foresight and thoughtful draftsmanship. Mr. Chairman, my message to the Committee is simple. Cloning humans is wrong. It should be banned permanently, without loopholes, throughout the United States. We can ban human cloning without undermining promising and ethical health research. This strikes me as a perfectly reasonable position. But to listen to the reactions from various quarters, you would think I was advocating a ban on sunshine. Senator Harkin on the Senate floor compared me to Pope Paul the Fifth, who prosecuted Galileo. Jim Glassman, in a recent Washington Post column, labeled me an "egregious anti-cloning zealot." "The wonderfully complex and unique design that makes each of us human should be treated with profound awe and respect, not subject to experiments by scientists, mad or otherwise. " Now, you cannot evoke these kinds of hysterical reactions without having hit a deep chord. And just what is that chord?
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