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Hi all, Thanks, again, Murray, for sounding the alert on the amendments. And I'm really glad that so many of you folks on the list are contacting your senators about the bill. This is so important. Now -- Brownback's amendment: > (b) Prohibition: It shall be unlawful for any person to knowingly > attempt to create a human/animal hybrid by-- > (1) combining a human gamete and an animal gamete; or > (2) conducting nuclear transfer cloning using a human egg or a > human somatic cell nucleus. Hmm.. Not quite what I expected. I'm confused. The original bill S2015 permits federally funding the extraction of stem cells from exess embryos created during in vitro fertilization and states the restrictions under which that would be carried out. Browback's amendment is about two different lines of research, and it is unrelated to funding source. Item #(b)(1) -- who is attempting to do this, anyway? Item #(b)(2) seems to apply to a possible way of causing adult human cells to revert to an embryonic-like condition, from which stem cells may be derived. A few years ago (it seems like yesterday) the head of Advanced Cell Technology in Wooster Mass announced that his company had done this by inserting adult human somatic cells into cow eggs that had been stripped of their nuclei. No hyrbid was created, becaused the cow DNA was supposed to have been removed. There was no federal funding of this. I don't understand what Brownback is up to. I thought that he would not support S2015. Why is he adding to it a provision that he does support and that does not change the orignal bill except to replace the title? Optimistic interpretation: Does he think that S2015 will pass and therefore is taking this opportunity to add his provisions as a rider? And why 13 amendments, each of which applies to one word of the original bill's title? Phil Tompkins p.s. I'll be away (N.Y.C.!) starting tomorrow morning and will have no access to email until Monday night.