House passes stem cell bill despite Bush veto threat

Despite a veto threat from President George Bush, the US House of Representatives has easily approved bipartisan legislation that would permit more federal funding of stem cell research.

The House also approved by a 431-1 vote less controversial legislation that would expand research involving cells drawn from umbilical cord blood.

The embryonic stem cell bill would allow federal funding of stem cell research involving excess embryos from in vitro fertilisation that would otherwise be discarded. It would not allow cloning a human baby.

The bill passed with a comfortable 238-194 margin, but was well short of the two-thirds threshold needed to override Bush's threatened veto.

Opponents of embryonic stem cell research believe it destroys human life and object to using taxpayer dollars to finance it. They also charge that the promise of the research has been hyped.

"The deliberate destruction of unique living self-integrated human persons is not some incidental tangent of embryonic stem cell research. It is the essence of the experiment -- kill some in the hopes of saving others," said House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, a Texas Republican.

But several conservative Republicans, who usually oppose abortion rights legislation, broke with their party leaders and the anti-abortion movement to support research, saying it held out hope for treating devastating diseases, like Parkinson's or diabetes.

Representative Joe Barton, a Texas Republican who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said in 21 years in Congress, he had voted only once against the anti-abortion movement. Announcing his support for the Castle-DeGette bill, Barton said his record would now be "100 per cent minus two."

Bush, who has never vetoed a bill as president, said the legislation would violate his 2001 policy in which he allowed federal funding for stem cell research but limited it to 78 stem cell lines that existed as of August 9, 2001.

Bush issued the veto threat last week and expanded on his opposition in a speech in the White House East Room.

- REUTERS