With charts, blown-up photographs, and dozens of sentimental anecdotes, the Senate today opened the first of two days of debate on three bills concerning stem-cell research. Two of the measures are not controversial and are likely to pass easily when the Senate votes, on Tuesday afternoon. But President Bush has already promised to veto the third, HR 810, which would relax the federal government’s strict limits on what embryonic-stem-cell research may receive federal support by allowing scientists to experiment on embryos left over from fertility treatments.

HR 810, which passed the House of Representatives last year (The Chronicle, June 3, 2005), is sponsored in the Senate by Sen. Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican. In addition to touting the potential medical benefits of the research, Mr. Specter today tried to separate the measure from the wider anti-abortion movement, many of whose members oppose such research. “A woman’s right to choose has nothing really to do with stem-cell research,” he said, noting that a number of anti-abortion Republicans, including Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah and a former first lady, Nancy Reagan, support stem-cell research.

Senators opposed to HR 810 spoke of alternative approaches that they called better choices. Sen. Sam Brownback, a Republican from Kansas, said he was focusing not on issues in “theology” but “biology,” calling embryonic-stem-cell treatments “speculative” and not nearly as promising as research on adult stem cells. He said that if the $500-million already spent on embryos had been diverted to adult stem cells, “we would have a lot more people in clinical trials today, a lot more people, I believe, being cured, and a lot more people alive today.”

The other stem-cell bills the Senate is scheduled to vote on tomorrow are S 3504 and S 2754. The former, the “fetal farming bill,” would ban the harvesting of stem-cell lines from pregnant women or from human embryos grown in the uteruses of animals; the latter would provide support for research on adult stem cells. But little debate surrounded those measures. As Sen. Tom Harkin, a Democrat from Iowa and co-sponsor of HR 810, said, “it’s the only one that really matters.”