WASHINGTON — President Bush and his conservative Senate allies are trying to peel votes from a stem cell bill by offering alternative legislation that would instead fund promising but unproven studies, several senators said Tuesday.

"I'm all for these alternative sources, [but] not as a substitute, not as some way of stopping what we're about to do," said Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, Senate sponsor of a bill already passed by the House that would end Bush's 2001 ban on federal funding for new human embryonic stem cell studies.

Several scientists testifying Tuesday before the Labor, Health and Human Services Appropriations subcommittee agreed that Harkin's bill, co-sponsored by panel Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., should be passed before even their own research receives federal funding.

"It's a no-brainer," said Robert Lanza, one of the scientists working on a process by which embryonic stem cells are derived without destroying life. "I do not think we should keep the scientific community or the patient community waiting."

Another scientist at the table, William B. Hurlbut of Stanford University, said vital science that could someday lead to cures of diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's must have the engine of public consensus behind it.

A member of the President's Council on Bioethics, Hurlbut noted that large sections of the public believe human embryonic stem cell research is immoral because it destroys the embryo, which many, including Bush and some congressional conservatives, consider a budding human life.

Government, he said, should set "a coherent moral platform to guide our science."

But staring down a self-imposed Aug. 1 deadline for voting on the legislation, Senate negotiators were no closer Tuesday to agreeing on a list of bills to debate on the Senate floor. Still swirling were talks over a six-bill package of legislation, including the Harkin-Specter measure, and others that would fund alternative methods or ban certain stem cell and cloning techniques altogether.

Specter, a cancer patient also helming the fight over Supreme Court nominations, said he was growing impatient with the delay and made clear that his bill is the first priority.

"If we can pass the House bill, Specter-Harkin, that is the most important bill to be enacted," Specter said as he gaveled open the Labor, Health and Human Services subcommittee hearing.

Testifying were James Battey, chairman of the National Institutes of Health Stem Cell Task Force, and Lanza, who has done research into deriving stem cells from a single animal cell without destroying the embryo.

The House approved the Harkin-Specter bill, 238-194, on May 24. That is far less than the two-thirds support that would be needed to override a veto Bush has threatened, and it was unclear that either house of Congress had the two-thirds vote necessary to override a veto.

The bill numbers are HR 810 and S 471.

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