Dr. Zach W. Hall is one of our most distinguished scientists and experienced research administrators, with posts at USC's medical school, UC San Francisco, and the National Institutes of Health on his glittering resume.
He is also interim president of the state's new stem cell agency, the California Institute for Regenerative Research. So when St. Francis Memorial Hospital in San Francisco announced that the topic of his speech there last week would be "Stem Cell Research: Hope or Hype?" no one really expected him to accentuate the negative.
But Hall has taken on an indispensable role since assuming his temporary post in March: the voice of balance. He has been quietly tempering the public's expectation that the $3-billion bond issue approved under Proposition 71 will yield instant medical therapies and cures.
Hall's talk Wednesday evening was a step in that direction. "Based on my experience as a laboratory scientist," he told me before taking the podium, "I know that to make an experiment work, we need to have someone in the lab who really believes in it -- and someone who is a skeptic all the way."
Skepticism about the potential of stem cell research was wholly absent from the campaign for Proposition 71. As a scientific undertaking, the stem cell program is unique in that its sponsors, the state's voters, committed their money without receiving the slightest bit of professional scientific counsel. Before making a similar expenditure, any philanthropic foundation or university board would first seek advice from experts about the potential yield in knowledge from the effort, the obstacles ahead and the time frame required.
California voters received, instead, a TV campaign promising cures tomorrow for a host of diseases, some of which may never respond to stem cell therapy. The professional cautions are only appearing now, after the money is committed. The shock of discovery that "tomorrow" may be 20 or 30 years away (or may never come) could be severe.
Hall understands that sustaining public support requires, among other things, dialing back public expectations. The Proposition 71 campaign "tapped into an amazing reservoir of hope among California voters," he says, "but we need to make people aware of how difficult it is to bring a new therapy to the market."
