SAN FRANCISCO — The stem cell institute that California voters willed into existence with their approval of a $3-billion bond measure goes on trial today.
The lawsuit, to be heard by an Alameda County Superior Court judge, is relatively simple: Opponents contend the lack of direct state control over the institute's finances is unconstitutional.
The state attorney general's office and the institute's lawyer counter that the measure amended the state constitution to allow for such independence.
The dispute has frozen one of California's boldest experiments: to create an embryonic stem cell research industry that has been deemed off-limits for federal funding by the Bush administration.
Beyond the dry legal question, the trial will offer the San Francisco-based California Institute for Regenerative Science a forum to press its case that it has been and will be accountable to the public.
Since inception, the institute has been embroiled in a debate over the workings of its citizen oversight committee, which over a decade will dole out an amount comparable to the annual gross national product of Papua New Guinea to advance the relatively young science.
"This agency has been under a microscope for the last year and been subject to a fair degree of criticism," said institute attorney James Harrison. "In some sense, this trial gives us a chance to prove what this agency has accomplished and how accountable it has been."
Many key decisions -- about ethical standards for research, whether revenue from patented findings would be shared with the state, if indigent Californians would be ensured access to treatments -- had not been made when the lawsuits were filed.
But now they have been, after nearly five dozen public meetings and hours of spirited discussion with patients' groups, researchers, legislators, taxpayer watchdogs, stem cell skeptics and more.
Proposition 71, known as the Stem Cell Research and Cures Act, was approved by 59% of voters in November 2004 to allocate $300 million a year for a decade. It created the institute and its governing body, the 29-member Independent Citizen's Oversight Committee. (The initiative's high-powered backer, Robert Klein, was selected to chair it.)
Although most committee members are appointed by elected officials, the proposition was designed to insulate the governing board from politics, so it forbade legislative intervention for three years.
It also made the committee responsible for the details of governance, including such relatively minor issues as compensation of institute staff and broader ones of grant disbursal for research and construction of laboratories.
The crux of the two consolidated lawsuits -- one by People's Advocate and the National Tax Limitation Foundation, the second by the California Family Bioethics Council -- is that lack of direct state management and control of the taxpayer funds violates the state constitution.
"There is one major big wrong with this thing," said Ted Costa, who heads People's Advocate, a taxpayer organization active in the recall of Gov. Gray Davis. "There is absolutely no oversight from the Legislature."
Institute leaders believe they are on firm legal ground, as do some independent legal scholars.
"I think this should be an easy winner for the defendants," said Hank Greely, a law professor and chairman of the steering committee of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics.
Although the institute's opponents have attacked its legal foundations, two of the organizations involved oppose the institute because stem cells are sometimes drawn from embryos discarded by fertility clinics.
Adult stem cells have been used to treat heart, liver and other diseases. But embryonic ones, culled before cells begin to differentiate, have the promise of more versatility and could replace abnormal cells in a range of organs. People with spinal cord injuries and diseases that include childhood diabetes, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's have high hopes for stem cell research.
The Napa-based Life Legal Defense Foundation, which opposes abortion and euthanasia and fought for the life of Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged Florida woman at the center of an end-of-life case last year, is the counsel for the first lawsuit.
"Obviously we are a pro-life group," said executive director Dana Cody, who has known Costa for years and suggested they team up. But the legal challenge "is a taxpayer issue, not a life issue."
The second plaintiff was created by the Christian conservative California Family Council specifically to sue the institute, said director Ron Prentice.
"There are other avenues of stem cell research that have proven much more beneficial to curative therapies," Prentice said. "On top of that, the people of California are being hoodwinked into a very expensive and unproven research ... fraught with conflicts of interest."
