In the annals of wrongheaded things done with the best intentions, the California stem cell program has always been in a category of its own.
The $6-billion program was enacted by voters in 2004 as Proposition 71 after a campaign of exceptional intellectual dishonesty, featuring vignettes of sufferers from diabetes, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and other heartbreaking diseases for which it seemed to promise imminent cures through research into embryonic stem cells.
As conceived by a Northern California real estate man named Robert Klein, who remains the program's chairman and guiding spirit, the idea was that California would fill the vacuum created by the Bush administration's ideology-inspired ban on federal funding for much of this research. (President Obama rescinded the ban this month.) The state, according to the hype, would reap billions in profits from the therapies it funded.
No one would dispute that finding cures for Alzheimer's, cancer or diabetes is a worthy, even urgent, goal. To its credit, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine has placed the state at the center of the world of embryonic stem cell research by committing hundreds of millions of dollars in grants for the construction of state-of-the-art labs and the training of a new generation of scientists.
But the program threatens to suck up precious fiscal resources of a state with none to spare and is rife with conflicts of interest. Its commitment to public disclosure is spotty. Now it's planning to hand over up to $400 million in taxpayer funds to the biotech industry on terms that may multiply the potential for conflicts and waste.
The institute is tangled in a persistent ethical morass. From the start, its safeguards against conflicts of interest by members of its 29-person governing board were sketchy, and provisions for vigorous debate over its goals and methods were nil.
Despite a provision in Proposition 71 forbidding a board member to attempt to influence "in any way" a decision involving his or her employer, in 2007 board member John C. Reed tried to get the institute's staff to reverse the rejection of a grant for the La Jolla-based Burnham Institute for Medical Research, of which he is chief executive. The staff refused. Reed, who should have been bounced from the board, got his wrist slapped by state ethics officials instead.
