California Institute For Regenerative Medicine

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.

On the cusp of a new era in stem cell science, Democratic heavyweights are pushing to install the outgoing California Democratic Party chief in a leadership post at the state's $3-billion research program. Art Torres, who served two decades as a state lawmaker before assuming the party chairmanship a dozen years ago, is being backed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, U.S. Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer of California and Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, among others.

California's voter-created stem cell institute is expected to award $227 million in grants today to seed a laboratory building spree at a dozen universities and research centers, including USC, UCLA and UC Irvine. New labs are needed to house the growing number of researchers funded by 2004's Proposition 71, officials at the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine say, even though one of the main pressures on lab space is likely to be lifted after the November election.

California's voter-approved stem cell research institute cleared a roadblock Monday when a University of Wisconsin alumni group said it would not seek to collect licensing fees on discoveries made with institute grants. Proposition 71, passed in 2004, created the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine and all but promised taxpayers royalties in return for approving $3 billion in bonds for research. A move to collect fees out of any royalties would likely have led to a court battle.

A state appeals court upheld the constitutionality of California's voter-created stem cell institute Monday, decisively affirming a lower court decision less than two weeks after hearing oral arguments in the case.

California's voter-created stem cell institute approved a $2.6-million grant earlier this month to a Los Angeles-based research center whose founding president, a South Korean fertility expert, is embroiled in an international dispute over authorship of a medical journal article.

Zach W. Hall, the first president of California's voter-created stem cell institute, will retire April 30 rather than in June as he had previously announced, the institute said Tuesday. In a letter to the institute's citizen oversight committee, Hall said he had recently been diagnosed with prostate cancer and will undergo surgery in May.

A pioneering Australian biologist who was among the first scientists to grow human embryonic stem cells in a laboratory will lead California's $3-billion effort to translate such research into cures for diseases.

The Los Angeles research lab founded by a controversial South Korean fertility scientist is withdrawing its application for millions in state funding for stem cell studies. The CHA Regenerative Medicine Institute was given preliminary approval in March for $2.6 million in funding by the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. The agency was reviewing the Los Angeles-based center's proposal before writing the check, said agency spokesman Dale Carlson.

Opponents of the $3-billion stem cell research initiative approved by California voters characterized it Monday as fraught with conflicts of interest and so unaccountable to the state and taxpayers that it is unconstitutional. A deputy attorney general countered that the legal challenges that have held up public spending by the state stem cell institute are "tortured interpretations of the constitution."