Stem Cell Dispute Heats Up
The fledgling California stem cell research board unanimously declared its opposition Monday to a proposed state constitutional amendment that members said would “make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for scientists to do their job.”
The action, by the 29-member Independent Citizens Oversight Committee meeting here, marked the first public skirmish between the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine, the stem cell agency created by voters last fall, and California legislators who want to place more public control over the new $3-billion research institution.
Faced with recent scientific breakthroughs in South Korea and mounting court challenges at home, the high-powered research board contends that the proposed constitutional amendment, SCA 13, written by state Sens. Deborah Ortiz (D-Sacramento) and George Runner (R-Lancaster) could impede the potentially pioneering work of the nation’s most ambitious government stem cell research program.
“If enacted, SCA 13 will stop us in our tracks,” said acting agency head Zach Hall, a neuroscientist and former director at the National Institutes of Health. “I can say with assurance that SCA 13 will cripple our efforts, making it impossible to put California at the forefront of stem cell research.”
Caltech President David Baltimore, a board member who helped compose the resolution opposing the proposed amendment, said: “We need to send a shot over the bow of the Legislature.”
Board Chairman Robert Klein, whose teenage son suffers insulin-dependent diabetes, wrote Proposition 71, the ballot measure that created the agency last fall. Klein said he was perplexed by the actions of Ortiz, who was one of the leading supporters of the initiative during the campaign but who now thinks more legislative oversight is needed.
“We don’t understand where this issue came from that could destroy Prop. 71 and our ability to attract the best and the brightest scientists to our state,” Klein said.
He accused Ortiz of scheduling hearings on the amendment in Sacramento at the same time as stem cell board hearings, so that he and other members of the board were not able to attend.
Ortiz countered by charging Klein, a former legislative aide, of campaigning strategically to kill the proposal before the June 30 deadline that would place it on the November ballot if a special election were held at that time.
“Mr. Klein should know better than anyone else the deadlines for a ballot measure,” Ortiz said. “We are behind in the timeline to make the ballot. Ultimately, we need to let the voters decide if this extra accountability is too burdensome.”
In interviews, Ortiz has said the constitutional amendment “is needed to fill gaps in Proposition 71 that threaten to undermine the public’s confidence in California’s landmark stem cell research.”
The proposed amendment requires that the agency and its board meet conflict-of-interest, financial disclosure and open-meeting requirements similar to those established for other state agencies.
Board members and some leading state scientists see the open-meeting proposal as a challenge to the closed-door “peer-review” process used in considering grant applications at universities and other publicly funded research institutions.
Paul Berg, a Stanford University Nobel laureate and geneticist, testified Monday that scrapping the peer-review system “would cripple the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine’s ability to operate.
“Peer review cannot happen in an open meeting,” said Berg. “I predict a substantial number of outstanding scientists would flee” the California program, “if that happened.”
In response, Ortiz said, “We have made it very clear that we want to maintain the integrity of peer review, but at the same time assure the public that once a decision is made to fund one proposal, that they be required to justify how this particular proposal will benefit California.”
As board members debated the language of the resolution opposing the Ortiz bill, several became emotional over what they see as a threat to the development of potential cures to intractable genetic disorders.
“It’s just wrong,” said attorney Joan Samuelson, a patient advocate on the board who suffers from Parkinson’s disease. “It’s risking the life-saving opportunity that Prop. 71 offers. The results will be measured in extra suffering and death.”
Others said that recent breakthroughs in South Korea, where researchers announced last week that they had successfully cloned human stem cell lines, threatened to cut into the momentum in stem cell research that California enjoyed after the November vote on Proposition 71, which voters overwhelmingly approved.
“And now we have this major advance in South Korea,” said Jeff Sheehy, a board member at the University of California at San Francisco AIDS Research Institute. “How dare she steal hope from the people of California,” he said, referring to Ortiz. “How dare she!”
