New Stem Cell Agency Takes Shape
As the board of California’s new $3-billion stem cell institute met Thursday to begin creating a new state agency, many members admitted to tension about the need to get grant money out quickly while setting the highest standards for the controversial research.
“I’m trying to keep the skepticism out of my voice,” said Dr. Michael Friedman, president of City of Hope and a former acting commissioner of the FDA, when a 30-day timeframe for choosing a location was proposed.
It was one of many “chicken or the egg” moments, in the words of one board member. Without a location, how could they choose staff or recruit a president to run the daily operations? How could they set salaries without knowing the cost of living? What if the best person for the top job didn’t want to live in the city they chose?
“If we don’t have superb staff functioning at a very high level, everything else will fall apart,” Friedman said.
In addition, board members said they were acutely aware that they needed to establish standards for ethics and research before starting a process for grant applications.
“It would be the worst mistake to begin going through the grant process without all the regulations defined,” said Dr. Philip Pizzo, dean of the Stanford School of Medicine.
Even as they raised concerns about the workload and timeframe, the board voted to begin creating powerful working groups that will play key roles in deciding which researchers will share in about $300 million a year earmarked for embryonic stem cell research in the next decade.
The decisions, made Thursday in an auditorium at USC’s Keck School of Medicine, reflected both the scope and the difficulty of the task facing board members, nearly all of whom have demanding day jobs.
The board decided:
* To hire an outside headhunter to help in hiring a president who will serve as chief scientific officer and run day-to-day operations.
* To grant Bob Klein, a Palo Alto real estate developer and chairman of the committee, temporary authority to hire staff and to rent short-term offices during the start-up phase.
* To break into smaller groups to find people qualified to help the agency set policy.
As the board began to make choices that will shape the institute, audience members raised questions about public representation.
Among the key questions that Proposition 71, the voter-approved ballot measure that created the agency, left for the board to resolve is how the state will share in any profits from treatments or cures derived from taxpayer-funded research, what standards for conflicts of interest should be imposed on working groups and what ethical guidelines will govern the types of research to be funded.
The five-hour meeting was marked at times by tense exchanges with members of the public, some of whom said the new agency already had taken a series of missteps that call into question its officers’ commitment to public openness. Three weeks ago, a similar agenda for the inaugural meeting in San Francisco was abandoned at the last minute after public interest lawyers raised questions about compliance with the state open meeting law.
Some of those objections were raised this week, although representatives from state Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer’s office said that Thursday’s meeting complied with state laws.
After the meeting, Klein conceded that his goal of getting the first grants to scientists by May was optimistic. But Klein, who wrote Proposition 71 and headed the campaign to pass it, said he purposely wrote tight deadlines.
“I believe we have a responsibility to try our best to move this as rapidly as possible or we won’t be honoring our obligation to patients,” Klein said.
He became an advocate for embryonic stem cell research after his son, now 14, was discovered to have insulin-dependent diabetes. “If you don’t reach for a goal, you’ll never reach it.”
The board plans to meet again Feb. 3 in San Diego.
