Assembly Begins Hearings on UCI : Inquiry: Top university officials are set to testify about allegations of unethical fertility research on humans. A broader state Senate investigation is yet to come.

The unfolding scandal involving the Center for Reproductive Health at UC Irvine shifts to Sacramento today, when an Assembly committee launches an inquiry into accusations of unethical fertility research on humans.

“There’s some allegation and some suggestion that there was precious little oversight at the center,” said Christopher Cabaldon, chief consultant to the Assembly Committee on Higher Education, which is chaired by Assemblywoman Marguerite Archie-Hudson (D-Los Angeles).

The hearing from 3:45 to 5 p.m. will include testimony, Cabaldon said, from Sidney Golub, vice chancellor of UC Irvine; Frederic Wan, vice chancellor for research at UC Irvine; Reese Jones, chairman of the Committee on Human Research at UC San Francisco, and William Dommell, an official with the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md.

The Legislature’s involvement follows Sunday’s disclosures that physicians at the center kept more than $167,000 in cash payments and failed to disclose more than $800,000 in funds that were supposed to be shared with UC Irvine, according to an independent audit.

The university has severed its ties with the center, which moved to new offices last week.

Earlier, there were allegations that eggs were transferred and implanted in women without the consent of donors or recipients, and that patients were research subjects without their approval.

Cabaldon said UC Irvine stands to lose more than $14 million in research grants from the National Institutes of Health, which is conducting its own investigation into allegations of impropriety surrounding the center and three of its doctors, who will not be testifying today.

The doctors--Ricardo H. Asch, Jose P. Balmaceda and Sergio Stone--may testify at a state Senate hearing June 14, when Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica) is expected to convene a much broader hearing into what went wrong at UC Irvine.

Hayden obtained approval Monday to subpoena 10 people involved in the case--four doctors at the center, including the three at the center of the controversy; three whistle-blowers who brought the case to light; two officials connected with the UC Irvine Medical Center, and Gloria Allred, an attorney for one of the whistle-blowers.

In a letter to the chairman of the Senate Rules Committee released Monday, Hayden said the situation “raises serious questions concerning UC Irvine’s oversight of the center and the propriety of entering into such associations with private medical facilities for financial gain and academic prestige.”

In granting the subpoenas, the rules committee made it possible for the whistle-blowers to testify, despite the promise of confidentiality won by the university in doling out about $900,000 in settlements to the three.

Concerning the possible loss of NIH funding, Cabaldon said, “It certainly is in some jeopardy; we at least know that much. To what extent the threat might be real still isn’t clear.”

Cabaldon defined the committee’s inquiry as delving into “the protection of human subjects vis-a-vis academic research, and on the oversight of such research centers generally.

“We hope to use UC Irvine as a case study,” he said. “We’re concerned about the problem as a whole and whether it extends to other areas of the UC system or to other schools anywhere in California.”

Cabaldon said the committee doesn’t intend to investigate the Irvine case, but rather explore the implications of the controversy.

The inquiry by the Committee on Higher Education began at the behest of Assemblyman Mickey Conroy (R-Orange), Cabaldon said.

But other Legislative committees in Sacramento are expected to examine the situation at UC Irvine “in detail,” he added, including the Assembly’s Health and Judiciary committees, while Hayden’s Senate committee will convene the only “broad scope inquiry into specifically what went wrong and why.”

Stephanie Rubin, a consultant to the Senate Select Committee on Higher Education, which is chaired by Hayden, said its inquiry evolved “from newspaper accounts and phone calls from individuals claiming to have serious information about what happened at the clinic.

“We hope to study in full the oversight practices of the entire University of California system,” Rubin said. “That is, in the context of contracting with private medical facilities for profit. And, more narrowly, we want to focus in detail on what actually happened at the center.”