"Scam Cell": Will California Voters Learn From Proposition 71 Debacle?

It's been one of our mantras here at "A Shepherd's Voice": Are California voters having second thoughts yet about shelling out $3 billion + for immoral & unproven embryonic stem cell research, which has yet to show a single cure, while adult stem cells are curing people left and right?

Of course, the adult stem-cell success are now too many to list. And this week Lloyd Billingsley has an excellent article in City Journal about where all that $3 billion of taxpayers money went. There is only $859 million of the $3 billion left. and the $2.1 billion already spent has not cured a headache.

Scam Cell
California’s embryonic stem-cell research institute fails to deliver.
14 March 2013

"The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the state’s controversial, $3 billion stem-cell research agency, has yet to follow recommendations from a December report by the Institute of Medicine, a division of the National Academy of Sciences. The report, which urged the agency to overhaul its board of directors, did not fully convey the magnitude of CIRM’s failure—but it did confirm that CIRM might be better described as Conflict of Interest Research Money. Almost all members of the CIRM board, investigators noted, “are interested parties with a personal or financial stake in the allocation of CIRM fundings.” In fact, CIRM directed a full 91 percent of its research funding to institutions with representatives on its governing board. Similarly, the CIRM board overruled the Institute’s own scientific reviewers, who twice rejected a proposal to fund a for-profit company on whose behalf CIRM founder Robert Klein had lobbied, and the board went ahead and gave the money to the company anyway. According to a Sacramento Bee report, “it was the first time in the board’s eight-year history that it approved an application twice rejected by reviewers....

Yet CIRM has been a scientific bust. It played no role in noteworthy medical-scientific advances of recent years, such as the construction of a new windpipe for a Colombian woman or the near-total restoration of sight for a man whose eyes sustained severe chemical damage in 1948. These were triumphs of adult stem-cell research. A ballpark figure for the number of life-saving cures and therapies CIRM has delivered is zero. But as a staffer said at a meeting of the Little Hoover Commission in 2009, CIRM was “getting money out the door,” as though this was a legitimate measure of success.

CIRM was always more about the money than the medicine. Klein cleverly wrote Prop. 71 to install himself as the institute’s chairman, and he freed it from almost all legislative oversight by requiring a 70 percent supermajority of both houses to make any structural or policy changes...”

Do read the whole thing.

Posted by Gibbons J. Cooney