Stem Cell Secrecy

The California stem cell program is off to a rocky start. The board of the new California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), which will spend $3 billion over the next ten years on research, is not interested in having the taxpayers look over their shoulders. Nor, it would appear, are they interested in complying with the state's conflict of interest laws.

According to a report in today's Los Angeles Times, the board yesterday unanimously voted to condemn a proposed constitutional amendment that would require that all its funding decisions be subject to the state's open meetings and conflict of interest laws. The architects of last fall's Proposition 71, which created CIRM, inserted language in the ballot initiative that not only exempted the new agency from public oversight, but required a constitutional amendment to change the exemption.

Needless to say, this didn't sit well with many politicians, including a number of liberal Democrats who are avid backers of stem cell research. Even though the CIRM board promised to conduct all its major meetings in public, the legislature is moving to put a constitutional amendment on California's November ballot that would guarantee that CIRM operate in public and comply with conflict of interest laws.

The CIRM board, led by Stanford Nobel laureate Paul Berg and CalTech president David Baltimore, read the amendment to mean that peer-review meetings that make research funding decisions would have to operate in public. No science agency, including the National Institutes of Health, does that now. "Peer review," Berg said, "can't happen in a public meeting."

Baltimore told the press after yesterday's meeting: "We needed to send a shot across the bow of the legislature."

State Sen. Deborah Ortiz, a Democrat from Sacramento and a primary architect of the amendment, fired back that CIRM was deliberately misconstruing the amendment's intent. "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."

Peer review may be a smokescreen. The CIRM board is larded with biotech industry patent lawyers and academic entrepreneurs. If their firms get research grants, it may run afoul of the state's conflict of interest laws. From their perspective, that's something better left in the dark.