California’s Proposition 14: shot in the arm for stem cell research
By Patrick Foong,
BioNews
| 12. 14. 2020
The recent close-call US presidential election grabbed headlines, but no less closely-fought was California's Proposition 14, also on the ballot in October, which will have a huge impact on the future of stem cell research in the state.
The Stem Cell Research Institute Bond Initiative (Prop 14),which was on the ballot in the initiated state statute will allow the state to issue billions of dollars in bonds for its stem cell research programme. The vote could not have been closer, with 51 percent of ballots for and 49 percent against.
This initiative will enable financiers to lend US $5.5 billion to a stem cell agency, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) which the state's taxpayers will repay with interest over the next three decades. The sizeable bond fund will be allocated to research, human clinical trials and programmes and also for start-up costs for facilities in the stem cell field. About US $1.5 billion of the money will be spent researching neurodegenerative conditions, including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and dementia. Some of the funds will be allocated to the shared labs programme: state-funded facilities dedicated to conducting...
Related Articles
By Priyanka Runwal, Chemical and Engineering News | 08.05.2024
Saritee Sanodiya, 26, has spent countless days wondering if she’ll ever live a “normal” life. Growing up, Sanodiya often missed school, frequenting the hospital for sudden, life-threatening drops in her hemoglobin levels and excruciating pain in her joints. High fever...
It’s been a busy couple of months in biopolitics, with developments in the US, UK, China, Japan, and implicitly on Mars. Time for a brief roundup.
• • •
Bioethics needs an update
The National Research Act is now 50 years old. It was signed into law on July 12, 1974, as a direct response to publicity about the 1932 “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.” The Hastings Bioethics Forum celebrated its anniversary with an...
Image courtesy National Human Genome Research Institute
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is supposed to encourage effective medical advances while also ensuring that patients and research subjects are protected. This dual mandate demands tricky judgment calls that are made more difficult by outside pressures of several kinds, political, judicial, and especially commercial. This April story at Bloomberg examines one deeply troubling pattern of regulatory capture:
Americans Are Paying Billions to Take Drugs That Don’t Work
Companies are increasingly...
By Sarah Kliff and Azeen Ghorayshi, The New York Times | 07.15.2024