Editorial: Stem cell property
By Sacramento Bee,
Sacramento Bee
| 08. 29. 2005
Who will profit from stem cell investment?
Cast your mind back to September 2004. Hollywood actors, Nobel laureates and patient advocates were urging voters to approve a $3 billion bond package for stem cell research. To counter concerns that a cash-strapped state couldn't afford to loan $3 billion ($6 billion with interest), proponents commissioned a study to buttress their claim that Proposition 71 would produce an economic windfall.
The study, conducted by a Stanford University professor and a consulting firm, the Analysis Group Inc., concluded that Proposition 71 would save billions of dollars in health care costs and provide the state with $537 million to $1.1 billion in direct royalties from new stem cell therapies. Two months later, nearly 60 percent of voters approved the initiative.
Now return to the present. Legislators and public interest groups, excited about the potential of stem cell research, are insisting on licensing agreements that will ensure that California gets its promised benefits, either through royalties or discounted therapies. This is reasonable. Californians should expect something from a $3 billion investment that likely will make...
Related Articles
By Smriti Mallapaty, Nature | 09.11.2024
Under his microscope, Jun Wu could see several tiny spheres, each less than 1 millimetre wide. They looked just like human embryos: a dark cluster of cells surrounded by a cavity, and then another ring of cells.
But Wu, a...
By Antonio Regalado, MIT Technology Review | 08.22.2024
In 2016, I attended a large meeting of journalists in Washington, DC. The keynote speaker was Jennifer Doudna, who just a few years before had co-invented CRISPR, a revolutionary method of changing genes that was sweeping across biology labs because...
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...