Watchdog suggests stem cell policies for state
By San Diego Union Tribune,
San Diego Union Tribune
| 01. 23. 2006
A taxpayer watchdog group is expected to release a report today outlining how leaders of the state's $3 billion stem cell initiative could develop policies to make stem-cell-based therapies affordable and accessible to Californians.
Leaders of the initiative known as Proposition 71 "must put the interests of taxpayers and patients ahead of private biotech companies who have (a) financial stake in the outcome," the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights said in its report.
For example, a portion of the money the state raises by licensing scientific discoveries made with Proposition 71 funds should be used to make new therapies available to people who can't afford them, the foundation report states.
Biotechnology or pharmaceutical companies that develop therapies using science that results from Proposition 71 should be required to sell those therapies to California at their lowest price, the report states.
It also recommends that the institute reserve the right to keep a Proposition 71-funded discovery from being patented if it is determined that it would do more good by remaining in the public domain.
In addition, it suggests that...
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...