With wildfires burning and Covid-19 spreading, can California afford stem cell research? Voters are set to decide
By Usha Lee McFarling,
STAT
| 10. 26. 2020
LOS ANGELES — This Election Day, California voters are being asked to replenish funding for the state’s ambitious stem cell research program, with a well-financed campaign that’s making heady promises about curing diabetes, paralysis, cancer, and Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases.
Backers of Proposition 14 also cast it as a job-creation measure, arguing the money it raises will boost the state economy by cementing the Golden State’s place as a leading incubator of successful biotech startups. But opponents say that amid the Covid-19 pandemic and wildfires, California has far more pressing needs.
In 2004, Californians approved a $3 billion ballot measure, Proposition 71, to create a new state agency to fund stem cell research at a time when President George W. Bush had banned federal funding for some of this work — if scientists used newly created embryonic stem cell lines. Now, even though the National Institutes of Health funds stem cell research to the tune of $2 billion a year, California residents are being asked to authorize the sale of $5.5 billion in general obligation bonds to pay for stem...
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