CGS-authored
Stem cell czar hires lobbyist, skirts board on key issues
In the 1979 film "Apocalypse Now," a renegade officer named Col. Walter Kurtz creates his own kingdom in the jungles of Cambodia. A soldier named Willard, an admirer of Kurtz, is sent upriver to intervene.
Here in California, we have a similar drama involving the state's $3 billion stem cell research institute.
Robert Klein II, who wrote the ballot initiative that created this quasi-public agency, has gradually been consolidating power. In recent weeks, Klein has installed his cohorts as state employees, hired and fired consultants without consulting his fellow board members, and basked in the adulation of patient activists who see him as their savior.
If this research endeavor is to retain its integrity, someone has to play Willard to Klein's Kurtz. That person is turning out to be Sen. Deborah Ortiz, D-Sacramento, a longtime advocate of stem cell research.
Ortiz has introduced a constitutional amendment to tighten controls on Klein's Institute for Regenerative Medicine. Among other things, Ortiz wants to prevent the institute's advisory groups from meeting entirely behind...
In the 1979 film "Apocalypse Now," a renegade officer named Col. Walter Kurtz creates his own kingdom in the jungles of Cambodia. A soldier named Willard, an admirer of Kurtz, is sent upriver to intervene.
Here in California, we have a similar drama involving the state's $3 billion stem cell research institute.
Robert Klein II, who wrote the ballot initiative that created this quasi-public agency, has gradually been consolidating power. In recent weeks, Klein has installed his cohorts as state employees, hired and fired consultants without consulting his fellow board members, and basked in the adulation of patient activists who see him as their savior.
If this research endeavor is to retain its integrity, someone has to play Willard to Klein's Kurtz. That person is turning out to be Sen. Deborah Ortiz, D-Sacramento, a longtime advocate of stem cell research.
Ortiz has introduced a constitutional amendment to tighten controls on Klein's Institute for Regenerative Medicine. Among other things, Ortiz wants to prevent the institute's advisory groups from meeting entirely behind...