Editorial: Stem cell follies: Crank up the spin machine
By Sacramento Bee,
Sacramento Bee
| 07. 17. 2005
Just a half year into its troubled existence, California's stem cell research institute has already spent more than $2 million, none of it on research. Alert members of the institute's 29-member oversight board are starting to ask an important question: Where the heck is this money going?
Despite a cash-flow shortage caused by a pair of costly lawsuits, institute chairman Robert Klein II has been spending freely. Four months ago, under Klein's direction, the institute quietly hired Edelman, which bills itself as the "world's largest independent public relations group," at a rate of $27,550 a month. Edelman replaced Redgate Communications, which had already racked up $108,000 in PR work in three months.
Klein didn't use a competitive bidding process in retaining either of these companies. Neither did he seek competitive bids before he hired the law firm of Remcho, Johansen & Purcell for $320,000. At the moment, he and institute President Zach Hall are negotiating a long-term contract with Edelman that could top $500,000.
Oversight board members learned of these expenditures at a meeting in Irvine last Tuesday, and some...
Related Articles
By Tomoko Otake, The Japan Times | 04.09.2024
A decade ago, researcher Haruko Obokata caused a sensation when she published two papers in the journal Nature, in which she claimed that she had discovered a way to create stem cells easily using the so-called STAP method.
With STAP...
By Ian Sample, The Guardian | 03.08.2024
Scientists are a step closer to making IVF eggs from patients’ skin cells after adapting the procedure that created Dolly the sheep, the first cloned mammal, more than two decades ago.
The work raises the prospect of older women being...
By Ramon Antonio Vargas, The Guardian | 02.28.2024
Doctors say a man in California who contracted blood cancer while living with HIV is in remission from both potentially fatal illnesses thanks to a treatment they are hailing as remarkable and encouraging.
Paul Edmonds is only the fifth-known person...
By Victoria Gray, Uduak Thomas, and Kevin Davies, The CRISPR Journal | 02.14.2024
In July 2019, medical staff in Nashville dosed the first U.S. patient in the exa-cel therapy trial, sponsored by Vertex Pharmaceuticals and CRISPR Therapeutics. That first patient was Victoria Gray, a mother of four from Forest, Mississippi, a sickle cell...