Editorial: Cellular mutation
By Sacramento Bee,
Sacramento Bee
| 06. 02. 2006
In her latest effort to reform California's $3 billion stem cell research institute, state Sen. Deborah Ortiz, D-Sacramento, has introduced SB 401, a proposed ballot measure that seeks to close gaps in Proposition 71, the 2004 initiative that created the stem cell agency.
By our measure, Ortiz's bill doesn't go far enough. It doesn't require scientists reviewing multimillion-dollar grants to disclose publicly any interest in companies that could benefit from those grants. Such a requirement should be the bottom line for any changes in Proposition 71.
Fortunately, there is time to improve this legislation before it comes before the Assembly. The bill, however, has had one positive effect: It has prompted Robert Klein II, the institute's chairman and Proposition 71's author, to concede that initiatives are a poor way to make policy.
Klein made the comment on an early version of Ortiz's bill: "This is legislation that creates an initiative. So if this is passed, you can't even, if there's an error in it, you couldn't even change it with legislation. You have to go back to the voters with...
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...