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
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
By Katie LaGrone, WPTV | 06.28.2024
Image by National Cancer Institute from Unsplash
TAMPA, Fla. — A Tampa jury recently found the now-defunct Lung Institute in Tampa guilty of engaging in “deceptive or unfair practices” while it offered customers “valueless” stem cell therapy to treat incurable...