Stem Cell Research Center Needs Overhaul, IOM Panel Says
By Marcia Frellick,
American Medical News
| 01. 08. 2013
[Quotes CGS's Marcy Darnovsky]
An Institute of Medicine review of California’s prominent center for stem cell research found organizational flaws and called for sweeping changes to reduce potential conflicts of interest.
The report praised the taxpayer-funded California Institute for Regenerative Medicine for its aggressive pace in awarding grants totaling $1.3 billion to 59 institutions, saying, “CIRM and those it has funded have set in motion a significant scientific enterprise.” However, the IOM found the center’s practices generate concerns about transparency and potential bias that could undermine support for the CIRM.
Reviewers found “far too many” CIRM board members represent organizations that were awarded grants or benefited from the grants. The majority of board members should be independent with no conflicting personal or professional interests, the committee said.
The CIRM definition of conflict of interest should be retooled to “include non-financial interests, such as the potential for personal conflicts of interest to arise from one’s own affliction with a disease or personal advocacy on behalf of that disease,” the report said (
iom.edu/~/media/Files/Report%20Files/2012/CIRM/CIRM_rb.pdf).
The IOM review called for the CIRM’s day-to-day operations to be...
Related Articles
By Emma McDonald Kennedy
| 07.11.2024
Louise Perry’s recent article in The Spectator cautions against “The quiet return of eugenics,” a threat she locates in preimplantation genetic testing for polygenic disorders. The technology is billed as a way for parents undergoing IVF to select which embryo to implant based on information about each embryo’s genetic risk factors and traits. These reports, she says, give parents “a very full picture of the adult that embryo could become”––from their child’s risk of developing different diseases to their “likely...
GATTACA was released in 1997, but — remarkably — is even more relevant now than it was then, as the technologies whose social implications it explores have developed considerably.
On Thursday, June 13, the California Film Institute presented GATTACA to a sold-out house at the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center as part of their Science on Screen series. CGS Associate Director Katie Hasson offered framing for the film and participated in a Q+A discussion.
The film’s plot explicitly involves...
By Ellie Kincaid, Retraction Watch | 06.18.2024
Nature has retracted a 2002 paper from the lab of Catherine Verfaillie purporting to show a type of adult stem cell could, under certain circumstances, “contribute to most, if not all, somatic cell types.”
The retracted article, “Pluripotency of...