California Squirms with CIRM: The Embryonic Stem Cell Boondoggle

Chuck Donovan / November 24, 2010

Centrally planned job creation and scientific research pose many of the same problems: extraordinary expense, a pattern of politically shaped insider transactions, and less than promising results. This occurs for substantially the same reason: government attempts to pick winners and losers in developing fields ignore the discipline of the marketplace and the wisdom of personal investment.

Consider the story of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM). California voters approved Proposition 71 in 2004, which authorized the creation of the institute and permitted it to raise up to $3 billion in bond funding for grants over a 10-year period to pursue the promise of embryonic stem cell research (ESCR) and human cloning. At the time of the vote, federal funds for ESCR were limited under a Bush Administration policy issued in August 2001, and no federal funds at all were available for research involving human clones. (more…)