The Lords of Creation

Proposition 71, the initiative supporting stem cell research that Californians passed earlier this month, may already be paying off, in that top researchers and biotech firms are at least talking about moving to California.

What’s luring these scientists and entrepreneurs is not just the jaw-dropping cash -- $3 billion over 10 years -- but freedom. The measure funds research far beyond federal limits that allow publicly funded researchers to work only with a small selection of existing stem cell lines.

The initiative is a sound investment in research that could offer treatments or cures for serious diseases such as diabetes, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Proposition 71’s payoff, however, is no sure thing. Like most California ballot measures, it was more an expression of voter intent than a legal blueprint for implementation. It leaves a lot of room for interpretation by the 29 people who will make up Proposition 71’s governing board, known as the Independent Citizens Oversight Committee.

By the middle of next year, the board will have to draw up royalty and licensing guidelines to ensure taxpayers a share in the profits of any stem cell discoveries. They will have to define “informed consent” forms for research subjects, including volunteers for experimental treatment and women whose eggs may be donated for research.

Only nine people have been appointed to the board so far, and top state officials have less than two weeks to fill the remaining slots. Appointees so far have been drawn from top medical schools with close ties to the biotech industry. That’s not inappropriate because the measure itself places its faith in entrepreneurial science. But the board should include at least a strong minority not tied to deep-pockets biomedical interests.

Balance is important to prevent scientists, in their eagerness to find cures, from taking shortcuts around ethics rules, which they perceive as nettlesome but the public sees as important. The board also needs to ensure that research dollars go where they are most needed rather than where the best-funded patient advocacy group wants them. All public dollars should be well accounted for. For all these reasons, the biotech contingent needs some counterweight.

In recent days, the Proposition 71 gossip in Sacramento has centered around the struggle of Robert Klein, the father of a young diabetic and a wealthy housing developer who put up $3 million to finance the Proposition 71 campaign, to persuade Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger that he should be given the plum job of board chairman. The more serious challenge facing Schwarzenegger, however, is opening up the Proposition 71 nominating process. The public deserves to know the history of likely nominees and their views on how to implement this unprecedented scientific experiment.

So far, the wrestling over Proposition 71’s implementation has been entirely behind the scenes. That’s the wrong place to iron out an initiative governed, as the name of its oversight body suggests, independently and for the citizens.