No Pressure, Jon

San Francisco Chronicle reports that Robert Klein, real estate magnate and chair of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the Proposition 71-funded Master of Ceremonies for $3 billion in stem cell research to be doled out beginning in May, has at long last given an interview. In it he discusses the controversy concerning when the money will be given out for stem cell research, and more important the rules that will be used by CIRM to do so.

The guidelines are required by Proposition 71, and while it can revise the guidelines that it puts in place now, it needs good guidelines at the outset, not only because of the law but because of swirling controversy in California about the ties of CIRM board members to the institutions that will be asking for money.

So where will these guidelines come from? The National Academies, who have engaged Virginia bioethicist Jonathan Moreno to run a committee on model guidelines for conducting stem cell research.

'It would be better for us all to be on the same page,' said Jonathan Moreno, director of a biomedical ethics center at the University of Virginia and co-chair of the National Academies committee. During a telephone interview Wednesday, Moreno said the national [Academies?] guidelines are expected to be out by April after a final round of outside reviews and revisions. 'The committee has been running since August, and people say, 'Gee, you're taking a long time,' ' Moreno said. 'But this is hard. For academics, this is a breakneck pace.'

It will be helpful indeed for California's stem cell funding group to get the Moreno committee report, which will join several other sets of recommendations on how individual states', states collectively, and the nation should pursue specific standards for stem cell research.

But it is difficult to see how any group writing guidelines for national stem cell policy - or even for state and national policy - can cover both the issues inherent in national dilemmas, and the issues present in the states' differing legal, clinical, political, economic, and social situations, and still be finished in eight months.

And in this case, Moreno and his group are being asked to produce a report that does all of this while taking care to address the issues about model guidelines that would be appropriate to the very, very special "California world," with its own behemoth budget and complex allocation issues.

It remains to be seen whether California will create its own ethics group or ethics research division within Proposition 71, and it would be dangerous indeed for the state to avoid doing so. California state stem cell policy might not be something you want - for the long term anyway - to have "phoned in" at the last minute. What Californians really need to do is hire Jonathan Moreno away from Virginia! - Glenn McGee