The Full Employment Act for Stem Cell Research

Well it's out, at last, the first Request for Applications (RFA) for money from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, abbreviated WYD - Who's Your Daddy CIRM and pronounced "SERM." This thing is a monster - $1.25 million a year proposals are being invited for institutions, each one of which could support up to 16 new scholars in stem cell research. And $800,000 and $500,000 for smaller programs. And that's just the start of it - these are just the grants to pay for training new people to work in the field. The big bucks are going to be in support of actual research initiatives. Places like Stanford for example are going to leverage this money to build new buildings for regenerative medicine. This program has been coming since Californians passed Proposition 71, the $3 billion stem cell initiative. But when you actually look at the thing, it is just a huge amount of money that will go to a select number of institutions.

Is there ethics money? Well, sort of. The programs "will be required to offer at least one course in stem cell biology and disease and a course in the social, legal and ethical implications of stem cell research." And there is a mandate that CIRM "seeks institutions that will promote interaction among trainees from different fields, especially those trained in basic science and clinical medicine." But there's no gigantic ethics pot here, so the money for bioethics and stem cell research, which everybody thinks ought to be front burner, will require that the big schools in California think intelligently about how important it can be for them to include a real ethics program in their applications for stem cell money. And that is going to require that some of us fly out there and sell that idea to UCLA and other places that have virtually no bioethics right now. And you know, it's such a long flight...

Anyway, anybody with half a brain out there in bioethics has to be scheming to build a bioethics proposal for one of these big center grants - because that could result in the biggest program in the nation in bioethics quite quickly. Oh yeah and that would serve the public interest.