California Could Shatter Bush's National Stem Cell Stance

Posted: Thursday October 28,2004 - 10:47:39 pm

LOS ANGELES (AFP) - When Californians go to the polls, they won't
simply be choosing a US president, they may also redraw the
scientific map and make their state a global hub of embryonic stem
cell research.

In a local referendum of colossal proportions, voters in the trend-
setting state could also effectively shatter President George W. Bush
's cautious three-year-old national policy on the controversial
issue.

Along with the names of presidential candidates Bush and John Kerry ,
residents' ballot papers will also carry a landmark local measure
that has put them at the centre of a stormy national political and
ethical debate.

The groundbreaking Proposition 71 asks voters to allow up to six
billion dollars in public money to fund embryonic stem cell research
in California over 10 years, despite Bush's 2001 ban on further
federal funding for the science.

"This measure, if it passes, would be extremely significant not only
for California, but for science," said professor Art Caplan, head of
the department of medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania.

"The world is watching as this could have an immense overnight impact
on research," the proponent of the measure told AFP, adding that it
would allow 10 times as much funding for the science as the US
government has spent since Bush took office nearly four years ago.

"State funding would make a real difference in getting much more
sustained research and would effectively undercut and circumvent
everything that the president has very vigorously attempted to
prohibit and restrict."

The measure, championed by a group of scientists, parents and
Hollywood stars including Brad Pitt, the late Christopher Reeve and
Michael J. Fox, calls for a 295-million-dollar state bond issue to
fund stem cell research by institutions here over 10 years.

With interest payments, the total bill for taxpayers would be around
six billion dollars.

A Los Angeles Times poll showed last week that 53 percent of likely
voters favoured the measure with 34 percent against, while a Public
Policy Institute of California poll had supporters leading by 50
percent to 39.

Even California's movie star governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger , has
broken ranks with his Republican party and backed the proposition on
the issue on which Bush and Kerry are diametrically opposed.

Such research, still in its infancy could lead to cures for ills
including Alzheimer's Disease, Parkinson's Disease, spinal cord
injuries, AIDS and cancer, but is lagging in the United States
because of the ban of federal funding for the extremely costly
science, proponents say.

But it is also bitterly opposed by many Americans, including Bush,
because fertilised human eggs are destroyed in the process, a concept
that links embryonic stem cell research to the explosive and
emotional debate over abortion in the minds of many opponents.

But supporters say embryonic research is a critical opportunity for
the human race and that California, already the undisputed home of
the US biotech industry, now holds the key to its future.

"The money that will be released by the proposition would make it
possible to get a significant boost in the amount and the quality of
research," Stanford University Medical Center professor Paul Berg
told AFP.

"If it passes, it is extremely likely that researchers in other areas
of the country, and the world, whose work is hamstrung by funding or
regulation will move to California which would become a new hub in
this realm."

Experts said the pace of US stem cell research has been overtaken in
the past four years by nations including Singapore, Britain, Belgium,
Israel, China and Sweden, but that California's direct democracy
measure could reverse the trend.

"You can't understate the importance of the measure to science and to
US research that will ultimately be of use to the public and to
public health," said Stanford professor David Magnus.

But opponents, including some top bioethicists and medical
practitioners, say Proposition 71 is a waste of money that cash-
strapped California cannot afford to fritter away on scientific hopes
that are as yet totally unproven.

They also worry that the measure is a back door to the sensitive area
of reproductive human cloning and that it will simply serve to line
the pockets of biotech companies that have taken out scores of key
patents linked to embryonic stem cell research.

Devoutly-Catholic movie star Mel Gibson has become one of the leading
voices urging voters to defeat Proposition 71.

"I found that the cloning of human embryos will be used in the
process and that, for me, I have an ethical problem with that,"
Gibson told ABC's "Good Morning America" Thursday. "Why do I, as a
taxpayer, have to fund something I believe is unethical?"

SOURCE: The News Wire / SierraTimes.com
http://tinyurl.com/3kxh2

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