Institutes of Health, West

Baltimore Sun: Since The National Institutes of Health couldn't do it, voters in California last week created their own public agency to fund research using embryonic stem cells. It is a giant -- and necessary -- break with the nation's 117-year-old tradition of relying on the NIH to fund most biological research
A variety of stem cell techniques have great potential, but the science is in its infancy. While NIH usually mothers such raw, rarely profitable science, President Bush since 2001 has confined its funding to research done on the few existing strains of stem cells. He argues that allowing donation to create new strains might encourage the creation of human embryos simply for research.
With the current strains wearing out, this branch of biotechnology has all but stalled in the United States. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of eggs that could be used to supply such stem cells are stored at the nation's fertility clinics. But the clinics destroy a woman's eggs when she decides she no longer needs them, rather than donating them for research.
Voters approved establishing the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine to fund research that could take advantage of those eggs, building from them versatile stem cells that hold promise to treat a variety of debilitating ailments, including diabetes and Parkinson's disease. Already, at the University of California, Irvine, researchers are investigating treatments for spinal injuries; at the state university in San Diego, Alzheimer's disease; at the Davis campus, liver disease.
The institute, which is to dole out $3 billion in bond money over the next 10 years, tips the funding scale from famine to feast. New Jersey is the only other state to commit taxpayer dollars to research on stem cells, at $50 million over five years. The federal government spent $25 million on stem cell research last year; Britain in May allocated $30 million.
The institute is intended eventually to be self-financing, and assumes that some of these discoveries make it to the profitability stage in the next decade. That's quite a risk for a state that is looking at a $10 billion deficit next year.
One may question the wisdom of parallel state scientific panels and federal ones doing peer reviews and awarding money to research proposals. One may fret that the $3 billion to be awarded over 10 years just to California-based groups could drain such institutes as stem cell pioneer Johns Hopkins of its biotech brainpower. But one cannot question the overriding public interest in discovering just how promising this medical technology can be.