WSJ: Scandals in Medical Research

Why should California's stem cell agency be more, rather than less open with disclosure and transparency?

If you read the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, you know why. A front page piece by reporter Bernard Wysocki described a case at Cornell University that "exposes what some scientists call a dirty little secret of university medical research: the misuse of taxpayers' funds.

"The NIH last year funneled $20 billion to campus researchers, an amount that has doubled since the late 1990s," Wysocki wrote. "Now, a string of multimillion-dollar settlements by leading universities is showing how vulnerable the system has become to abuse.

"Since the beginning of 2003, Northwestern University, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University and the University of Alabama at Birmingham have agreed to civil settlements. In each case, the government alleged that the universities pledged to do one thing with their NIH money and then spent it on something else. This spring, the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn., agreed to pay $6.5 million to settle charges it diverted money from one grant to other grants running short of funds. The institutions agreed to upgrade their accounting practices, but admitted no wrongdoing."

"In a recent survey of 3,300 research scientists, researchers at Minnesota-based HealthPartners Research Foundation and the University of Minnesota found that more than 50% of established grant-getting scientists used grant money designated for one project on another project -- often for undisclosed research that might lead to future grants," Wysocki wrote.

Public disclosure and openness do not guarantee that there will be no abuses. But without public transparency, temptations arise. Even the well-intentioned can fall into arrangements that cannot stand the light of day. The collateral damage can be weathered by institutions such as Harvard and the Mayo Clinic. But they can be life-threatening to a young agency, such as CIRM, that is engaged in controversial research.

Given that CIRM already has built-in conflicts of interest, it behooves the agency to avoid giving its enemies any more fodder than they have already.