The campaign to save California's stem cell agency with a $5.5 billion cash infusion is peddling a variety of claims that stretch the facts or that the campaign is unwilling to support publicly.
Leading the pack is the assertion that the multibillion-dollar proposition will cost no more than a bottle of aspirin per person, per year. Unspecified by the campaign, however, is the number of persons and the number of years. The five-buck claim is clearly an attempt to minimize the cost of the proposal, which actually totals an estimated $7.8 billion, according to the state's legislative analyst.
Robert Klein, leader of the Proposition 14 campaign, made the five-buck claim back in July. It has also appeared on the campaign web site. And Klein brought up the figure again this month in a radio broadcast.
"Proposition 14 will cost the state an average of less than $5 per person, per year – about the cost of a bottle of aspirin" is the way Klein put it last summer.
The California Stem Cell Report has asked the campaign several times to explain how it arrived at that figure. The first request was made 44 days ago (Sept. 1). The campaign has not responded.
On Oct. 5, Klein brought up another number during a KQED broadcast. He said $4.1 billion was put into CIRM research in 2019 via matching funds. The state stem cell agency declined to verify that figure. A query to the campaign has not been answered.
The campaign additionally uses a figure of 90 to describe the number of clinical trials in which the stem cell agency is involved. The agency, which is known officially as the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), says that it is involved in 64. That is a more than respectable number, more than Klein would have predicted back in 2005 when he was the first chairman of CIRM.
The campaign's justification for using the larger figure seems to be that somehow, someway, that some piece of CIRM-funded research, however tiny, has played a role in some sort of trial. By that criteria, John J. Loud could be also credited with contributing to a CIRM-backed clinical trial. He invented the ballpoint pen in 1888.
Over the past several years, the agency, during public meetings, has been careful to limit its focus on clinical trials to those that involve meaningful financial participation, for which it deserves ample credit. (It should be noted that the number has grown as CIRM has helped to fund more trials.)
Pushing the envelope is normal practice for ballot campaigns. It may be unrealistic to expect the stem cell campaign to behave any differently. Winning is everything in an election campaign. As I have remarked in the past, a ballot campaign is like a war with a deadline. The losers are like so much charnel on the electoral battlefield.
That said, Proposition 14 involves the credibility of science, a matter much in the news nowadays. And backers of the stem cell initiative continue to suffer from the ill effects of the hype of the 2004 campaign, which was also led by Klein.
The excessive and unrealized voter expectations raised by 2004 campaign are popping up this year in news stories and editorials about Proposition 14 in a way that does not improve its chances of approval, at least for some people. Of course, constant repetition of misleading or bogus information can have an impact on some voters as the country has seen on a national level.
Art Caplan, a nationally prominent bioethicist, said in 2014,
“Stem cell research seems, again and again, to go off the rails when it comes to the ethics of research.”
Caplan was speaking mainly about hyped claims involving stem cell research that could not be replicated. The general concern, however, remains alive.
In 2016, five researchers highlighted ongoing issues involving stem cell hype in a piece in the journal Science, They wrote,
"This (trend) raises the risk of harmful consequences, including misleading the public, creating unrealistic expectations, misinforming policy debates, devaluing methodical approaches to research, and driving premature or unwarranted clinical use. This is particularly important in light of mounting concern about the marketing of unproven stem cell treatments. This trend may have led to a gap between public expectations and the actual state of stem cell science and clinical development."
More recently in California, Hank Greely, director of Stanford's Center for Law and the Biosciences, this week was quoted in an article about Proposition 14. He said,
“Politics has a corrupting influence on everything — it pushes toward exaggeration."
As for what that means for voters evaluating Proposition 14 and the claims of its backers and opponents, the ancient admonition of caveat emptor would seem to be the order of the day -- buyer beware. That is a deeply unfortunate position for those who believe that the nation should trust science.
(Editor's note: This is an updated and lightly edited version of an earlier version of this item.)
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Read all about California's stem cell agency, including Proposition 14, in David Jensen's new book. Buy it on Amazon: California's Great Stem Cell Experiment: Inside a $3 Billion Search for Stem Cell Cures. Click here for more information on the author.
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