Illinois Gubernatorial Action

Illinois Gubernatorial Action

The Champaign-Urbana News Gazette reports that Illinois Governor filed an executive order eliminating oversight of the state’s stem cell grant program. Now, this news article is less than stellar in its writing, containing phrases such as “by $10 million that had been hidden in the budget under the vague description of ‘scientific research,’” “circumvented the legislative process,” “Those rules would have had to have been,” and “Back in July,” which suggest either a fairly strong opinion on the part of the writer (in the first two) and just plain poor writing (the second two). The facts are a little bit incoherent as well, and the nature of the writing leads me to have some doubt about their completeness/accuracy. But the sequence appears to be that
1) last spring the state legislature failed to pass a bill for stem cell research;

2) the governor issued an executive order in July requiring the state Dept. of Public Health “to adopt rules for the issuance and administration of stem cell research grants”. The funding reportedly came from an umbrella budget line for “scientific research”;

3) The General Assembly's Joint Commission on Administrative Rules was required to approve the rules adopted by the Dept. of Public Health;

4) The new executive order eliminates the adoption of the rules.

According to the article,

"The Department of Public Health already has the authority to issue grants without promulgating rules, so the language that was in the order was not needed," said Blagojevich spokeswoman Abby Ottenhoff. "So in order to issue grants and get research started as quickly as possible, the second executive order just clarifies that the department can use the authority it already has."

State Sen. Dan Rutherford, R-Chenoa, said the problem was not the governor's support for stem cell research, but the way he chose to go about it. "Some people are for this issue and some people are against this issue," said Rutherford, who is a member of the Joint Commission on Administrative Rules. "The fact is, we should be able to present it in full public disclosure, have it debated and have it decided as a consensus of the General Assembly. I think its [sic] inappropriate for the governor to say he's going to have his state agency receive money without having any guidelines or oversight as to how they're going to spend this money or give it out to people without having legislative oversight."

Now, I don’t really feel like spending my time reviewing the two executive orders, the charter for the DPH, or other stuff, so I’m not giving you a researched opinion here. But it seems to me that the legislature did not need to allow “scientific research” to be a budget line if they didn’t want the governor to appropriate it as he saw fit. Should stem cell research be debated? Well, yes, given the current climate. This may well have been a mistake in judgment on the governor’s part, if only because he’s going to tick a lot of people off, but if there was a budget line for research already, and people want to spend money on embryonic stem cell research, then why not? I can’t imagine that the grants are going to be given without scientific review of the proposals, which should ensure that the money will be reasonably well spent. Or does the legislature propose reviewing all grant applications in every scientific field itself?

Legal Brou-ha-has

Legal Brou-ha-has

The Missouri Coalition for Lifesaving Cures, the group pushing for an amendment to the Missouri constitution is suing another group for copyright violation. According to an AP story in the Kansas City Star, the second group, the Elliot Institute, is “pushing a different ballot measure that would ban most forms of embryonic stem cell research, and what it terms other types of "human engineering." The MCLS alleges that the Elliot Institute is using images and layout from the MCLS website on its own website in order to “trick Internet search engines to direct people to the wrong site.” The MCLS spent over $130,000 on designing its website and believes its intellectual property has been stolen.

All this will be decided by a court, but if you want to have an opinion on it, here are the two sites:

Missouri Coalition for Lifesaving Cures: http://www.missouricures.com
Elliot Institute: http://www.elliotinstitute.org

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In California, “final” briefs were filed electronically in the Prop 71 trial yesterday. I put “final” in quotation marks because each side now gets a chance to file a response, and because an appeal is inevitable. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the lead lawyer for the state/CIRM wrote, “Plaintiffs failed to prove any facts that could possibly justify invalidating Proposition 71.” Now, I can tell you from my own experience with law that this is a rhetorical statement and doesn’t really mean anything as to whether there was any factual information presented that would invalidate Prop 71. Even if there were, the defense attorneys would still use this language. When you’re being sued, a standard way to mount your defense is to state that plaintiffs have no facts. So we’ll see what the judge thinks. It is probably the case that the “facts” of this lawsuit are much more ambiguous than facts of other lawsuits; it is fairly easy to establish that a person was in a particular time and place when a harm occurred, for example, but showing that there are conflicts of interest are much less cut and dried. And there’s probably not a lot of good precedent to fall back on to show how the statutory language has historically been interpreted.

Probably more than you wanted to know….

Batten Disease Trial to Begin in Oregon

Batten Disease Trial to Begin in Oregon

Oregon Health & Science University is conducting a clinical Phase I safety trial to observe the effects of using transplanting fetal stem cells into the brains of six children with Batten Disease. The patients have not yet been selected. Batten Disease is an invariably fatal disorder that causes blindness, speechlessness, and paralysis prior to death.

An AP story on Fox News and in the Washington Post says that stem cells have been developed by the California biotech company Stem Cells, Inc. and are derived from fetal tissues and not embryos. The patients will have holes drilled in their heads and the stem cells will be injected directly into the brain. There will be no subsequent testing, but the patients will be monitored to see if there is an effect on the progress of the disease.

The press release on the trial gives some more details about the disease. Batten Disease is the name for a collective group of disorders, two forms of which will be evaluated. They are known as neuronal ceroid lipofuscinosis (NCL), and are caused by genetic mutations which interfere with the body’s ability to make certain enzymes and proteins. Other material builds up in the brain as a result of the absences of these enzymes. Previous studies of mice that are missing one of the enzymes that causes NCL have shown that the stem cells increase the amount of the missing enzyme, reduce the amount of abnormal material in the brain and prevents the death of some brain cells. The stem cells are derived from neural stem cells in the fetuses.

This just seems like one of the most horrific diseases there is—as a parent, I can’t imagine what it would be like to watch my son lose his vision, his motors skills, his speech. I really hope this shows some effectiveness.