New Jersey Senate Approves Stem Cell Money
New Jersey Senate Approves Stem Cell Money
A Bloomberg story reports that the New Jersey Senate has approved a $250 million plan to create three stem cell research centers by a vote of 29-10. The money would come by borrowing from the state’s cigarette tax revenue. $150 million would go to a center in Brunswick, and the remaining $100 mil would be split between centers in Camden and Newark.
This proposal has been on the table for a while, so it’s not a big surprise that it finally passed the state Senate. It still needs to pass the state Assembly. It was sponsored by Senator Richard Codey, who was acting governor for a little over a year until the gubernatorial election last fall. The Newark Star-Ledger reports that the bill will not pass smoothly in the Assembly, because Assemblyman Neil Cohen, sponsor of an Assembly version of a similar bill, believes the funding allocations should be changed. The paper all reports that all 10 of the dissenting votes came from Republicans, at least one of whom said the state could not afford it.
I expect that this will pass, in some form or another, because New Jersey lawmakers see the state as in competition with other states for biotechnology business. I have no idea if the state has other expenses that might be a better use of the money—but I think if the state can administer the money under a model that encourages collaborative research across fields, such as immunology, cancer research, cell biology, and so on, the benefits will extend considerably.
Editorial Rant—one of the things that I find myself irked by in the stem cell debate is how people who are opposed to embryonic stem cell research often say that it has not shown any results yet. For heaven’s sakes, the first embryonic stem cell was only derived in 1998, and federal funding for new research was cut off three years later. While eight years is a long time in the world of technology—your PC will become a doorstop in that time—and while it seems like a long time in the culture of instant gratification that surrounds most Americans, it is not a long time in scientific terms. The cell is an amazingly complicated organism, and the numbers of signals and messages that it receives that we have not yet deciphered is immense. We don’t even have several generations of scientists who have spent their life studying stem cells yet—someone who started college in 1998 might be receiving their PhD this year, if they are brilliant. A culture of research needs to develop for the ideas to start flowing fast and furious as synchronicity kicks in.