More IOM-CIRM Coverage: One Story Notes Major 2007 Conflict Flaps at Stem Cell Agency

Posted: December 9, 2012 at 8:00 am

Additional coverage emerged this morning,
including stories in the Los Angeles Times, the Nature web site and
Businessweek. on a blue-ribbon report that recommended sweeping changes
at the the $3 billion California stem cell agency

In the Times, California's largest
circulation newspaper, Eryn Brown's story was headlined,

"Stem cell
agency board criticized for conflicts of interest."

The article began,

"The board of California's stem cell
funding agency is rife with conflicts of interest and should be
restructured to improve the integrity of its grant-making process,
according to a new report from independent experts convened by the
national Institute of Medicine."“

In the San Diego U-T, reporter Bradley
Fikes' article was the only piece in all the coverage to mention two major conflict-of-interest flaps at the agency in 2007.
One involved then CIRM board member
John Reed, head of Sanford-Burnham in La Jolla, who tried to influence CIRM staff
in connection with a grant to his organization, triggering
an investigation by the state's political ethics commission. (Reed's
actions were first disclosed by the California Stem Cell Report.) The
other case involved inappropriate actions by four members of the
29-member board in an $85 million round. Ten applications were dumped
from the round because of the directors' actions. The conflict
issues were so rampant that only eight of the directors present at a
December 2007 meeting could discuss the issues.
(See here, here and here.)
On the Nature news blog, Monya Baker
had a thorough piece that said the agency “received a mixture of
praise and hard-to-enact recommendations from an august scientific
body.” She also wrote,

“It’s unclear what effect the
report will have. Many of these recommendations run counter to
requirements enshrined in the legislation that created CIRM, and the
board of CIRM has heard similar recommendations before and failed to
act on them.”

On the web site of the journal Science,
Greg Miller wrote that IOM report "praises the California Institute for
Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) as a 'bold social innovation' that
provided a creative new source of funding that has turned the state
into an international hub of stem cell research. But the IOM panel
authoring the report also concluded that the funding agency’s
organization and governance is not optimal."
Businessweek carried the AP story by
Alicia Chang mentioned yesterday. The AP story also appeared on the San
Francisco Chronicle and Sacramento Bee web sites and was also carried internationally on other web sites.  The Chronicle also had a staff story by Erin Allday.  
(An earlier version of this item did not contain the last sentence regarding the Allday story.)

Source:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/uqpFc/~3/yk8zuHF6IKA/more-iom-cirm-coverage-one-story-notes.html

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