Stem Cell research "Accountability": What sounds good vs. what is good


There's been a lot of talk about reining in the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), aka the "stem cell institute" begotten by last year's Prop 71.

Some of the proposals for increasing responsiveness are long on sounding like a good idea if you don't know what you're talking about but short on potential positive return. At their uninformed worst, these proposals hurt the science, and in turn hurt everyone.

Controller Steve Westly, who was an outspoken proponent of Prop 71, has recently waded into the accountability fray by proposing that funded scientists be forced to make projections about the impact of their research on the labor market and state tax revenues:
Controller Westly offered suggestions to the Independent Citizens’ Oversight Committee on ways to track its progress beyond the requirements of the proposition. Westly proposed performance measures including that the Committee require grant applicants to evaluate their project’s potential for creating jobs and generating revenues. He also recommended that the Committee report on the added performance measures annually and contract for a yearly performance audit.

I think the Controller's suggestion is well-motivated but ill-considered.

"Well-motivated" because, well, accountability is a good thing. It's hard to argue against it. CIRM could have been designed in a more transparent way, not so much to avoid wrongdoing as the appearance of impropriety. Besides, if CIRM is going to distribute $3 billion of taxpayer money, shouldn't it be accountable? The answer to that hopelessly rhetorical question is: Of course.

But it shouldn't be subjected to pointless regulations that will occupy scientists' time — time that could be spent generating ideas and doing experiments — with no obvious return. Which brings us to "ill-considered."

At best, proclaiming that scientists ought to predict the outcome of their proposed research — in a financial, as opposed to a scientific, context, — is empty boilerplate, and that's just what scientists will be pasting into their grant applications if this proposal is adopted.

All research of the kind that CIRM wants to fund creates jobs and raises tax revenue in more or less the same way, if it does so at all: The research produces a physical object or a technique that has therapeutic potential; this thing is then licensed, tested, and if (years later) it passes FDA muster, someone gets to sell it. So at best scientists will be saying just exactly that in every application. We could just pass out a rubber stamp.

(Note the italicized qualification. Some research doesn't create physical objects or techniques, but instead creates information without an immediate commercial product toy surprise in the box. This research doesn't create jobs or raise tax revenues — but it's still essential to the enterprise. Pure research is the bridge between our ignorance and research that does something concrete. It's not optional, especially not in an exploding new field. We need it. And forcing CIRM to weigh the "job creation potential" of each application might result in the neglect of important basic research.)

And that's the best-case scenario.

At worst, boilerplate wouldn't be good enough, and CIRM would be taking the requirement seriously instead of winking at the identical "political bozo supplement" section in each grant application.

In that world, each applicant will actually have to make a projection about the specific economic impact of their particular project, before the research itself has been performed and the outcome is known. This would be insanely onerous, if not impossible. Leave aside the fact that it takes a few years to get one Ph.D., that most of us don't have a second one in economics, and that highly specialized people's person-hours are best spent working in their specialty. I think it's obvious that predicting the future economic impact of an unknown technology is a fairly heavy burden to add to someone who's already obliged to create novel and interesting directions for advanced research in a new field, do the experiments, and wake up the next day to do it again.

Incidentally: scientists funded by the NIH and DoE aren't required to make these sorts of projections, which I mention both for the precedent value and because Westly's proposal mentioned that "the State Controller’s Office provided recommendations to the Committee on grant administration and fiscal practices at the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Health and the Stem Cell Research Foundation." If the Controller's Office had paid attention to NIH policy and practice, it would have noticed that the kinds of constraints proposed for CIRM aren't placed on the nation's largest funding source for biological research.

Accountability sounds like a good idea, but so many people are jumping on the bandwagon right now and trying to "improve" CIRM by restricting it that it could end up dying a death of a thousand cuts.

The bottom line for me is this: This proposal could be just so much hot air, because all good science affects the economy in much the same way, and there's no point in asking each scientist to say it. Or it could seriously threaten basic research that doesn't have straighforward economic ramifications. Or it could place a deleterious and undue burden on people who just want to roll up their sleeves and do science.

Or it's all of those things. Note that none of them are good. None of them even sound good.

Posted: Fri - April 1, 2005 at 07:03 AM   | Category:     |   |   | |


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