Stem Cell Agency Must Look for Responsible Leadership
A summary of opinion pieces regarding the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the state's stem cell agency, appears below.
- Robert Klein, Sacramento Bee: The "search for a permanent president of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine ... requires more time than we would wish" because of the "complexity of the decision to accept this extraordinary change in roles, along with the multilayered transition," Robert Klein, chair of CIRM's Independent Citizens Oversight Committee, writes in a Bee opinion piece. "[R]ecruiting a scientist with a proven record in directing and managing major ongoing research involves finding medical scientists who can take over existing grants, assume the responsibility of mentoring ... students in the labs and assume the institutional management responsibilities for leading the stem cell efforts of a major university or research facility," Klein writes (Klein, Sacramento Bee, 9/2).
- Christopher Thomas Scott, Sacramento Bee: The interim leader of CIRM's grant operations must manage "against a backdrop of transparency, the politics of the citizens committee and the steely gaze of Sacramento," Christopher Thomas Scott, director of the Stanford University Program on Stem Cells in Society and senior research scholar at the Center for Biomedical Ethics, writes in a Bee opinion piece. "California voters put their money on the line for a vision of science and medicine," Scott writes. "Now comes the hard part. The institute must execute the plan, bringing new knowledge, discoveries and therapies to California," Scott concludes (Scott, Sacramento Bee, 8/31).