Governor vetoes California stem cell bill

The effort to create CIRM was launched after President Bush’s August 2001 restrictions on federally funded embryonic stem cell studies because the process requires the destruction of human embryos.

SB 1565 was sponsored by Sen. Sheila Kuehl, a Santa Monica Democrat, and George Runner, a Republican from Antelope Valley. It had breezed through the Assembly and the Senate since its introduction Feb. 22.

Kuehl has long pressed CIRM for increased accountability and to codify — beyond CIRM’s policy — that stem cell therapies and diagnostics funded by the agency be affordable and accessible to uninsured Californians.

Runner has been an avowed opponent of embryonic stem cell research. His amendment would have allowed CIRM’s scientific and medical research funding working group — which includes 15 scientists who review, score, rank grant and loan applications — to allow a simple majority vote to push forward non-embryonic stem cell research.

That research already can receive federal funding. But adult stem cell research has picked up support over the past year, after Shinya Yamanaka, now a part-time researcher at the J. David Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco, and others induced some adult skin cells to change into embryonic-like stem cells.

Runner’s amendment also may have made it easier for researchers at Stanford University, the University of California, San Francisco, the Gladstone Institutes and the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute to land more funding for their efforts to manipulate adult stem cells into embryonic-like stem cells or work with umbilical cord blood cells.

One of SB 1565’s aims already is coming to pass, though. The Little Hoover Commission, an independent, bipartisan state oversight commission, said Sept. 25 that it will study CIRM .

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