“71 will support research to find cures for diseases that affect millions of people, including cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Please support the effort to find cures. . . It could save the life of someone you love.” That was actor Michael J. Fox in an ad for Proposition 71, the Stem Cell Research Initiative, also supported by Christopher Reeve and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose father-in-law Sargent Shriver was afflicted with Alzheimer’s. The 2004 measure passed in a landslide, but there was more to it than grandiose promises.
The prime mover was Democrat insider and real estate tycoon Robert Klein, who wrote the measure to install himself as chairman and required a 70 percent supermajority of both houses to make any structural or policy changes. Proposition 71 created the $3 billion California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), which was really about the redistribution of money.
In 2012, the Institute of Medicine, a division of the National Academy of Sciences, found that almost all CIRM board members were “interested parties with a personal or financial stake in the allocation of CIRM fundings.” As the investigators learned, CIRM was directing a full 91 percent of its research funding to institutions with representatives on its governing board. This seems to have escaped the attention of state attorney general Kamala Harris.
According to Klein, the life-saving cures would generate a steady stream of royalties that would make CIRM self-supporting. Trouble was, the state stem-cell agency reported no royalties until 2018, and only in the amount of $190,345.87. That is less than the salary of former state senator Art Torres, the non-scientist CIRM hired when a biotech professional was willing to work for no salary at all.
By 2020, CIRM stood in need of more money to redistribute. Americans for Cures, a non-profit headed by Robert Klein, floated Proposition 14, the Stem Cell Research Institute Bond Initiative, this time for $5.5 billion. As this writer twice verified, signature gatherers falsely claimed the measure sought only $1.5 billion. As the deadline approached, Americans for Cures began pushing for people to print out 16 pages and mail in the signatures. This was an open invitation to fraud, but Secretary of State Alex Padilla duly approved the measure for the November 2020 ballot.
Proposition 14 passed by 51.09 to 48.91, a far cry from 2004. In 2024, a ballpark figure for the promised life-saving cures is zero, and for all but the willfully blind, there’s a lesson or two here. Beware of white coat larceny, as in 2004, and white coat supremacy, as in 2020 under the loathsome Dr. Anthony Fauci. In 2024 moving forward, it’s all about memory against forgetting.
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