Yuval notes that scientists have made real progress on stem-cells, reprogramming adult cells to behave . Meanwhile, California real estate developers have made a different kind of progress on stem-cells:

California has awarded $271 million in grants to build 12 stem cell research centers in the state, even as one of the political rationales for the building program might soon disappear.

California’s Proposition 71 was always a real estate question before it was a science question. Of the $3 billion in bonds issued, up to ten percent was explicitly set aside for real estate, with acquisitions to be made in the first five years after the issue. Real estate developer Robert Klein, the top campaigner for Prop 71, is chairman of the organization it initiated, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM). Klein became chairman because Prop 71 set requirements for the job that basically excluded every other candidate in the entire state of California at the time.

There is a real question of whether CIRM will produce cures or just buildings. It is now building very expensive monuments to science even as both science and politics threaten to pass CIRM by. On the one hand, as the Times piece notes, the next president of the United States could dissolve CIRM’s political rationale by lifting the ban on federal funds for embryo-killing research. On the other hand, if the science continues to progress as it has, away from embryo-killing, then CIRM’s explicit, constitutional charge of funding only science that is not eligible for federal funds will prevent it from doing the most up-to-date science. (Unless, of course, California voters pass another constitutional amendment.)

Either way, it appears very likely that California taxpayers saddled themselves with an additional $6 billion in debt (principal and interest) for an institution that will probably be either obsolete or redundant before it is even built. The urgency of dedicating $3 billion for “the only science that can offer cures for the sick” has vanished, and California is currently $60 billion in debt, or twice that if you include new debt approved and not yet issued.