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In a September 5, 2004, news commentary, this reporter wrote that "Socializing the Risk while Privatizing the Health Benefits and Profits, as California's Proposition 71 does, is Unethical." .

On September 16, 2004, California State Senator Tom McClintock, who finished third in the election that made Arnold Schwarzenegger Governor of California, appeared on California Politics Today to attack Proposition 71 as a "self-serving sham" that will spend money California doesn’t have. Senator McClintock puts forward many of the same arguments he presents in this interview in a print column that you can access by clicking here.

In that interview, the Republican politician also said that he'd be glad to participate in a phone debate on California Politics Today with any bona fide representative of the pro-Proposition 71 side.

This reporter has tried hard since then to find one.

George Schultz is a very high-profile politician and an endorser of Proposition 71. So far, he has declined to respond to a very polite offer to let him speak out on behalf of the measure on California Politics Today or to debate Senator McClintock on this site.

Bob Klein is a multi-millionaire, a connected California Democratic, the author of Proposition 71 and its chief sponsor and someone who, like former Secretary of State Schultz, has declined to respond to an invitation from this site to debate the merits of Proposition 71 with Senator McClintock.

Fiona Hutton is the communications director for the "Yes on 71 California Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative." California Politics Today has asked her half-a-dozen times to provide someone to debate Senator McClintock on the merits of this $6 billion gift from the people of California to a select group of self-promoting elitists posing as saviors of suffering humanity. She hasn't returned a single one of these calls.

Now, today, October 17, 2004, the tide may finally be turning in the direction of common sense.

As reported in Friday's San Francisco Chronicle, "Foes closing the gap in stem-cell measure--Financing, not ethics, causing some to take closer looks". Its author writes:

"Even as supporters were beginning a statewide advertising campaign, one of the state's leading health care unions, the 58,000-member California Nurses Association, came out against the proposition, arguing that it would saddle the state with debt and allow billions of dollars in research grants to be doled out without adequate public supervision."

Meanwhile, researchers at Harvard University are asking permission to create cloned human embryos for stem cell research into the causes and treatment of type 1 diabetes, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's, precisely the diseases cited by Proposition 71 supporters as targets of their taxpayer-supported "Institute of Regenerative Medicine," but without requiring the taxpayers of Massachusetts to provide the funding for their work.

A few miles away, in Worcester, Massachusetts, as discussed in a recent Stem Cell World interview with Dr. Robert Lanza, Vice President of Medical & Scientific Development at Advanced Cell Technology (ACT), this private company has produced breakthrough results in creating specialized retinal stem cells that now offer hope to those with retinitis pigmentosa and other degenerate eye diseases, all without receiving billions in grants from THEIR cash-starved state.

If capital feels there's a future in stem cell research, it will seek out and fund the scientists, labs, and companies able to do that research. If society feels, for humanitarian reasons, that it should fund research that private equity markets aren't interested in, then society should reap whatever benefits and profits accrue from its investment.

But asking society to bear the risk, while private universities, companies, and venture capitalists appropriate whatever payback stems from its humanitarian impulses is, to repeat a point made earlier, unethical, unjust, and unconscionable.