Los Angeles-----------Sacramento-----------San Diego-----------San Francisco

Portola Valley/Cyberspace, California

Commentary

Apparently, the decision regarding where to put the headquarters of the $3 billion Proposition 71 embryonic stem cell research Institute will be made by a subcommittee recently appointed by the Independent Citizens' Oversight Committee (ICOC), the governing board of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM).

In a syndicated article from the Knight-Ridder organization called "S.F. vies to be state's stem-cell site," and posted yesterday, January 7, 2005, it says that:

"The [29-member Independent Citizen's Oversight] committee voted to create a subcommittee that will evaluate possible locations. The panel -- made up of members from the Bay Area, Los Angeles, San Diego and Sacramento -- has until Feb. 3 to recommend a site."

In an article entitled Using the Broadband California infrastructure, let's solve the problem of where to put the $3 billion California Institute for Regenerative Medicine by putting it everywhere and nowhere," posted on the Broadband California web site on December 10, 2004, it was proposed by this reporter that instead of spending money on bricks and mortar to build physical office space for the 50 or so bio-medical bureaucrats who will be administering the $3 billion in Proposition 71 stem cell money, the best minds, most innovative telecommunications companies, and the latest and most advanced high-tech equipment be used to enable these research facilitators to work from home and telecommute to a "virtual headquarters" in cyberspace, where they could do all the work necessary to see that the $3 billion in funds appropriated by the voters of California is put to the best possible and most effective use in the search for the promised cures for the terrible diseases now afflicting Californians and others.

The list of places from which the members of the ICOC's "Location Subcommittee" will be drawn—"the Bay Area, Los Angeles, San Diego and Sacramento"—certainly includes the four main sites of political, economic, social, cultural, and technological power in the state. Not included, however, are members from cyberspace, which is, arguably, an even more potent source of all these forces than any one of these places separately, and, perhaps, soon if not already, of all of them together.

For that reason, it seems only reasonable to include one or more representatives from Cyberspace on this subcommittee, so that the arguments in favor of putting the CIRM headquarters "everywhere and nowhere" can be considered along with the justifications for picking one and rejecting all the other physical locations now in the running to host the office that will be dispensing $3 billion in taxpayer money (collected from the entire state of California, not just these cities/areas).

By using broadband tools available from SBC, Verizon, and many smaller high-tech and telecommunications companies in California, it would be possible to provide every one of the 50 or so CIRM employees with state-of-the-art capabilities to download documents, prepare reports, peruse spreadsheets, listen to pleas for funding, meet with colleagues, access background materials, vote on funding decisions, and discuss the competing merits of the various funding requests in intimate detail with some or all of their co-workers in a very cost-effective and convenient way, facilitating and accelerating the decision-making process (everyone says it should be done as swiftly as possible) regarding the advancement of California's "soft-tech" (bio-medical) research efforts and institutions by taking full advantage of past successes and stimulating future ones in California's "hard-tech" (computers, micro-electronics, and telecom) sector.

The Knight-Ridder article semi-facetiously cites as an advantage of putting the CIRM headquarters in the San Francisco Bay area the fact that doing so would be "convenient for committee chairman Robert Klein, who lives in Portola Valley."

Locating the Proposition 71 Institute in cyberspace would be even more convenient for CIRM Interim President Klein, who could, within the context of this reporter's suggested solution, go directly from his Portola Valley kitchen to his Portola Valley home office and be at work doling out the $3 billion in research funds a few seconds after breakfast, with no need even to motor or bike through Stanford University into Palo Alto.

And getting to work would be just as easy for the rest of the Proposition 71 team, an advantage that ought to be seriously considered since, as Interim President Klein said at the second meeting of the ICOC on Thursday, January 6, 2005, at the University of Southern California, ""We have a responsibility to move as quickly as possible."