This page and its contents are copyright © 2006 by Etopia Media News Networks. All rights in all media reserved.

(click on image to activate video clip)

Russell Korobkin, Professor of Law at UCLA Law School and Senior Fellow at the UCLA Center for Society and Genetics

UCLA Professor views with alarm the anti-Proposition 71 lawsuit

Russell Korobkin is Professor of Law at UCLA Law School and a Senior Fellow at the UCLA Center for Society and Genetics.

Professor Korobkin recently published two versions of essentially the same op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. The Times piece appeared on March 3, 2006, and was entitled "The stem cell initiative, sabotaged.". The version that ran in the Chronicle, entitled "An abusive stem-cell lawsuit," was published on March 13, 2006, and included the suggestion that:

"If the plaintiffs appeal, as they have already pledged to do, the California Supreme Court should exercise a power that it has, but rarely uses, to bypass the state Court of Appeal and review the case immediately."

an exclusive 33-minute video interview with Professor Korobkin about his op-ed piece and related issues

Professor Korobkin was interviewed exclusively this afternoon by California Politics Today reporter Marc Strassman in the professor's UCLA Law School office, and spoke at length and in detail about the points he raises in his newspaper op-ed pieces.

You can watch and listen to that comprehensive interview with UCLA Law School Professor and UCLA Center for Society and Genetics Senior Fellow Russell Korobkin by clicking here.

"Independent," yet operating under the "exclusive management and control" of the State of California

Chief among the issues discussed in this interview is the legal-political-semantic question of how the Independent Citizens' Oversight Committee (ICOC), designed by Proposition 71 author and ICOC Chair Robert N. Klein II precisely to be outside the control ("independent") of non-scientist, non-biotech entrepreneur/venture capitalist, non-Stanford people, and explicitly free of "political interference" from outside meddlers without the specialized knowledge needed to run a successful human embryonic stem cell research project as envisioned under Proposition 71, can now be construed as being "under the exclusive management and control" of the State of California, as required by Article XVI, Section 3, of the California Constitution.

Other issues discussed in this interview include: the logistics, expense, and ethics of the "farming/harvesting" of potentially huge numbers of human eggs from human women egg donors; oft-repeated public claims/promises of over a billion dollars in royalty payments to the State of California from royalties based on Proposition 71-funded research in light of recent admissions that that won't be possible; the possibly higher costs of life-saving (and allegedly cost-saving) medical treatments derived from Proposition 71-funded research; and the reduced competitive advantage that might be enjoyed by California's universities and bio-tech companies if, as Professor Korobkin believes, whoever is elected President of the U.S. in 2008 reverses President Bush's August, 2001, ban on federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research and the head-start in human embryonic stem cell research intended to be bestowed within California through the spending of $3 billion (to be repaid with around $6 billion in taxpayer funds over 30 years) is rendered considerably less significant by the possible opening of the floodgates of federal funding for the same research, which would be dispersed outside of, as well as within, California.

Join the "California Politics Today™" mailing list (unless you're already on another Etopia Media mailing list)

Just send an empty e-mail to CAPolDay-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.

Get into the swing of things with additional Etopia Media News Network articles and interviews and Google Alerts

To access additional, recent articles from the Etopia Media News Networks web site, as crawled and cataloged on the Google News web site, click here.

To sign up for Google Alerts whenever a new Etopia Media News Networks article appears on Google News, click here.