The San Diego Union-Tribune
Is there really a shortage of trained lab technicians for California’s academic and biotechnology laboratories? Does working in a stem cell lab really require a distinct set of skills?
Those are just two of several questions that officials from the California State University and community college systems will have to answer before their request for $31 million from the state’s stem cell institute will be further considered.
Representatives for the systems appeared before the stem cell institute’s board yesterday, requesting part of the state’s $3 billion stem cell fund to create new or enhanced educational and training programs.
They said the programs are needed to fill the increasing number of lab positions expected to be created as the institute continues to seed stem cell research around California. But board members questioned the proposal.
“I don’t have any opposition to the idea of a well-trained work force in California. I just question if this is the place to fund it,” said Dr. John Reed, president of the Burnham Institute for Medical Research in La Jolla, who is a member of the institute’s board.
About 44 percent of California’s undergraduates in life sciences and 65 percent of its undergraduates in business come from the CSU system, the educational system representatives said.
Obviously, they contribute greatly, Reed said. But he wants to see national job data that confirm there’s a need for more people with associate’s, baccalaureate or master’s degrees to meet the demand, and whether that represents a bottleneck in terms of advancing stem cell research.
Reed also wasn’t convinced that specialty training for work in stem cell labs as opposed to other scientific labs was needed, or cost-effective.
“This field of stem cell research right now is in its infancy and changes rapidly,” Reed said. “Any training that we tailor now can be outdated in a year, so the work force needs to have good, strong, basic skills and not necessarily specialized skills.”
Reed also questioned how the systems’ plan to use stem cell funding to keep upgrading their curricula is any different from the sort of upgrades that they must undertake all the time when teaching courses in constantly evolving fields, such as biology or bio-informatics.
“Presumably, they have a budget to do this on an ongoing basis — why does it need to come out of the institute’s pool of money?” Reed asked.
While the systems put together their responses to the institute’s questions, a subcommittee from the institute was assigned to look into whether the stem cell initiative legally allows the funding of such a request, and into other alternatives to helping develop a stem cell lab work force.
It will take some work to convince at least one consumer advocacy group that the education systems are not looking at the $3 billion stem cell fund as a “gravy train.” Are they just trying to jump on it by adding the words stem cell in front of course titles? asked John Simpson, of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, a Santa Monica-based nonprofit.
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Contact the author Terri Somers at: (619) 293-2028; [email protected]
