Talk on distributing funds grows contentious.
Sacramento Bee (California)
The president of California’s stem cell agency and the chair of a key subcommittee have resigned, following a contentious meeting Friday over plans to issue hundreds of millions of dollars in grants for new lab space.
Zach Hall, the president of the agency since its creation in 2005, had announced earlier this year that he intended to leave sometime this summer. But a recent diagnosis of prostate cancer as well as conflict within an agency subcommittee regarding grants for new laboratories led him to resign effective April 30, Hall said in a letter dated Tuesday.
“The exceedingly contentious and occasionally personal tone of the last (subcommittee) meeting suggests that it is in both my best interest and that of the institute for me to step down at this time,” he wrote to the agency’s governing board.
The chair of the subcommittee, Southern California real estate consultant Albert “Rusty” Doms, submitted a resignation letter Sunday.
Neither Hall nor Doms was available for comment Tuesday.
But Janet Wright, a Chico cardiologist who sits on the agency’s 29-member governing board, said Hall’s letter refers to a meeting Friday at which the subcommittee discussed plans for grants to fund $222 million in new laboratory space at universities and research institutes around the state.
Wright said Hall pushed for the committee to move quickly, following what he said was direction provided by the governing board April 10. Wright and others disagreed with that interpretation of the board’s order, she said, and argued for a slower process that would include a series of public hearings and extensive consultation with experts.
The debate turned rough.
“It was not our best day,” she said.
Bob Klein, the chair of the governing board, said Doms told him he was resigning principally because he did not have time to attend the series of meetings that Wright and others proposed. Doms is also on the board overseeing the construction of a major new hospital in Los Angeles, Klein said.
John Simpson, stem cell project director for the watchdog group Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, said that while Hall’s health should be the primary concern, his abrupt departure, combined with Doms’ resignation, should raise alarms.
“It’s never a good sign when the chief executive of a public agency resigns after a policy dispute,” he said.
Hall, 69, was trained as a neuroscientist and spent most of his career as a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco. Since 1994, he has been a high-level scientific administrator, including serving as director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.
A search committee has been looking for Hall’s successor for several months. It met Tuesday to select candidates for interviews in early May, said Dale Carlson, the stem cell agency’s spokesman.
The state stem cell agency, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, was created to administer the $3 billion in bond funding for embryonic stem cell research approved with Proposition 71 in November 2004. In the past year, the agency has awarded more than $130 million in fellowships and research grants to stem cell scientists.
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About the writer: The Bee’s Jim Downing can be reached at (916) 321-1065 or [email protected]
