The Sacramento Bee
Citing conflict-of-interest concerns, California’s stem cell agency on Friday rejected 10 of 58 applications competing for $85 million in grants.
The applications, submitted by various faculty members statewide, were rejected because they included recommendation letters from academic supervisors who also sit on the agency’s governing board.
Board members are responsible for awarding the agency’s grants and are supposed to abstain from any involvement with awards to their own institutions.
Keeping with the agency’s privacy policies, spokeswoman Ellen Rose did not disclose the names of the researchers or institutions involved.
But representatives from UCLA and the University of Southern California both confirmed with The Bee that their applicants were among those tossed out. The grants in question, which are designed to fund stem cell research by new faculty members, range as high as $2 million over five years.
Friday’s announcement follows the disclosure last month that board member John Reed, who heads the Burnham Institute for Medical Research in La Jolla, had lobbied agency staff members to reconsider their rejection of a $638,000 grant to a Burnham researcher. A complaint that Reed violated conflict-of-interest rules is pending before the state Fair Political Practices Commission.
Rose said the problems revealed Friday appear to have arisen from what she described as an ambiguity in the grant instructions: Applications were required to include recommendation letters from a top official at each university or research institution, but some of those same people sit on the stem cell agency’s 29-member board.
John Simpson, spokesman for the watchdog group Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, said the rules should have been obvious to board members.
“It’s simple: Stem cell board members cannot take part in any way in grants to their institutions,” he said.
Some universities with executives on the stem cell board had already taken steps to avoid potential conflicts of interest.
Claire Pomeroy, dean of the UC Davis School of Medicine, sits on the agency’s board. Her school’s applicants were not hit by Friday’s action because their letters of recommendation were written by an associate dean.
“We have a very clear barrier,” said UC Davis School of Medicine spokesman Charles Casey. “(Pomeroy) did not even know who we were submitting for those faculty grant awards.”
Robert Klein, the agency’s chairman, said in a statement Friday that instructions for future grant applications would be more precise.
The state stem cell agency was created to issue grants authorized by the passage of Proposition 71 in November 2004. The bond measure directs the state to spend $3 billion over roughly 10 years to fund stem cell research, train young scientists and build new laboratories.
About the writer:
–The Bee’s Jim Downing can be reached at (916) 321-1065 or [email protected].
