Scientist to California: Fund research like a nation

LA JOLLA California's boosters like to compare its economic statistics to other nations. The message is that California's economy is more like a nation than a state.

Larry Goldstein, director of UCSD's stem cell program, said California should apply that logic to funding of science and technology research. Since the federal government is cutting back, it's time for California to pick up the slack, Goldstein said at Monday's "Pipeline for Life" symposium. The event was held by the California Healthcare Institute Foundation at the Salk Institute, in San Diego's bioscience research hub of Torrey Pines Mesa.

Larry Goldstein lays out the case for California funding its own sci-tech research, giving San Diego as an example of what can happen.

I've embedded a short video clip above of Goldstein making his point, part of a much longer speech he gave outlining issues and opportunities in stem cell research. If you don't want to watch the video, the text of his remarks about California funding research are below. It's very slightly edited for clarity.

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"The population of California is 10 percent of the United States, we consume about 10 percent of the funding for research, but we only have about 10 percent of the say in how federal money is used," Goldstein said. "We disproportionately in California benefit from investments in science and technology. And in fact, we're particularly well suited to take advantage of this.

"I think we may have reached the point where as a country California is almost as big as Italy or Germany or somewhere else, it's in our best interests to begin seed-funding our own long-term research interests. That's partly what Prop. 71 attempted to do. It stimulated the growth of a number of industries, research findings, trials, what have you.

"And it could be that the time has come for us to stop blaming everything on Washington, although there's plenty of blame to go around there, and take matters into our own hands, and recognize that it's in our interest to function locally.

"We've got to have appropriate regulation that would stimulate this field while protecting people from the excesses of those who would cut corners on logic. And then there needs to be enormous amounts of transparency, so that the public knows what they're getting into. Because at the end of the day, the clinical trials are experiments on a public who have paid for the research. And we have a great debt that we have to make good on to be sure that they're adequately informed, so that if we do hurt somebody, and there will be adverse events, we've done it in an open way.

"And finally, of course, teamwork and cooperation. San Diego and La Jolla are in my view the epicenter of this kind of collaboration and cooperation ... Here in La Jolla we build bridges across the street at the Sanford Consortium, working across disciplinary and institutional boundaries here is typical. And in fact movement in and out of the private sector locally is substantial, through the hundreds of companies that have been started and the people who move around. It's just a great environment."

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Scientist to California: Fund research like a nation