Payback for Tax Payer Funding Called For

Letter to the Editor

On February 13th of this year Governor Doyle will send his proposed $50 billion dollar budget to the legislature. In 2006 Doyle helped authorize $50 million in state funding for the University’s planned Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery. This funding by our Wisconsin taxpayers was in part to further jump-start Wisconsin’s still fledgling stem cell research and development initiative.

During this same period Doyle also funded a $5 million plan to recruit and retain stem cell companies; $3 million has gone into Dr. James Thomson’s two companies---Cellular Dynamics, Inc. and Stem Cell Products, Inc. Steps were also taken to waive Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation’s (WARF) royalty fees for companies that conduct stem cell research in Wisconsin. All of this funding, mind you, without establishing any terms whatsoever for obtaining any returns on the tax payers’ investment.

Such blatant generosity has been hailed by Jim Haney, executive director, of the Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, as contributing to “a critical mass” that can only be compared to Silicon Valley. Such hyped-up support has also caused Tom Still, president of the Wisconsin Technology Council, to tout Dr. James Thomson as a possible candidate for the Nobel Prize.

The print media’s unceasing editorializing about Dr. James Thomson’s “research commercialization model” along with the imperative for ever more public funds to support this model “for a more robust job creation,” all suggest that much is going to be expected from you and I, the taxpayer in the years ahead.

All of this suggests to me that state funding for for-profit stem cell entities in Wisconsin will increase dramatically in the immediate years ahead. What is most surprising and disheartening is the fact that neither our public servants nor the media have yet shown any willingness whatsoever to assure accountability to the taxpayer for such public funding. If Wisconsin taxpayers are paying for this research they have the right to expect a reasonable share of the commercial profits and other benefits.

In addition to direct financial returns or commissions, for-profit entities that receive public funding should reasonably be expected to make their stem cell therapy products available to uninsured Wisconsin residents. They should also be expected to provide discounted prices to publicly fund health care plans, and to grant Wisconsin residents preference if their stem cell therapies are in short supply.

Wisconsin middle class taxpayers, the uninsured working poor and the sick should not continue to acquiesce and do nothing out of fear and trumped up accusations that such ethically sound taxpayer-centered accountability practices will somehow squash private competition and send our local scientist-entrepreneurs and in-state jobs packing.

Wisconsin needs to step up to the plate now and meet this responsibility to the taxpayers and to future generations who suffer from cell-based diseases. Now is the time to address and resolve these taxpayer inequities and assure more affordable health care to all of us.

Respectfully submitted