Public Testimony

As a family with several cell-based diseases and a taxpayer concerned about Wisconsin economic future I am dumb-founded as to why this legislature continues to ignore this state’s multi-billion dollar gold standard resource. With each passing day, without state funding and a sound 21st century policy foundation in place, down the road, both Wisconsin taxpayers and health consumers will wonder just how in the world did their state lawmakers fail to act to protect and conserve this state’s greatest scientific and technological resource ever?

More specifically why does our state legislature sit idly by while a small non-public non-profit entity usurps its authority and decision-making power over this state’s most valuable twenty-first century economic property and resource?

How much longer will it take before Wisconsin lawmakers make the connection between its present health care and economic crisis and how its lucrative multi-billion dollar stem cell legacy is presently being shepherded? In all due respect to Dr. James Thomson who I greatly admire and respect, fundamentally this is a State of Wisconsin creation!

How many Wisconsin legislators have any idea about the nature of the decision-making and intellectual property language that was involved in Wisconsin’s decision to grant to our chief competitor, a large biotech company in the State of California, an exclusive embryonic stem cell license? Such agreed upon or passive impotence will not and should not go unnoticed by Wisconsin taxpayers.

California taxpayers and lawmakers have wisely determined that such lucrative intellectual property rights and profits should be shared with the California taxpayer and no longer controlled totally by the inventor alone and/or a small unelected elite in a research transfer office.

Finally I refer you to California’s Constitution on this subject, and more recently the Stem Cell Affordability Legislation (SB 343) now before California’s Senate Health Care Committee.

Most respectfully,

William R. Benedict