Stem-cells are merely a policy diversion for lagging Connecticut

I’ve previously raised the possibility that, in its quest for economic revitalization, state governments are not suited to pick and choose among emergent industries to invest in, much less make the risky decision to invest in unproven technologies. Now I wonder whether some taxpayer-funded initiatives to attract high-tech jobs to Connecticut amount to anything more than glossy-sounding buzz-words thrown out by policymakers who have very little idea how to get the lagging Nutmeg State back on track.

Exhibit A for exciting-to-talk-about but dubiously significant state job-growth efforts is the Connecticut Stem Cell Research Program. The state initiative came up on Tuesday, in a discussion of the state job situation on Where We Live, WNPR’s daily Connecticut news program (disclaimer: my wife, Libby, is a producer for the show). Stem-cell jobs were one of the few items that the state politicians and economist on the show were particularly upbeat about.   Is the stem-cell program really something worthy of so much hope and attention?

First of all, no one is jumping out of their seats to say anything bad about an emergent scientific field that has enormous potential to cure many diseases. (Though I must interject that biomedicine has a history of “magic bullets” that didn’t really pan out; real advance comes from broad efforts combining many independent–and often iconoclastic–researchers and disciplines.)

In the midst of a depressing discussion of Connecticut’s daunting problems (regulatory instability, high energy costs, poor infrastructure, a 20-year slide in employment), one of the show’s guests, UConn economist Fred Carstensen, brought up the stem-cell initiative, in part because its continued funding is in question in the new, downsized state budget.  He described it as “phenomenally successful…we’ve had some extraordinarily important breakthroughs.”  He cites the fact that “we literally have had world-class researchers moving to Connecticut and looking to move to Connecticut because of our stem-cell initiative”.

Stem-cells funding may have brought a few researchers and their labs to Connecticut, and encouraged good ones that are already here to apply for more funding and, perhaps, hire a few new postdocs or technicians to perform research.  But Yale already has over 270 different labs working on biomedical science.  In 2008, it received $300 million from the NIH alone, not counting that from other major funders like the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.  UConn took in over $70 million from the NIH last year.  The total outlay of the Connecticut Stem Cell Initiative?  Ten million dollars per year.  Denise Merrill, the majority leader of the state house of representatives said that with stem cells, the state brings benefits “for a relatively small amount of money”.  The characterization of price is true, but what benefits do $10 million bring when spent on stem-cells instead of, say, transportation or inner-city education?

Proponents argue that stem-cells will become a centerpiece of some future, high-tech Connecticut economy.  However, a brief history of turbulent stem-cell politics brings this aspiration into doubt.  Connecticut began the stem-cell initiative in 2005, hoping to get a corner on the research after the Bush Administration had announced tight restrictions.  However, the Nutmeg State was not alone.  Our neighbors in Massachusetts, which considerably outranks Connecticut in the biotech sector, got in on the act, pledging $100 million over 10 years.  California voters approved a $6 billion state stem-cell initiative; unsurprisingly, perhaps, this program has been criticized for its enormous cost and lax oversight.

The problem with these programs is that they represent frenzied competitive maneuvering between states, but with dubious outcomes, especially for those that, like Connecticut, didn’t put that much on the table in the first place.  In fact, our tax dollars are already hard at work on biomedical research in a very serious way, through the NIH and other, federal, entities.  Compared with our centralized national programs, state science initiatives, on the other hand, are heavy with ambition but starved for good organization and sufficient money to fund more than a few research goals.

In hindsight, the stem-cell money appears to have been thrown at a good, celebrity-supported cause, but with uncertain prospects for Connecticut.  We absolutely need research investment to create future jobs.  I say “future”, because the short-term expense of research is not only in personnel, but in equipment, expendables, and energy, which might provide jobs where they are manufactured or generated, but that is unlikely to be Connecticut.  Why should we bet that Connecticut research dollars will stay, as future employment, in Connecticut if the research might be spun-off more efficiently in one of the big biotech regions already humming with infrastructure?

At its best we can hope that a bit of good science was supported by the CT stem-cell initiative.    At worst, the state stem-cell program is a rather pathetic talking point for politicians without the nerve to tell their constituents how poorly their state competes for jobs compared to other regions.  If policymakers want to use the state budget resources to engineer our way into the future, they should focus on the tasks that state government does best.  Oh, hold on, perhaps the Connecticut should figure out how to do the things it should be doing best first, instead of waiting for a small investment in stem cells to grow into a fresh, economic heart-transplant for the state.

• Update: John Dankosky and the folks over at Where We Live put up this post on their blog that summarizes the main discussion points in Tuesday’s “jobs” show.   The show included an interview with an official from Virginia, which leads the 37 states doing a better job than Connecticut in growing their economies, according to one survey.

Related posts:

• U.S. should fund high-tech research, not states
• Should Yale support biotech lobbyists?
• My Op-Ed in the Hartford Courant
• Yale-Science Park and New Haven development