Suckers for 'Science' How to talk California taxpayers out of $3 billion.

The passage of proposition 71 in California (the Stem Cell Research and Cures Act) was an acute case of electoral folly. As Californians plunged headlong into a $6 billion quagmire of debt in a quixotic quest for "miracle cures" from human cloning and embryonic stem cells, they simultaneously rejected Prop. 67, an initiative that would have added a modest tax to phone bills to keep the state's endangered emergency rooms and trauma centers from shutting down.

This is a remarkable and disconcerting development. It wasn't long ago that California's trauma centers were the pride of the state and a model for the world. In the heyday of the trauma center movement, emergency rooms throughout the state were upgraded to ensure that critically injured people could receive quality care within the "golden hour," a 60-minute time frame that dramatically increases a person's chances of survival. Needless to say, such centers are very expensive, which made them politically vulnerable after the dot-com bubble burst and the California legislature's spending binge led to a collapse of the state's finances. The bitter irony here is that while Californians refuse to fund treatment centers that could make the difference between people living and dying today, they are pursuing treatments and cures that, if they come at all, are likely a decade or more away. What could explain such folly? Blame the awesome power of big money, big celebrities, and big hype.

Ever since President Bush limited federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research to stem cell lines that already existed in August 2001, Big Biotech and its partners in major universities have sought to regain the advantage. Supporters of embryonic stem-cell research and human cloning courted celebrity disease and injury victims to become the campaign's spokespersons, who then testified before Congress and sat for softball interviews on Larry King Live and Oprah. Politically potent and well-funded disease victims' organizations, too, worked the halls of power, appealing to the universal human desire to alleviate suffering. Science went out the window, as advocates peddled junk biology to win the debate. And the entire campaign was funded in the millions by biotech companies and coordinated by their trade association, the Biotechnology Industry Organization.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media performed terribly, often misstating or skewing the science, hyping what could be accomplished in a reasonable time frame by biotechnology, and denigrating the moral concerns of bio-skeptics as mere religious fanaticism. Minor advances in embryonic stem-cell research were touted as proof that ...