Owen Hughes, Pfizer

Law and regulation are what happen to us when we lose trust.

So, there's been a loss of trust from stakeholders on so many sides of this issue. Academics, business people,

He's talking about patents and the strange mess we're probably about to find ourselves in. The bush policy which limited NIH support defined an area where funding cannot go; the burden it imposed on everybody trying to do both kinds of work was pure overhead.

And how does it work when the government marches in and takes control of what you created partially using their money (this is called a reach through) -- a catastrophe . . . but only avoidable with fully understood and clear regulations, like at the NIH.

So now if a state tries to protect its investment, the law is not well understood. The CIRM is operating as a part of the CA government, and its policies have the force of law. Nobody quite knows yet how it will play out . . . and it will get more complicated if the NIH decides to enter the funding arena. The trigger points for the reach through events will be different for feds and states, and we don't clearly know what they are.

You'll have a federal agency, a state agency, private investors, and maybe foreign nationals all with a financial stake in how it plays out.

Time now to overcome the vacuum in which we've been operating during the Bush administration. Won't be simple.