Month: January 2011

Report: CIRM creates 8 jobs a day for California

A report will be issued today of the economic impact of CIRM on California. The Sac Bee and FierceBiotech are reporting on the economic infusion that CIRM has provided to the state. On average during its existence, CIRM has created 8 jobs day for the state of California. The jobs mostly consist not surprisingly of …

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Contagious cancer: the allograft your dog doesn’t want

Can one creature directly give another creature cancer? It appears so in dogs and that cancer is highly contagious. When we think about transplants of cells, we think about hospitals and high-tech equipment used to give patients stem cells or other types of cells to help treat them for a disease. Generally cancer patients are …

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Appeals court dismisses lawsuit against ES cell research, but this was a different lawsuit

A federal appeals court today threw out a lawsuit against federal funding of ES cell research. The lawsuit reportedly was filed on behalf of all cryopreserved embryos in the U.S. and the ruling was issued by the US Court of the Appeals of the 4th Circuit. While this decision does not directly have anything to …

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CIRM Appoints UC Davis Grad and Executive Med Director of Amgen as VP

CIRM announced today that it had appointed Ellen Feigal, M.D., to be its first VP for Research Development. Dr. Feigal will begin the job on Jan. 31. Dr. Feigal is a graduate of UC Davis Med School (where I am writing this from; go UC Davis SOM!) and is currently Executive Medical Director for Global …

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A perspective on U.S. embryonic stem cell research from Israel

As we have blogged before, there are a host of different beliefs about embryonic stem cell research and about when life begins. This diversity of perspectives is sprinkled across the globe. Too often in the U.S. people take an ethnocentric view of this question, believing that everyone else should think the same as they do. …

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My Cancer: how I became an advocate too

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There is a kind of invisible cultural wall between patients such as cancer patients and biomedical scientists like me, but this wall does not have to exist and indeed it is a negative wall as patients, scientists, doctors, agencies, and advocates can achieve far more together than apart. But the wall is surprisingly strong. Last …

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Jerry Brown vs. California Education and Research

New California Governor, Jerry Brown, today proposed a 17% cut in funding for the UC System. Such a cut would be devastating to California at many levels including education, research, and competitiveness. The UC System is already under extraordinary stress from recent budget cuts that have inflicted serious injury upon the system. The new Governor’s …

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