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 Michigan university, lawmakers at impasse over hESCs
May 2012
SHARING OPTIONS:
Case in point: In March, Michigan’s House Appropriations
Subcommittee on Higher Education said it may withhold $7 million of performance
funding from the 2012/2013 state budget for the University of Michigan (U-M)
and Michigan State University if U-M does not disclose the number of hESCs the
school is using in its research. The university was required to report this
information to the Department of Public Health by Dec. 1 under new language
inserted into last year’s state budget.
Specifically, the university was required to submit data
showing the number of human embryos and hESC lines received in the current
fiscal year; the number of embryos used for research and the number of embryos
held in storage; the number of stem-cell lines created; and the number of
research projects currently underway.
“Our position is that it is just not possible to boil this
very important work into a series of data points,” Fitzgerald tells ddn. “We reiterated that we feel
strongly that the information we provided offered the kind of rich context for
the research we’re doing, which we believe is really important to understanding
this work.”
Lawmakers were miffed at the university’s submission. Last
month, at an annual meeting of the subcommittee and the leaders of Michigan’s
15 state universities, Rep. Kevin Cotter, R-Mt. Pleasant, accused U-M of
“thumbing its nose at the legislature.”
Cotter, who did not respond to my
interview request, said the data required of U-M could have been provided on
one sheet of paper.
U-M President Mary Sue Coleman responded that she thought
the university responded appropriately to the reporting requirements, and she
and the legislators “would have to disagree” on the issue.
Michigan’s public universities are already facing a severe
budget crisis. Currently, the state budget allots $1.4 billion to higher
education, a 3 percent increase over the 2011-2012 budget.
“Researchers are very concerned about the political climate
in Michigan,” says Fitzgerald. “There is a lot of work to be done with regard
to higher education appropriations for the coming year, and a lot of
differences to be resolved in our state budget. This is a complicated issue for
our state, and one we hope will be resolved by the time the legislature adopts
a budget.”
But Jim Eliason, executive director of the Great Lakes Stem
Cell Innovation Center and an outspoken critic of this current situation, isn’t
quite as diplomatic.
“They have put something into the higher education budget
requiring some kind of nonsensical attempt at transparency—yet they are about
as transparent as …” he trails off.
The impasse between lawmakers and universities “does harm to
the entire biotech community in Michigan,” Eliason adds. “We have no trouble
finding quality staff. A lot of people want to work here because of the quality
of our universities. But all of this is a strong indicator that our politicians
and state are anti-science. If you were a biotech company, would you really
want to move to a state that is anti-science? This is like pouring cold water
on recruiting efforts or start-up companies.”
As we went to press, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder came out in
favor of the university, arguing that the reporting requirements included in
last year’s state budget are “unenforceable and unconstitutional if sought to
be enforced.” The governor’s legal counsel wrote a letter to lawmakers stating
as much.
Here’s hoping that this situation can be resolved in a
manner that is in the best interests of the universities and Michigan
taxpayers.
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