How long will it be before California’s US$3 billion stem cell initiative produces cures for dread diseases? Five years? Ten years? Keep guessing. The latest estimate is 25 years. Officials of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine are sounding distinctly less upbeat than they did in the 2004 campaign to sell the idea to voters. Some scientists now say that it could take decades for the grants to pay off. Its new Australian president, Alan Trounson, recently told the Boston Globe that it’s too early to tell. "There are very few substantial developments [in medical science] that have happened in less than 25 years. There have been some, but they tend to be rare."

Now that the debate is no longer on the front page of newspapers, it now seems that other "facts" in the great stem cell debate over the past five years may have been manhandled. Take the brain drain. There were doleful predictions that labs around the world would lose staff to California. But it hasn't happened. “I do not see a migration,” says Brock Reeve, executive director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, in Boston. Academics in the rival state of Massachusetts say that scientists routinely move from one state to another. They even point out that one prominent stem cell scientist, Kenneth Chien, left the University of California, San Diego, and moved to Harvard. Although it has been reported that well-known researchers have shifted to California, it turns out that the real story is that they have opened satellite labs there.

Nor has the initiative created many jobs yet. Tracy Lefteroff, of PricewaterhouseCoopers, says that stem cell research will create thousands of jobs – but that it will take at least another five years. “I don’t think it has had that much of an impact yet.” ~ Boston Globe, Feb 11