Dan Sarewitz has posted the text of a paper that he gave at the AAAS meeting last month titled, “Proposition 71: Vulgar Democracy in Action” (PDF). Here is how it begins:

In 1947, when Congress passed legislation to create the National Science Foundation, President Truman vetoed the bill because it insulated the administration of the proposed agency from direct Presidential control. At issue here was not a simple question of turf or the exercise of power, but a fundamental principle of democratic governance: that publicly funded programs must be ultimately accountable to the public via democratically elected officials. In the decades since Truman’s veto, as the nation’s investment in research has grown from a few tens of millions to about sixty billion dollars, this principle has never seriously been challenged. Indeed, it is precisely this accountability that has allowed the publicly funded research enterprise to maintain its political legitimacy, productivity, and growth through such crises as the Tuskegee experiment and the death of Jesse Gelsinger, and which has stimulated a considerable beneficial evolution of scientific norms in such areas as protocols for human subjects’ research, the treatment of laboratory animals, and the role of gender and ethnic diversity in clinical trials. Democratic accountability, that is, is good for science.

So, in the summer of 2004, when I first read the language of Proposition 71, the “California Stem Cell Research and Cures Act,” I was floored. Written and promoted by a coalition of patients’ advocates and research interests from the academic and private sector, Proposition 71 was of course a response to President Bush’s draconian restrictions on publicly funded embryonic stem cell research. But it was a response that was as extreme in its own way as the President’s actions. Proposition 71 would create a new stem cell research institute, funded by public monies raised through a bond issue, that was effectively insulated from all public accountability through a variety of mechanisms, including the creation of a state constitutional right to conduct stem cell research, a ten-year funding entitlement that “shall not be subject to appropriation or transfer by the Legislature or the Governor for any other purpose,” and a provision that allowed legislative amendment to the initiative only after three years, only by a 70% supermajority of the California legislature, and only “to further the purposes of the grant and loan programs created by the measure.”

Most troubling of all were the proposed mechanisms for accountability, particularly as embodied in the Independent Citizen’s Oversight Committee, whose stipulated membership was made up almost entirely of people whose interests were in some way served by goals of embryonic stem cell research. There was absolutely nothing independent about this committee at all. In summary, as I wrote in an LA Times op-ed in October 2004, “Proposition 71 would put stem cell research out of the reach of Sarewitz democracy—in a move that would seriously undermine the unwritten social contract that exists between government and science in this country.” Conservative political theorist Francis Fukuyama, writing in the Wall Street Journal on the same day, was less restrained, asserting that “Prop 71 is a bad idea, not because stem-cell research is morally wrong, but because it represents a huge, self-dealing giveaway of money from cash-strapped California taxpayers to a small group of institutions and companies that will remain largely unaccountable.” A similar position was taken by the Center for Genetics and Society, a California-based NGO with liberal leanings.

Now of course I recognize that questions of political accountability and the governance of science can hardly stack up to the promise of curing disease. Indeed, at one point prior to the election I found myself in the compromised position of having to debate on a radio program one of the promoters of Proposition 71, a Hollywood director named Jerry Zucker, who, if I recall correctly, had a child with diabetes. No doubt I came off as an ivory tower esthete willing to place abstract principle above the alleviation of a child’s suffering.

As usual, Sarewitz is smart, provocative, and on target. Read the whole thing. (PDF)