Faculty to testify on campus Friday at public hearing on state stem cell bill

A public hearing on the statewide impact of federal stem cell policy will be held at 9:30 a.m. Friday, March 8, at the Stanford Faculty Club. The hearing is being convened by Sen. Deborah Ortiz (D-Sacramento), chair of the California State Senate Health and Human Services Committee.

Three Stanford faculty members are scheduled to testify: Irving L. Weissman, the Karel H. and Avice N. Beekhuis Professor in Cancer Biology, who chairs the National Academy of Sciences Panel on Scientific and Medical Aspects of Human Cloning; Henry T. Greely, the C. Wendell and Edith M. Carlsmith Professor of Law and co-director of the Stanford Program on Genomics, Ethics and Society; and Paul Berg, the Robert W. and Vivian K. Cahill Professor in Cancer Research, Emeritus -- a Nobel laureate who chairs the National Institutes of Health Human Genome Project Scientific Advisory Committee.

Other invited speakers are Hans Keirstead, professor of anatomy and neurobiology, University of California-Irvine College of Medicine; David Gollaher, president and CEO, California Healthcare Institute; and Bert Lubin, director of research at Children's Hospital, Oakland.

The hearing will focus on Senate Bill 1272, which -- if passed -- would impose fewer restrictions on human embryonic stem cell research in California than those mandated by the White House last summer. The senate bill also would facilitate the voluntary donation of embryos for stem cell research and create a mechanism to oversee stem cell research in the state. In addition to authoring legislation, Ortiz is convening an advisory council made up of physicians, researchers, lawyers and ethicists to assist with the development of stem cell policy in California.