Politics
California's Prop. 38 Would Funnel Billions to Billionaire's Own Institute, Critics Say
A ballot measure to fund immunotherapy research with $8.4 billion in bonds would direct half the money to a single institute chaired by the billionaire who wrote and funded the campaign. Eligibility rules appear to exclude every other institution, including UCSF.
A California ballot measure that would authorize $8.4 billion in bonds for immunotherapy research would direct half the money to a single, four-year-old institute chaired by the billionaire who wrote the proposition and bankrolled nearly the entire campaign to pass it, according to a review of the measure's text.
Proposition 38 never names the California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy (CIII). But the eligibility requirements it sets out appear to leave the institute as the only one that qualifies, potentially steering billions of dollars in public borrowing to the center.
Robert Kaplan, a former associate director at the National Institutes of Health, said he initially liked the sound of the measure. The bond money would support cutting-edge research into cancer, Alzheimer's and other diseases. Then he read the fine print.
Kaplan said many voters did not do the same. Had they, he argued, they would have found that half the sum would be granted to a single research institute chaired by Dr. Gary Michelson, the billionaire who authored the proposition and funded nearly the entire campaign for its passage.
The campaign behind the measure now says Michelson's institute "likely qualifies" for half the money.
The eligibility rules are the crux of the dispute. The measure's requirements appear tailored so narrowly that no other institution in the state meets them, including UC San Francisco, which is the state's biggest recipient of federal immunotherapy funding. That exclusion has raised questions about whether the measure is designed to benefit one private research center rather than to build a broad public research program.
The arrangement concentrates both the writing of the policy and the likely financial benefit in the same person. Michelson, whose fortune comes from medical-device patents, chairs the institute that stands to gain, and he financed the political effort to place the measure before voters.
For California voters, the stakes are significant. The state would take on $8.4 billion in debt, with roughly $4.2 billion flowing to a single institution that has existed for only four years. Supporters cast the measure as a bold investment in research that could yield treatments for devastating diseases. Critics say the structure raises conflict-of-interest concerns and could bypass established public research institutions that have long competed for federal and state funding.
The measure's fate now rests with voters, who will decide whether to approve the borrowing and the unusual concentration of funding that comes with it.