A 'Position of Luxury,' CIRM's 'Angel Investors' and the Media

The California stem cell and gene therapy agency gains some attention from an outfit that "informs the powerful"

California’s stem cell and gene therapy program made a rare appearance on a semi-mainstream media platform this week, Politico’s California Playbook.

The article was headlined “Whatever happened to….” It noted that recipients of research awards from the agency are benefiting from $8.5 billion in state funding in this time of chaos on the national research scene. Politico wrote:

“‘What that means is scientists funded solely by CIRM are secure while their federally supported colleagues down the hall are scrambling,’ health reporter David Jensen observed recently in his California Stem Cell Report newsletter.”

The Politico piece recapped the history of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) and ended with this last paragraph:

“‘As far as we know, there’s no analog