Demand payback on biotech strategy

Wisconsin State Journal

Steven Clark’s recent guest column in the State Journal, “State needs biotech investment strategy” should make every taxpayer in Wisconsin --- and particularly families with chronic stem cell-based diseases --- sit up, take notice and act now. Clark found that Wisconsin’s biotech initiative has no clear overarching focus.

I was surprised to learn that Wisconsin has not placed its miraculous human embryonic stem cell (hESC) discoveries upper most in its strategic biotech initiative.

Wisconsin has already sold an inclusive license to one of the largest biotech companies in the world, which clearly cut taxpayers out of any special payback or affordable access to these products. Wisconsin families with stem cell-based diseases need to demand a full accounting of why this has happened now before any more of our intellectual property is compromised and squandered.

It also appears that the Madison biotech flagship needs to be expanded to include all the public and private biotech resources – both research and business - from throughout the state.

This is not the case. Wisconsin taxpayers and health care consumers ultimately will pay the price for our shortsightedness. As Clark notes, if research is not translated into businesses, it does nothing for the people or the economy.

Also, unlike in Wisconsin, the California taxpayers and stem-cell based consumers have been promised by state statute that they will receive a payback for any successful stem cell-derived commercial product.

That is, the state will receive a certain percentage of any revenue derived from the state-funded research, and low income and the uninsured residents will have equal access to the miracle health products that follow.

In Wisconsin, the home of embryonic stem cell research, there is little evidence thus far that any overall plan or policy exists to ensure that Wisconsin taxpayers will receive a similar payback and public access to affordable stem cell therapies when they appear in your local drugstore.

The bottom line: the Wisconsin biotech flagship is adrift without a rudder. Wisconsin lacks a clear mission and policy platform that would help guide it through what is projected as a $500 billion dollar industry in 2020 or sooner.

In a practical sense, this means that when your governor or the Wisconsin Department of Commerce awards a biotech company or scientist or entrepreneur a grant, you will not find any mission-driven clause or revenue- earned payback requirement in that contract.

I urge all taxpayers, especially those who are working for health care reform and families with stem cell-based diseases, to call your legislators and ask them what they are doing to make sure that Wisconsin’s investment in human embryonic stem cell research is protected from any further unraveling of this enormously lucrative “home-grown” resource.

Benedict lives in Madison.

"Those Were the Days in Indiana"

My partner Suzanne and I arrived at the Old Ball Park with our two borrowed folding chairs filled with excitement. For many months now my nephew David Kirk had sung the praises of the Grascals. “Uncle Bill you won’t find country music and bluegrass sung better anywhere in this world! And, “Two of the lead singers are Hoosiers. You just can’t miss them.”

We placed our chairs on the margin of the huge crowd near several others who were standing in front of us. The Canoefest Princess Contest was just starting and looking up to the very front of the crowd Suzanne suddenly stood up and said, “Look there Bill, that couple are folding up their chairs,” and almost miraculously two empty spaces appeared up in the center of the front row.

After the voting and prizes were awarded there was just time enough for refreshment and for taking in all the happy and smiling faces and the many volunteers frantically running here and there in preparation for the main event of the evening. Looking up to the stage I noticed several middle aged men mostly with their shirt sleeves rolled up. They were whispering to one another as they checked their mikes and cords and tuned up their instruments. Having not attended many major concerts of this type before I guess I was expecting them to be wearing some kind of country costume. Still being in their ordinary street clothes, perhaps these fellows were just stage hands who were setting up for the stars to come?

As I continued to observe them they reminded me of my track and field days when the athletes began warming up for their event. Wiping their brow and drinking that last gulp of water down and giving that last rub to an arm or a leg. Suddenly the mandolin player, the fiddler, guitarist, the base fiddler and the banjo player struck their instruments and they were off and playing and they never quit. We soon learned that the two lead singers were both from Indiana and I thought how fitting. I had heard that our bicentennial planners were top notch but were they really this good?

When harmonizing together the two lead singers created a voice so strong and vibrant that it seemed to echo out deep up into the now darkened Franklin County hills and valleys. The young lead singer from Milan soon had the entire audience in the palm of his hand as he talked so warmly about his own love for Indiana and for his family and friends who were with him in the audience. Later when he mentioned that the earlier male vocalist and idol contestant was his blood relation and brought his niece up to sing for us I was beginning to get a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes. I was filled with deep feelings of nostalgia. I realized that while I had lived in three other states since graduating from Brookville High School my roots would always be firmly planted here.

Suddenly I had a flashback and realized that where I was now sitting used to be where they always placed the merry-go round for the Franklin County 4-H Fair each year. I was raised just a few hundred yards from here. I thought of my Uncle Maynard Stang now sitting up at his home on 11th street. Like so many other Franklin County war veterans, Maynard served and fought so that we all could be here to night to celebrate our town’s glorious Two Hundredth Birthday.

As if this wasn’t enough nostalgia for one night, as I sat and pondered my existence and how Brookville is so much a part of who and what I am, the Grascals began to sing, “Those were the days in Indiana, They will never come again, I might see cornfields in Atlanta, But Indiana’s where I am. “

State must protect investment in stem cell research

The Capital Times/Opinion, Madison, WI

As a Wisconsin taxpayer I am grateful and proud of Dr. James Thomson and UW-Madison’s bioscience community for their human embryonic stem cell (hESC) discovers. But as I study the funding issues relating to Wisconsin’s stem cell enterprise I have become increasingly concerned with how our state is managing the intellectual property associated with these potential lucrative discoveries.

One of my questions has to do with why Wisconsin agreed to give exclusive rights to the Geron Corp. in Menlo Park, Calif., for using Wisconsin-patented stem cells to treat heart, diabetes and neurological disorders? My concerns have to do with both the nature of the diseases chosen and the potential economic and health care implications involved.

I am also concerned with the potential conflict of interest involved and exactly by who and why this decision was made and whose interests are best being served?

After all, the potential financial returns to the state of Wisconsin in terms of future health care costs are enormous, not to mention who it is who will ultimately control and most benefit from any cell-based cures in these three major disease areas.

As users of heart drugs and other therapies, I and many other Wisconsin citizens are very dependent upon medications. As both a taxpayer and patient I am concerned about how Wisconsin-funded cell-based discoveries are being managed. Are they being managed in a way that can best ensure Wisconsin families more effective and affordable heart disease, diabetes and neurological care?

Or, will my grandchildren also have to travel to Minnesota for their heart medications? Will nearly half of Wisconsin citizens still have to go without full access to medications and more affordable health care in 2020?

I urge all Wisconsin citizens, but especially those who are working for health care reform here, to begin to connect the dots between our basic biomedical research and development decisions and our existing health care crisis before it is too late.

The central question is: how can we move from our state funding policy of providing a blank check to biotech and pharmaceutical companies and scientists/entrepreneurs to routinely attaching health care payback safeguard to all our innovation grants and other tax incentives?

Perhaps the place to begin is with better and more accurate information about who really is paying for this research. We can begin by eliminating two major myths: that university funding for science discoveries is generally paid for by the private sector, and that public revenue sharing would discourage scientific research.

Wisconsin citizens need to consider who owns the university, who really pays for the laboratories, equipment, supplies, the buildings, utilities and the salaries of scientists and staff who work there? Who supports and sustains the gigantic and robust interdisciplinary and collaborative resources deposited there? It is the taxpayers, the students and alumni (you and me) who support and sustain this marvelous and successful research enterprise.

Ultimately Wisconsin taxpayers’ ability to deal with the above concerns successfully will depend in large part on how we as a statewide community make these value-based decisions in the full light of public scrutiny. Presently these decisions are being made in board rooms and by CEOs sitting on university-based patent-making non-profit foundations. What are called for at this juncture are less government and media assurances and much more public discussion based on much better information and transparency.

Legislature: commit on stem cell research

Wisconsin State Journal/ Your Views
June 26, 2008

A recent study suggests that stem cell programs that exist in a stable and favorable policy and funding environment are continuing to thrive. Conversely stem cell programs that are hampered by inadequate and sporadic funding are clearly underperforming.

So far Wisconsin has been blessed with a huge investment only in human capital. This has been contributed tirelessly and generously by Thompson and his UW colleagues. We cannot afford however to rest on our laurels and human capital alone.

What is needed is a bi-partisan initiative that goes beyond good will and provides for a secure and continuous public and private funding base. This support and funding must be accompanied by a message from the people of Wisconsin ---our state Legislature—that tells venture capitalists and committed scientists alike that Wisconsin means to be in the stem cell business for the long time.

Wisconsin legislators can no longer continue to sit by while Wisconsin citizens and families continue to suffer daily from debilitating diseases and an ever weakening economy.

Check legislators’ record before voting

Capital Times - Readers View

Thanks to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign all you need to do now is click on www.wisdc.org/pr042908.php and see objectively how your state senator and Assembly representatives voted on six major clean government bills during this past year.

I worked as a program evaluator for over thirty years. How refreshing it was to see that our state legislators are finally going to have to stand on their voting record instead of how much money they have to spend on their campaign.

The representatives, based on their votes, were divided into one of four categories based not on their promises, good looks or how big their smile is but strictly on their voting record for clean government.

Before voting this fall, you only need to know one thing about your legislator. What clean government category did he or she earn? The four include democracy defender, public ally, bystander and public enemy?

Wisconsin voters will know their votes really did count this time to help clean up the sordid mess in their state capital. You can take control of your government if you act now.

Tier 4 Insurance Plans Are a Pretext for What Will Follow

According to a recent New York Times article by Gina Kolata health insurance companies are cleverly adopting a new pricing plan for very expensive drugs, asking patients to pay hundreds and even thousands of dollars for prescriptions for medications that may save lives or slow the process of serious diseases.

Now rather than paying a fixed co-pay charge for your prescription medications, patients will now be charged a percentage of the actual cost of certain high priced drugs up to as much as 33 percent. This new drug pricing scheme is called Tier 4 plans and is being touted by industry economists as a cost saving mechanism for health care consumers.

While the US government’s Medicare plan first conceived the 4-tier plan idea as a way of distinguishing between certain considered non-essential life-style or enhancement medications such impotence reducing products, the private sector, however, is now using such 4-tier pricing schemes to separate out the most seriously ill people whose illness or pain requires the most expensive bills.

Rather than spreading the insurance plan’s total cost out over the entire population served, this new pricing plan separates the most seriously ill consumers, often with the most pain, from the healthier who require less expensive medicines. If this is not health care inequity what is?

Some of the more common diseases that have now been moved into this category include multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis. Under these plans even the insured and more affluent people may not be able to afford the treatments they require.

What disturbs this writer is the industry’s audacity to inflict this costly and inhumane pricing system on you and me in spite of the fact that both pharmaceutical and insurance companies are already charging exorbitant prices and making such huge profits. This is occurring when over one-third of Wisconsin citizens have no health care insurance and many remain ill or are dying yearly because they cannot afford the high costs of medications.

Why would the industry want to provoke health care consumers more than they already are? The reason is because they want to be in a position when the stem cell medicine revolution era arrives to be able to serve both the average insured person and the very rich and powerful with even far more costly miracle cures and enhancements. The Tier 4 option will pave the way to allow such health inequities to co-exist while still allowing the existing very profitable system to continue.

If consumers allow such an inequitable drug pricing system to continue the far more costly future cell based miracle drugs both for diseases and increased longevity enhancement will be accessible and affordable only for the rich and powerful.

Many readers who read this article will wonder how it is possible for the government’s Federal Drug Administration and the federal insurance commission would allow licensed drug manufacturers and insurance companies the right to perpetuate such a pricing plan on the American public? There are two main reasons. One, of course is that it is the very pharmaceutical and insurances company officials that sit on the policy-making and governing sub-committees that write these rules. The second reason is that these two industries pay by far more for your representative’s re-election than either you or I.

Readers should contact their congressional representatives now and ask them to call an emergency session to stop such unjust drug and insurance pricing practices NOW.

Respectfully, William R. Benedict, Madison

The Squirrel Hunt

Some Brookville Democrat readers have contacted me to say just how much they look forward to reading my letters to the editor. One such recent Franklin County resident was Don Lewis, former district Democratic Congressman Ed Lewis’ little brother, who now lives just outside of Indianapolis. This story is set during the late 1940s.

The Lewis family use to live out on old Blue Creek road where the old wooden bridge sat for so many years. It had the misfortune of being burned down now over a decade ago. My brother Dale, the artist, use to regularly hunt squirrels with his classmate Donald Lewis. I was sometimes blessed when Dale would let me accompany them on the hunt.

Dale and I would leave Brookville usually on Saturday mornings at 4 AM in the dark and travel by motor bike out about five miles on the old gravel road to the Lewis farm. Mrs. Lewis would often have breakfast prepared when we arrived. This often consisted of fried squirrel, mashed potatoes and gravy and hot biscuits.

Don always had at least one well trained long eared beagle that usually started barking almost before we entered the woods. The hunt was really much like a continuous foot race from one big hickory tree to the next to shoot down the treed squirrel. I remember Don carried a 16 gauge shotgun and Dale brought along his smaller 410 pump shotgun. It would be much later before my older brother Justin or Juicy, as he was sometimes called, would allow me to take along his Winchester pump twenty-two short rifle.

Back then as now squirrels were plentiful, both the smaller gray squirrel and much larger red fox squirrel. We tended to favor the bigger red fox squirrels. My main job was to assist the dogs in finding the fallen squirrels and packing them safely away in our back packs. Both Don and Dale would almost always get the legal limit before the wet morning dew was hardly gone.

I recall on at least one other occasion I accompanied Don and Dale on what then seemed like an almost all night coon hunt with Don’s much larger hound dogs. The scope and the speed of the coon hunt was far longer and faster with the big longer legged hound dogs often moving deeper and deeper into the woods, their barking becoming fainter and fainter. While I saw my very first coon on these coon hunts, this hardly made up for how tired and weary I felt before these hunts ended.

I recall that during these earlier hunting trips I had the mere status of only being my brother's little brother but as time moved on I became an older and more respected Brookville Greyhound basketball player and my claim to fame with Don and the Lewis family was my long, two handed set shots. Such fame however was only in my own imagination I am sure! But nonetheless these feelings were very real to me back then.

Upon arriving home we dressed out the squirrels and our Dad had the job and honor of frying them up in a greasy floury rich skillet along with thinly sliced potatoes and gravy. While we were not the richest family in town it’s fair to say back during the early 1940s and 50s you would probably have had a hard time finding any more grateful and contented young squirrel hunters in Brookville than those sitting around the family table in our kitchen later that fine morning.

Respectfully
William R. Benedict, Madison