Mentor Traps

California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM)’s awards have been repeatedly going to the same group of privileged individuals in CIRM ICOC board members’ universities/institutes, despite they have generated no results. Do those CIRM awardees in the latest CIRM translational round look so familiar? Alan Trounson just had a meeting with Deepak Srivastava of Gladstone, Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte of Salk, Ann Tsukamoto and Irv Weissman of Stem Cell Inc, David Baltimore, and Gerald Schatten in Qatar in March. Back little further, CIRM hosted a series of meetings like ‘World Stem Cell Summit’ & ‘Stem Cell Meeting on the Mesa’ to reserve multi-millions CIRM award spots for each single individual of their privileged speakers, including Larry Goldstein, Yang Xu, Martin Pera. Mark Tuszynski, Joseph Wu, David Schubert, Stephen Forman, Thomas Lane, Eric David Adler, Peter Schultz, Renee Reijo Pera. It may help connect the dots if you know Larry Goldstein was among those who invited Alan Trounson back and helped him to get his half million a year profit at the costs of public funds. Larry Goldstein since has conveniently put himself on CIRM scientific advisory board to help set up many unlawful exclusionary eligibility criteria in CIRM RFAs to make sure the money go to himself & those close to him and block any competitors from receiving public funds. The outrages of such financial conflict of interest are stunning. Larry Goldstein alone has single-handedly snapped ~ $30 millions of CIRM funding for himself, which is more than the entire amount of CIRM funding gone into California regenerative medicine industry for stem cell therapy development, and those in Larry Goldstein’s inner circle have snapped other hundreds of millions. What have they done in return? Nothing but false hope they promised! Larry Goldstein loves to show his face in public as a prominent figure for stem cell research, however, do we remember any prominent stem cell research Larry Goldstein has done for CIRM to give him ~ $30 M of public funds? None. Larry Goldstein’s most proud accomplishment is his book “stem cells for dummies”. Who are the dummies? California taxpayers have given Larry Goldstein ~ $30 millions in exchange of nothing but false hope and corruption. From California governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, controller, treasurer, to state assembly & congressmen, to patients and voters, do we all look like Larry Goldstein’s dummies? What Larry Goldstein has done is millions of times smarter than those stem cell con men on 60 minutes and CNN. When those dummies of Larry Goldstein, including the United State President Obama and some very high-ranked congressmen such as Rick Perry, thought iPS cells (induced pluripotent stem cells) were a breakthrough for stem cell research, Larry Goldstein knew very well from its inception that it was for human cloning, even said ‘to clone himself’ in his seminars to joke about it. With $80 millions of public funds for stem cell research, Larry Goldstein has done nothing good to direct UCSD’s stem cell research, but has probably abused his director’s power to block more UCSD’s stem cell research that might have conflict of interest with him (please see below example of Larry Goldstein’s letters that he would not give other UCSD stem cell researchers access to UCSD stem cell center funded by State’s public funds required by the law to give access to any stem cell researcher in San Diego at SDRMI wordpress).    


My mentors all have deep connections in CIRM and are close to Larry Goldstein. Yang Xu loves to say he and Larry Goldstein are buddies. Besides their institutional ICOC board members, Stuart Lipton and Evan Snyder had John Sladek, now Joan Samuelson and Jon Thomas; Jean Loring, Yang Xu, Prue Talbot had Arlene Chiu and David Baltimore, now Ellen Feigal and Alan Trounson. My mentors have been deeply involved in Larry Goldstein’s many strategic partner plots, including the one to sue NIH, then sent Jean Loring’s good friend Mahandra Rao back to head NIH iPS cell center disguised as stem cell research. Their control web in the San Diego scientific community cannot be undermined. In Evan Snyder’s exact words “--- Stuart (Lipton) and John (Reed) are much less tolerant and understanding. Since Stuart is exceptionally well-connected in the San Diego scientific community, and particularly knows Shu Chien (of UCSD), ---”, so anything you do would be difficult. My mentors and their institutions all provided letters of support and institutional letters of support to promise the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide research spaces, resources, and training for my stem cell career development to become an independent investigator that were quite easy for them to do (please see below UCSD supportletter as a example), however, none have kept their promises to NIH (please see below DeptChairLetter as a example). When I received the NIH K01 award, I would have never envisioned the difficulties I have to go through, not for the research, but for the conflicts of interest with my own mentors. Evan Snyder wrote the appeal letter to CIRM that got John Reed in trouble all over the news. In that appeal letter, Evan Snyder falsely put many things that David Smotrich, a IVF clinician who does not do research and teaching/training, did not do to defend Burnham’s decision to put him as the principal investigator (PI), not the person who really did the research. Similarly, later on, Evan Snyder very conveniently forgot to mention in his Parkinson disease translational CIRM award that he did not do some of the hESC work he used. I used to wonder why Jean Loring would go to NIH to force me have to put her as my mentor if she later on would not allow me access to NIH’s stem cell center as the center Co-Director I helped her to get. I used to wonder why Yang Xu would ask me to write more grants if he and Larry Goldstein would block the research spaces for the NIH grants I already had. Well, their multi-millions CIRM awards for the work they did not do may explain it all.