Alan Trounson, California's Dr. Stem Cell -- latimes.com Page 3 of 4 cardiac muscle cell. Every month comes a new surprise, tumbling toward totally different medicine that we'll have in 30 or 40 years’ time. This work is still controversial. Your team in Australia created the technique that has allowed 5 million in vitro fertilization babies to be born worldwide. But you were still called a "baby murderer." Astrophysicists don't get that kind of reaction. In the surveys I've seen across the U.S., you get 70% or 80% of people very much in favor [of stem cell and IVF work]. If we get cures or treatments for some of these debilitating diseases. which is going to happen over the next four or five years, people will embrace what's necessary to help a Parkinson's patient or someone who's got Type | diabetes. I’m not afraid of what some small sector feels outrage about. It's their right, but it's not the majority feeling. Have you faced such personal criticism here? Not really. Last year I was invited to the Vatican to present a paper, but when I sent in a summary of what | was going to say, they decided not to have it. They sent a check to the treasurer of California and the treasurer rang us up and said, "What the heck is this check from the Vatican for?" It was for the inconvenience! ; Will California own patents from the research? | expect there's a lot of intellectual property with some of these [treatments] that will be really big returns for California. But it'll take some time; the so-called blockbuster treatments will take 10 years or more. Gov. [Arnold] Schwarzenegger pointed a finger at me and said, "We're going to give you the opportunity to deliver this, but understand it's a 25-year gig." The feds put $3.8 billion into the human genome project and the return from that, according to a study, is about $1,400 for every dollar. The big story about CIRM last year was its conflict-of-interest protocols. What's being done? The [national] Institute of Medicine