The Obama administration and its health-law allies are gearing up this summer to slice through three years of confusion and opposition to Obamacare.
They’ve got their work cut out for them.
Obamacare won’t have a shot at success unless millions of people sign up for insurance — the healthy as well as the sick. For that to happen, the White House and its allies will need to make the case that coverage is worth it for the estimated 50 million people who haven’t been able to afford or access insurance. Supporters are planning to spend tens of millions of dollars to persuade people to get covered under new health insurance options and explain how to sign up.
Organizing for Action, spun off from President Barack Obama’s campaign operation, went up with a seven-figure TV ad buy in June, touting the new benefits and promising to offer “the truth” about the law. Enroll America, a nonprofit group with ties to the White House, wants to leverage the grass roots across the country and engage big-name celebrities for the cause.
Here are five of the messaging challenges they face:
Spread the word about the subsidy — without inflating expectations.
Just about everyone knows there’s an individual mandate in the health law — people must have insurance starting in 2014. But another part of the message didn’t get through: Millions of Americans, including some in the middle class, will get help to pay for that coverage. And low-income people won’t have to pay premiums if they qualify for expanded Medicaid.
(PHOTOS: The eight GOP governors who said yes to Medicaid expansion)
It’s not entirely clear why the White House hasn’t hit that point harder: One reason may be that it doesn’t want to raise expectations and then crush them. Not everyone gets a subsidy. And subsidy doesn’t mean “free ” — it’s a sliding scale depending on income, location and family size. But some assistance is available up to four times the federal poverty level, or about $ 93,000 for a family of four.
“It’s very hard to explain the subsidies … so you end up avoiding it,” said Bob Blendon, an expert on health and public opinion at the Harvard School of Public Health. And old hands at health care remember what happened 25 years ago when Congress passed a law to help people with “catastrophic” Medicare expenses — and then had to repeal it when the overly high expectations collided with the cost-benefit realities.
Ethan Rome, executive director of Health Care for America Now, which strongly backs the law, predicts a massive multi-front education campaign that will start breaking through to people. And it will include a “retail” approach, particularly once enrollment opens Oct. 1.
“When you are talking to potential enrollees about the price of the insurance the best conversation you can possibly have is talking to them about their specific situation,” Rome said. Once people begin to get the subsidies and the coverage, he predicted positive word of mouth will encourage more people to sign up.
(WATCH: TOP 5 complaints about Obamacare)
Reach the hard-to-reach population.
Lots of the people eligible for various government assistance programs don’t actually reach out for them, and that may prove true of the health law, too. A recent Gallup poll found the uninsured knew less about the law than the insured, including the individual mandate.
Many of those who could get Medicaid or subsidized coverage are low-income, and not necessarily English-speaking. They may not see slick ads on English-language TV, and experience shows they may need a lot more than a brochure and a URL to tap into the benefits. They need different messaging and outreach and a lot more hands-on assistance, said Stan Dorn, a Medicaid expert at the Urban Institute.
That’s a conundrum. People can’t be walked through enrollment before it starts in October. But the longer the administration waits to reach this population, the less time they’ll have to break through, said Bruce Siegel, head of America’s Essential Hospitals, whose members treat low-income populations. “Waiting for fall is too late,” he said. Outreach has to be now and it has to target a whole lot of different audiences, from the Spanish-language tweet to a message that can work in a Haitian hair salon in Brooklyn.
Not only that, but the Supreme Court made the law even more confusing for the poor by deciding Medicaid expansion is optional for states. In some states, poor people will get benefits from expanded Medicaid — and in others they’ll get nothing. Even more confounding — the below-the-poverty line Medicaid population can’t tap into the subsidies in the health insurance exchanges, but people who are just few rungs up the income ladder can get that financial help.
“That message is going to be complicated,” HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said last week. “If the governor and legislature choose not to expand Medicaid, there will be a huge gap between what [low-income people] can afford and what is available.”
(QUIZ: Do you know Kathleen Sebelius?)
The “safety net” hospitals and community clinics will try to fill in the considerable awareness gaps when low-income and uninsured patients come in, said Siegel. But how well they do will depend partly on what state they are in, and how much of a buy-in state governments give to Obamacare.
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People demonstrate to celebrate the anniversary of the Yemeni revolution in Sanaa, Yemen, Feb. 7, 2013. (Photo: Samuel Aranda / The New York Times)From June 9 to June 18, I visited Yemen as part of a peace delegation organized by Code Pink, seeking to learn about the impact of U.S. drone strike policy in Yemen. We met with Baraa Shiban, who works for the British human rights group Reprieve, and who told us about a proposal in Yemen’s National Dialogue Conference – Yemen’s Constitutional Convention, as it were – to prohibit drone strikes in the country. This proposal may be voted on in the next few days. Baraa says he is confident that it will be approved. On Tuesday, June 25, I conducted the following interview with Baraa via Skype. I have edited the interview very slightly for readability.
Robert Naiman: What is Reprieve doing in Yemen?
Baraa Shiban: Reprieve has been working in Yemen for a couple of years now, we started by getting clients especially from some of the families of the some of the Guantanamo detainees – Yemeni detainees inside Guantanamo – and we had a number of clients. A number of them have been released and now we have three Yemeni clients whom Reprieve is representing. The other work Reprieve is working on advocating against the drones policy that has been going on in Yemen especially in the past two years. We try to educate the Yemeni people here, we try to advocate against it, we try to litigate particular cases.
RN: What are your expectations overall for the National Dialogue Conference?
Baraa Shiban: The first thing that everybody is expecting from the National Dialogue is drafting the new constitution and coming out with the main outcomes of what the Yemeni people want for the future. The other thing is facing the main challenges waiting ahead for Yemen. The main thing is bringing all the policymakers, all the political parties together, along with the youth, women and civil society, in order to shape what do they want for the future of Yemen, what is the new political system will be what kind of electoral system are we going to follow and what is the shape of the state, and also what are the polices and what are the new laws that we want to see in the new Yemen.
RN: How did you become a delegate to the National Dialogue Conference?
Baraa Shiban: There were 40 seats for the youth revolution inside the national dialogue. This was the first time where they gave some seats for the youth, the women activists and the civil society, 40 seats for each one. The seats were distributed among all the governorates of the country. I was selected to represent the town I originally come from, Haja, which is northern Sanaa.
RN: Within the conference you participate in the transitional justice committee. That committee has brought forward a proposal that would prohibit drone strikes – prohibit extrajudicial killings in Yemen, including drone strikes. What is this proposal, how did it come about, what do you hope it will achieve?
Baraa Shiban: The proposal specifically states that – criminalizing the killing outside of law, including drone strikes and targeted missiles … We are drafting the new future for the Yemeni people. And it’s very important to see, what are the main demands, what do the Yemeni people want. And it’s very clear that, all the Yemeni people would agree that they don’t want to see drones hovering over their towns and killing people – many of those incidents actually targeted innocent civilians.
We had a meeting with a group of security officials inside the country, including the National Security Bureau. And they very explicitly said, we approve those drones, we also approve the path of those drones, and each strike is getting the approval of the President and the National Security. So this was a very clear statement coming from the National Security inside Yemen, and when we voted about it inside the National Dialogue, it was very clear that all the delegates of the National Dialogue don’t want to see that happening. So we made a very specific law saying we criminalize the use of drones or targeted missiles for killing outside of law by all means or even having illegal detentions for very long time without any trial. So if there is any criminal act or any terrorism act inside the country, they have to follow the law and order. Every person has the right to a free trial, and have a judge and have a lawyer, and if he is convicted then he is punished by law, not droning them without any conviction, without any prosecution, without any trial.
RN: What has happened so far with this proposal in terms of the internal process of the National Dialogue? There are different levels of approval, criteria for approval.
Baraa Shiban: In order for a law to be approved by the National Dialogue, there are stages. First of all the subcommittee which is very specifically discussing this issue should all agree on issuing such a law. The second level is that members of the transitional justice team, which consists of eighty members, should also agree on that law. And when I say that we reach an agreement, I mean that we have to reach an agreement, not less than 90% of the votes. And we managed to get that.
The third level is to get it approved by the general assembly, which consists of 565 delegates. Very specifically this law didn’t get any rejection from the delegates. And it was very clear that we managed to get an agreement on issuing such a law, so the only thing we will be waiting (for) will be that the coming week, the law will be submitted for all the delegates, and to get a final approval, and if we manage to get that then it will be a law by the end of the national dialogue, which is the 18th of September.
RN: When do you expect that vote to take place?
Baraa Shiban: According to the schedule that was announced today [Tuesday, June 25 –RN] by the National Dialogue presidency we’re supposed to have voting Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of the coming week [July 1-3]. And I’m very confident that this law will pass.
RN: I understand that after the National Dialogue Conference has completed its proposal another committee of experts is supposed to turn your document into legal language, preparing a draft constitution.
Baraa Shiban: The laws that faced some rejections or comments inside the general assembly are the laws we’re supposed to change before the voting. But it was very clear in presenting the report of the Transitional Justice [committee] that this specific law got quite a consensus inside the general assembly, and almost everybody agreed. I’m very confident that it will pass, because everyone, even all of the political parties, regardless of their political affiliation, would disagree on many things, but they were very clearly agreeing on this specific subject.
RN: In particular, my sense was that even delegates to the National Dialogue Conference from the ruling party, from the President’s party, are supporting this provision.
Baraa Shiban: Yeah, exactly.
RN: The day I visited the National Dialogue Conference there was a speech from a parliamentarian from the ruling party who denounced the drone strike policy very harshly.
Baraa Shiban: Of course. That’s what we’re actually counting on. In many other topics all the political parties would disagree and would have their conflicts. And we would have to reach into some sort of a dialogue before drafting any decision. But I can very clearly tell you that this specific law didn’t get almost any rejection from any delegate – most of them supported that this law should pass ASAP.
RN: So what happens on September 18?
Baraa Shiban: September 18 is the last day of the National Dialogue. So we expect the laws to be implemented, or technically that’s the day when all the laws would be on the ground level.
RN: So is it your understanding that all of these proposals will be implemented by September 18? Or is it the case that – I spoke with a senior political advisor to the UN representative to the conference. He was saying that things agreed by the national dialogue conference would be – first of all this draft constitution would have a process of approval, there will be a referendum, but also that the things decided by the National Dialogue would be implemented by the next government, not this current “transitional” government.
Baraa Shiban: Yeah, of course, it’s exactly I think as the advisor told you. So by September 18, they start saying that these are the laws that came out of the National Dialogue. Those are the policies, the laws, the constitutional amendments that the delegates agreed upon inside the National Dialogue. And the government should start working on them. Then we will have a referendum, of course. And after the referendum would be parliamentary elections.
I don’t expect that somehow, magically, drones will stop hovering by just issuing such a law. But it is important even if it’s by papers, it is very important that the Yemeni people would say we are against the use of drones and killing outside of the law.
RN: And when do you expect the referendum to be and when do you expect parliamentary elections to be?
Baraa Shiban: Well, this is a matter of things that are not quite clear. According to the GCC Initiative, the parliamentary elections should be by February 2014, although I’m not sure that we have enough time to finish all the work until 2014. And before that should be a referendum. I’m personally expecting that there will be an extension for the transitional period. There will be appointing new dates for both the referendum and the parliamentary elections.
RN: So we don’t know exactly when this will take place but is it a reasonable guess that even if this is delayed it will be a matter of months? We’re not talking about elections happening in 2015?
Baraa Shiban: That’s actually still not clear. Will they just say delay for a few months? Or will they say let’s delay it for one year? We’re still waiting. I cannot now give any clear answer and predict what time exactly will be the coming elections.
RN: So supposing that this proposal passes, becomes part of the constitution, the constitution is approved, so this is a law that the incoming government has to implement. What do you think about the idea of saying that this kind of imposes a timetable on the U.S. government and the Yemeni government to end the drone strikes, to end direct U.S. military action in Yemen, it kind of imposes a horizon after which the new Yemeni government would be completely responsible for security in the country, and whatever the U.S. is doing would be supporting the Yemeni government, not undertaking direct military action?
Part of why I offer this image is that it’s similar to something that Americans are familiar with in another context. We have this war in Afghanistan, and right now there is a timetable, under which the United States is supposed to transfer responsibility for security to the Afghan government, and no longer be taking direct military action, and it so happens that that timetable is the end of 2014. And so it would seem that this process is maybe creating something similar in Yemen, that there’s some kind of line beyond which the United States should not be – in fact is not allowed – to take direct military action in Yemen, is only allowed to do things that help the new Yemeni government exercise responsibility for security in the country.
Baraa Shiban: Part of the work of the Transitional Justice team is to set a clear strategy on the methods of countering terrorism and finding other alternatives other than drones in the coming period and start putting a timetable on how and when all the steps of the strategy will be followed. That’s something we still have to work on in the second phase of the National Dialogue. And after that we will have to follow the implementation process by both the President and the new government coming after the elections.
RN: One thing that many people in the United States might not be aware of – many probably never heard of the National Dialogue process, but even those that may have heard of it, may not realize that the United States government is a key partner in this process. Countries like the United States and Saudi Arabia have sponsored this process, there’s a UN Security Council resolution, so arguably it would be politically awkward – hopefully, to say the least – for the United States to try to ignore something that’s coming out of this democratic process that the United States is a guarantor of.
Baraa Shiban: The United States very clearly funds the National Dialogue, and it funds it to the tune of millions of dollars. And this is a process that the United States Administration has been so much supportive of, for the past two years saying that Yemen should be going to a national dialogue. Now the real question is, will the United States respect the outcomes of the National Dialogue and respect the will and desires of the Yemeni people, especially when it’s something very sensitive coming to the counterterrorism methods, or will it say no, we have our own method, and the Yemeni people should adopt it, regardless of what are the needs and what are the realities facing the Yemeni people.
It was very clear in the past few years that the United States support was mainly directed into the Department of Defense inside the country and was overseeing the counterterrorism units and of course the drones policy, where I think they did a pretty good job on bringing [President} Hadi on to their side, to support those drones hovering over the heads of the Yemeni people.
But now it"s different in that the decision came back to the Yemeni people and to the delegates inside the National Dialogue who are representing now all the sectors of the Yemeni society. And the question is will the Yemeni President, Hadi, and the U.S. Administration respect the desires and the decisions made by the Yemeni people.
RN: There"s a perception that the activity of the U.S. government in Yemen now is tremendously focused on military counterterrorism at the expense of what many people – in fact, including, according to rhetoric, the U.S. government – say are the long term solutions to these issues – development, addressing unemployment, poverty, education, governance, democracy, government capacity building.
Baraa Shiban: I would totally agree when we say about what are the counterterrorism methods followed in Yemen in our day – the perfect way to really fight, to face terrorism ideologies inside the country. In fact, in my work in this field for quite some time, I found out that many of the people who would work with Al Qaeda or other militants inside the country don"t really agree with the ideologies of those people. Actually they come from the perspective that the United States is droning us, they"re killing innocent civilians, in many instances those drones have killed women and children. And those militants are the only ones saying very clearly that we"re fighting them. So it"s just an idea of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."
The right approach is the development process, in fact this might be the only approach to fight such ideologies inside the country.
With a drone missile striking a village, and killing people there - this one missile costs sixty thousand dollars. And in one strike, you don"t use one missile. You use maybe three to five missiles to kill one suspect. Here we"re talking about three hundred thousand [dollars], and this is a lot of money inside Yemen. You can build a very good level of school education system inside this village. And this is how you’d fight such an ideology. You can have the government build a hospital here. Or a school. Teach the young kids. Not just drone them and kill them and expect that … no one would start challenging those drones and challenging the U.S. Administration policy inside the country.
RN: I wanted to ask you about something that Ambassador Feierstein said to us when we met with him at the beginning of our week in Yemen. He told me that there are no signature drone strikes in Yemen, that’s something that’s happening in Pakistan. But in Yemen we know for sure every single person that we’re hitting, we know who they are.
Baraa Shiban: What about the strike that took place [garbled] it was all civilian villagers who had nothing to do with militants. This was a very clear signature strike. And what are the drones doing hovering and surveying over the villages day and night now inside the village? This is a very clear indication of a signature strike. And in the draft that Obama signed in the beginning of 2012, it clearly states that they’re going to have signature strikes inside the country starting from the beginning of 2012. And that’s why we had so many strikes in 2012. And in fact the number of strikes that took place in 2012 are more than all the strikes that took place since 2002 inside the country. And this is because of the signature strikes, we don’t have that much of targets inside the country.
RN: The Skype connection went bad at the beginning of your last answer, you were speaking about a particular strike.
Baraa Shiban: In August 2012 a strike took place in a very poor village inside Rada governorate. It’s a governorate right in the middle in Yemen. And all the people who were killed were innocent civilians, not even one militant was killed in that strike. And that was a very clear indication of a signature strike, because the drones have been hovering and surveying that area for over a month before, and then the strike took place.
And I was saying that the signature strikes come after a very long period of surveillance. And this is what’s happening now, as we speak, inside the villages of Yemen. Drones are hovering day and night, just taking information for a possible coming signature strike.
RN: We met with a [Western] journalist working in Yemen who was talking about the dynamics in the South, in these villages where Ansar al-Sharia has come in and the relationship with the villagers, and the counter U.S. policy of creating these so-called “popular committees,” if I have the name right, which are kind of like militias. As this journalist described it, these so-called “popular committees” are very controversial because they’re seen by many people as an unaccountable militia – warlords that prey upon the people. And in fact, that in some communities, one of the reasons that Ansar al-Sharia was able to make inroads in the first place with the people was that they perceived them as protectors from warlordism and criminality, and many people perceive that what the U.S. and the Yemeni governments are doing is bringing back the warlords. I said to this reporter, “sounds like Afghanistan,” and she said, “It’s exactly like Afghanistan.”
Baraa Shiban: The “public committees” that were used against what they called Ansar al-Sharia in 2012 – most of those people helped Ansar al-Sharia to get inside those governorates in the first place. After they had a disagreement after the Ansar al-Sharia took over some cities, they found another way to get income from the Yemeni government and the American government. So they can first of all kick Ansar al-Sharia outside of those cities, and then keep on living – they now have a main source of income coming from the government under the name of we are protecting the people here. While in fact what is supposed to happen is that police should enter, the army should enter, and not just leave it to “public committees.”
RN: What’s the path for creating government in these areas of Yemen where government hasn’t existed, including local police?
Baraa Shiban: This is a question we should ask the Minister of Interior and the Ministry of Defense, why there’s still no presence of the government until today. The other thing we should ask the government, when will the government be going to those cities and start providing the basic services? Unfortunately people only see the government when they see military, this is how they would witness and feel like there is a government. But what about the basic services? This is the approach I think the government should start following in those governorates if we want to support the rule of law inside all of Yemen. People should feel the presence of the government by the presence of the demands and the basic services to the people.
RN: When we met with Ambassador Feierstein we asked him about compensating civilian victims of U.S. drone strikes. He said this is happening, but it happens through the Yemeni government, and this is the way that the Yemeni government prefers it. When we were in Aden, and met with -
Baraa Shiban: To be honest I haven’t heard of any procedure compensating those people. In fact, the people who died in al-Madyar in 2009 haven’t been compensated until today. The people who died in Rada, although the government admitted that it was a mistake, haven’t received any compensation until today. So I don’t know what compensation process he’s talking about.
RN: When we were in Aden, and met with the families of drone strike victims, we asked about this, they said, nobody’s compensated us. They said there is some government program which compensates people if their houses are destroyed, gives them money to rebuild the house. But there’s no government program that compensates people if their family members are killed or injured, including the issue of medical care. Has there been any discussion of this issue in the National Dialogue?
Baraa Shiban: I’m part of the committee, the Transitional Justice committee, and part of our work is to work on the compensation process for the people who were affected in the previous conflicts. And part of our work is to start revising if there were any compensation programs that were implemented by the government so we don’t start from scratch. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been any compensation programs started by the government. There has been talk about compensating for the people who lost their homes inside Abyan. But also that program is being implemented very, very slowly. A lot of people, until today, although it has been more than a year since the war happened in Abyan, and their homes haven’t been rebuilt until today. So, again, I don’t know what compensation program he’s talking about.
RN: Many people in the United States are hearing about these policies for the first time. What is the most important thing you would want Americans to know about the situation in Yemen now and U.S. government policy there?
Baraa Shiban: What I want the American people to know is that the policies followed by the American administration inside Yemen are not helping the safety and security of the Yemeni people, in fact they’re making it worse.
The drone program, especially what happened in 2012 and 2013, has caused a lot of pain and a lot of frustration and anger towards the American government from the Yemeni people like never before.
It was the first time we feel – we feel the presence of the American government, but unfortunately not by development projects, but by drones hovering and killing innocent people.
We would tell them just imagine if you have a mother or a child, who has been killed by a drone strike, because there is a possible threat that there might be a militant inside your village.
How would that feel?
This is now a continuous life for the Yemeni people, this is something that is happening day and night.
This is actually not helping the Yemeni government nor the American government.
An Egyptian protester waves a national flag as Egyptians gather in Tahrir Square during a demonstration against President Mohammed Morsi in Cairo, Sunday, June 30, 2013. Hundreds of thousands of opponents of Egypt’s Islamist president poured out onto the streets in Cairo and across much of the nation Sunday, launching an all-out push to force Mohammed Morsi from office on the one-year anniversary of his inauguration. Fears of violence were high, with Morsi’s Islamist supporters vowing to defend him. (AP Photo/Amr Nabil)
An Egyptian protester waves a national flag as Egyptians gather in Tahrir Square during a demonstration against President Mohammed Morsi in Cairo, Sunday, June 30, 2013. Hundreds of thousands of opponents of Egypt’s Islamist president poured out onto the streets in Cairo and across much of the nation Sunday, launching an all-out push to force Mohammed Morsi from office on the one-year anniversary of his inauguration. Fears of violence were high, with Morsi’s Islamist supporters vowing to defend him. (AP Photo/Amr Nabil)
Opponents of Egypt’s Islamist President Mohammed Morsi protest outside the presidential palace in Cairo, Egypt, Sunday, June 30, 2013. Hundreds of thousands of opponents of Egypt’s Islamist president poured out onto the streets in Cairo and across much of the nation Sunday, launching an all-out push to force Mohammed Morsi from office on the one-year anniversary of his inauguration. Fears of violence were high, with Morsi’s Islamist supporters vowing to defend him. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)
Supporters of Egypt’s Islamist President Mohammed Morsi hold sticks and shields as they rally in Nasser City, Cairo, Egypt, Sunday, June 30, 2013. Hundreds of thousands of opponents of Egypt’s Islamist president poured out onto the streets in Cairo and across much of the nation Sunday, launching an all-out push to force Mohammed Morsi from office on the one-year anniversary of his inauguration. Fears of violence were high, with Morsi’s Islamist supporters vowing to defend him.(AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)
Graffiti, including a caricature of President Mohammed Morsi, left and ousted President Hosni Munarak, is painted on the wall of a building across from the Ministry of Culture in Cairo, Egypt, Sunday, June 30, 2013. Hundreds of thousands of opponents of Egypt’s Islamist president poured out onto the streets in Cairo and across much of the nation Sunday, launching an all-out push to force Mohammed Morsi from office on the one-year anniversary of his inauguration. Fears of violence were high, with Morsi’s Islamist supporters vowing to defend him. The red Arabic words below the face drawing reads, “Whoever cost it didn’t die.” The Arabic next to the face drawing reads, “Down with the rule of sheep.” The red and white Arabic reads, “The revolution is everywhere against the killer and the traitor.” (AP Photo/Hiro Komae)
Opponents of Egypt’s Islamist President Mohammed Morsi protest outside the presidential palace, in Cairo, Egypt, Sunday, June 30, 2013. Hundreds of thousands of opponents of Egypt’s Islamist president poured out onto the streets in Cairo and across much of the nation Sunday, launching an all-out push to force Mohammed Morsi from office on the one-year anniversary of his inauguration. Fears of violence were high, with Morsi’s Islamist supporters vowing to defend him.(AP Photo/Khalil Hamra)
Obviously the overall story about how Americans view the right to marriage is one of ever increasing majorities. From just a few years ago, when Americans were split on the issue at best, they now have marked majorities in favor of same sex marriage – 71% according to some polls, 86% according to others. The argument has been won, and cultural unanimity is virtually complete.
Oh, my mistake. It’s actually around half of Americans who favor gay marriage. Those figures above are for the percentage of Americans who support banning abortion after the first trimester (13 weeks), and after the second trimester (28 weeks), respectively.
But that can’t be possible. Because if that was the case, wouldn’t we have heard about it, from the newspapers? Maybe they just haven’t gotten around to reporting it – a blind spot missed amidst all the other pressing news. Except – it looks like Americans have thought this for almost two decades. The percent supporting a second trimester ban has never dropped below 64 percent, and the percent supporting a third trimester ban has never dropped below 80 percent in that time. These positions are true elsewhere, too – once a baby starts looking like a baby, people tend to think it ought to be protected. That’s why most of Europe has bans on abortion ranging from 10 to 22 weeks, and the major countries have first trimester bans – Portugal at 10 weeks, Germany and Spain at 14 weeks, Italy at effectively the end of the first trimester. France is at 14 weeks as well, and they even mandate a one-week waiting period for all abortions. Most of these countries also have conscientious objection clauses designed to protect those doctors with moral objections to abortion.
On such a divisive issue, you’d think the fact that this broadly popular position has endured in America and around the world to such a degree would inform the political analysis of the media. But last night we saw how personally invested many in the media are in the limitless, on-demand abortion regime in their obvious cheerleading for Texas State Senator Wendy Davis, who was filibustering a Texas measure that would limit abortion to the 20 week mark and require a host of regulatory steps which would shut down most Texas abortion clinics. Most egregious of all was the point in the evening when reporters were actually urging protesters on, encouraging them to scream and shout to delay a floor vote on the measure. This went well beyond the bounds of journalism – and indeed was indistinguishable from the single-issue abortion activists.
It was indistinguishable because the press is, by and large, unanimous on the issue. We saw this in the disinterested approach to reporting on the Kermit Gosnell trial (until pressured into it by Mollie Hemingway and Kristen Powers). Those who write about abortion as a political issue are only interested in reporting about abortion politics when they view it as an opportunity to press its agenda. You will see a great deal of reporting in the coming weeks about Davis’s rising political star – she’s ambitious, with statewide hopes – because the reporters view her as the activists do: a heroic, courageous figure, assaulted by the GOP’s war on women. But you’ll likely see little reporting about the fact that 62 percent of Texans support the 20 week ban she was filibustering. The agenda takes precedence. They know that fighting this bill now is better than fighting it before the Supreme Court.
Twenty weeks is, of course, an arbitrary mark to draw a line between protected under law and lump of cells. The general argument from the pro-lifers is that it is a point where the unborn obviously feel pain. Viability is a threshold that continues to move earlier thanks to medical science, and indeed some children born at 20 weeks have survived. But there’s something else that happens at around the 20 week mark: the unborn can distinguish sounds. The first sound they will hear is the voice of their mother. In the weeks to come it will be a soothing and recognizable sound, distinguishable from all the rest. They will respond to it and react to it, to changes in volume and conversation. Much later, they will even be able to recognize tones of voice. But at the twenty week mark, there is only the formless sound. The child cannot understand what she is saying. They cannot detect the difference in tenor when she makes the call, and schedules the appointment, and takes them from the waiting room into the operating room where they will die. They only recognize it as a mother’s voice, full of promise, enveloping them – familiar, reassuring, safe.
1 of 3. A damaged car is seen in the Al-khalidiya neighbourhood of Homs June 30, 2013.
Credit: Reuters/Yazan Homsy
AMMAN |
AMMAN (Reuters) – President Bashar al-Assad’s forces pounded Sunni Muslim rebels in the city of Homs with artillery and from the air on Sunday, the second day of their offensive in central Syria, activists said.
They said rebels defending the old center of Homs and five adjacent Sunni districts had largely repelled a ground attack on Saturday by Assad’s forces, backed by guerrillas from the Lebanese Shi’ite group Hezbollah, but reported clashes and deaths within the city on Sunday.
Mohammad Mroueh, a member of the opposition “Homs Crisis Cell” said at least 25 loyalist troops including four Hezbollah fighters had been killed in Homs in the previous 24 hours. Such reports are difficult to verify in Syria, where independent media cannot usually report freely.
The offensive follows steady military gains by Assad’s forces, backed by Hezbollah, in villages in Homs province and towns close to the Lebanese border.
Opposition sources and diplomats said the loyalist advance had tightened the siege of Homs and secured a main road link to Hezbollah strongholds in Lebanon and to army bases in Alawite-held territory near the Syrian coast, the main entry point for Russian arms that have given Assad an advantage in firepower.
At least 100,000 people have been killed since the Syrian revolt against four decades of rule by Assad and his late father erupted in March 2011, making the uprising the bloodiest of the Arab Spring revolutions against entrenched autocrats.
The Syrian conflict is increasingly pitting Assad’s Alawite minority, backed by Shi’ite Iran and its Hezbollah ally, against mainly Sunni rebel brigades supported by the Gulf states, Egypt, Turkey and others.
Sunni Jihadists, including al Qaeda fighters from Iraq, have also entered the fray.
ALARM
The loyalist advances have alarmed international supporters of the rebels, leading the United States to announce it will step up military support. Saudi Arabia has accelerated deliveries of sophisticated weaponry, Gulf sources say.
Opposition activists said a woman and child had been killed in a strike by government aircraft on the old city of Homs, home to hundreds of civilians.
Video footage taken by the activists showed the bodies being carried in blankets and a man holding a wounded child with a gash in his head.
Rebel fighters fought loyalist forces backed by tanks in the old covered market, which links the old city with Khalidiya, a district inhabited by members of tribes who have been at the forefront of the armed insurgency.
“After failing to make any significant advances yesterday, the regime is trying to sever the link between Khalidiya and the old city,” Abu Bilal, one of the activists, said from Homs.
“We are seeing a sectarian attack on Homs par excellence, The army has taken a back role. Most of the attacking forces are comprised of Alawite militia being directed by Hezbollah.”
Alawites belong to an offshoot of Shi’ite Islam and have controlled Syria since the 1960s, when members of the sect took over the army and security apparatus in the mainly Sunni country.
URBAN WARFARE
Homs is a majority Sunni city. But a large number of Alawites have moved there in recent decades, drawn by army and security jobs.
Lebanese security forces said Hezbollah appeared to be present in the rural areas surrounding Homs.
Anwar Abu al-Waleed, an activist, said rebel brigades were prepared to fight a long battle, unlike in Qusair and Tel Kalakh, two towns in rural Homs near the border with Lebanon that fell to loyalist forces in recent weeks.
“We are talking about serious urban warfare in Homs. We are not talking about scattered buildings in an isolated town but a large urban area that provides a lot of cover,” he said.
State media said the army had “destroyed terrorist concentrations” in several districts of Homs and made “big progress” in Khalidiya.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague said Assad must halt his “brutal assault” on Homs and allow full humanitarian aid access to the country. Gulf countries, which back the rebels, urged Lebanon to stop outside parties interfering in the conflict, a reference to the Iranian-backed Hezbollah.
The Syrian conflict has aggravated neighboring Lebanon’s own complex sectarian rivalry, triggering fighting between Alawite pro-Assad and Sunni anti-Assad militia in the northern city of Tripoli that has killed dozens.
Syria’s official state news agency said a helicopter carrying Ministry of Education employees heading to a northern area to supervise school exams had been shot down. The seven employees and the helicopter’s crew were killed, it said.
The agency said the plane was brought down as “part of the scheme of the armed terrorist gangs to halt normal life”.
Opposition activists said the helicopter had been carrying supplies to two Shi’ite villages north of the city of Aleppo where Hezbollah fighters had been deployed.
(Additional reporting by Angus McDowall and William Maclean in Dubai; Editing by Andrew Roche)
In a unanimous vote last month, the Regents of the University of California created a corporate entity that, if spread to all UC campuses as some regents envision, promises to further privatize scientific research produced by taxpayer-funded laboratories. The entity, named Newco for the time being, also would block a substantial amount of UC research from being accessible to the public, and could reap big profits for corporations and investors that have ties to the well-connected businesspeople who will manage it.
Despite the sweeping changes the program portends for UC, the regents" vote received virtually no press coverage. UC plans to first implement Newco at UCLA and its medical centers, but some regents, along with influential business leaders across the state, want similar entities installed at Berkeley, Davis, Santa Cruz, and other campuses. UC Regents Chairwoman Sherry Lansing called Newco at UCLA a “pilot program” for the entire UC system.
The purpose of Newco is to completely revamp how scientific discoveries made in UC laboratories — from new treatments for cancer to apps for smartphones — come to be used by the public. Traditionally, UC campuses have used their own technology transfer offices to make these decisions. But under Newco, decisions about the fate of academic research will be taken away from university employees and faculty, and put in the hands of a powerful board of businesspeople who will be separate from the university. This nonprofit board will decide which UC inventions to patent and how to structure licensing deals with private industry. It also will have control over how to spend public funds on these activities.
Newco"s proponents contend that the 501(c) 3 entity will bring much-needed private-sector experience to the task of commercializing university inventions. Ultimately, it will generate more patents, and thus bigger revenues for UC through licensing deals and equity stakes in startups, they claim. UC administrators also say they have established sufficient safeguards for Newco and that UCLA"s chancellor and the regents will have oversight over the entity.
But if last month"s regents meeting in Sacramento is any indication, UC oversight of Newco may be less than robust. Several regents, in fact, objected to creating an oversight committee that would keep tabs on the new entity. The debate over the issue concluded after Regent Norman Pattiz suggested that “it shouldn"t be called the Regents Oversight Committee. It should be called the Regents"-Encouragement-and-Finding-You-the-Dough Committee.”
Critics of Newco say the scheme won"t work, and that it will lessen transparency in UC research while undermining the public mission of the university. Putting a board of businesspeople in charge of the university"s tech transfer operation also will create conditions ripe for cronyism, they fear.
In fact, that may already be the case. Records show that wealthy investors and influential businessmen with close ties to UCLA and one of the UC Regents — Alan C. Mendelson — are financially invested in companies that currently license university-owned patents under exclusive financial arrangements. Mendelson, who also is a trustee for the UC Berkeley Foundation and has investments of his own in businesses that profit from university-produced research, was one of the main backers of the Newco proposal and cast a vote in favor of it.
The Newco program also could benefit companies like the ones Mendelson and his network of friends and investors own and work for. Many of the UC Regents are also close friends of investors who want greater access to university inventions under more favorable terms, and who want the university to subsidize early-stage business expenses and take financial risks by investing in technology startups.
And under Newco, they may be able to get exactly what they want.
***
It appears that the university is turning research policy over to a private group of businesspeople, and they"ll control the decisions of campus officials who are required to work for the public interest,” said Christopher Newfield, a professor at UC Santa Barbara who conducted campus-sponsored studies of a range of tech transfer policies at UCSB early last decade, and has sat on several technology transfer policy committees. Newco is the latest expression of a belief that the university"s research policy should be evaluated by measuring patents and revenues, said Newfield. He believes that basic research is central to the university"s public purposes, and that changes toward a more proprietary and privatized model will harm both science and society.
“After WWII, policymakers assumed that government-funded research did not need to depend primarily on for-profit commercialization in order to get out to the public; there wasn"t the sense that patenting inventions and getting revenue streams off them was the main goal of the university-society interface,” Newfield noted. “A famous example was Jonas Salk"s polio vaccine, which he did not patent: 100 million doses were administered in the US in the two years following the successful clinical trial.”
University policies changed in the 1970s as several universities patented lucrative inventions and earned millions in revenue. Even though these paydays were rare and only occurred at a handful of elite research institutions that got lucky from a tiny fraction of the total inventions their faculty were producing, many schools wanted to duplicate this luck. When Congress enacted the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980, which concerned patent and trademark law, university administrators quickly interpreted it as giving schools ownership of the federally funded research conducted on their campuses. The race was off.
Hundreds of schools set up tech transfer offices in an attempt to profit from inventions. Universities instituted policies claiming institutional ownership of all inventions created by faculty and graduate students, and many tech transfer offices began to choke back the supply of knowledge flowing from the university into society — all in hopes that the university could claim ownership of one of the rare “home run” inventions, as many in the tech transfer field call them, that generate millions in revenue.
Gerald Barnett, who ran tech transfer operations at the University of Washington and at UC Santa Cruz, and today is the director of the Research Technology Enterprise Initiative, an independent organization that consults with research institutions, said Newco represents a way for private business interests to try to game the university. “If you"re working for the public good you don"t have to take ownership of everything,” he said of the research discoveries made at university campuses. “You don"t have to have a large number of employees [at tech transfer offices], and you only have to do few transactions a year [licensing to private companies].
“At the University of Washington, when I was there, we had five employees in my licensing unit, and we brought in three to six million a year across a range of projects,” Barnett added. He said that University of Washington administrators, however, created an independent organization with a similar focus as Newco to manage the university"s inventions under the watch of business interests. “UW has put $ 100 million over five years into their "Center for Commercialization" with great ballyhoo about how industry and businesspeople would cut through all the red tape and delays,” he said. “Turns out that those industry people are doing a lot worse than the program they dismantled.”
Barnett predicts the same for UC"s Newco. “The problem is that you"re taking out of circulation a vast amount of public domain knowledge and other stuff, and holding it hostage, making it less likely that any of these inventions will make money because you"re focusing on exclusive licenses,” he said.
What"s better for the public and the broader economy, said Barnett, is a system in which most university inventions and knowledge quickly flows into the public domain, or is swiftly made available through non-commercial means. A relatively small number of university inventions that benefit from patent positions might be licensed out, Barnett said. But he"s skeptical of the obsession with exclusive patent agreements with corporations.
***
The idea of putting university technology transfer under the control of a board of business leaders grows out of recent experiences at a handful of elite universities in which just a dozen or so technologies created in publicly funded labs have blossomed into multimillion-dollar properties. Many university administrators, nonetheless, have come to see these relatively rare successes as potentially lucrative revenue streams to replace increasingly scarce public funding. And now many businesspeople and private investors see the university as a vast social factory from which they can extract valuable property — especially if the university is pliant and agrees to exclusive deals. UCLA offers a prime example.
In the early 1990s, federally funded experimental cancer treatments devised by doctors at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine were yielding promising results. Using genetically altered mice with cancerous human tumors grafted into them, scientists were developing research they hoped would eventually treat cancers using specially designed protein antibodies. In 1996, several UCLA doctors took the research private in order to quickly commercialize the treatments. They founded Urogensys, which was later renamed Agensys. Agensys struck a deal with UCLA to exclusively license some of the school"s patented technologies on which the cancer therapies were based. Over the next decade and a half, Agensys filed for 156 patents on these cancer treatments, all based on fundamental research done at UCLA with federal research grants.
In 2007, the Japanese pharmaceutical giant Astellas bought Agensys for $ 537 million, making it one of the most valuable university spin-off companies in history. Agensys" deal with UCLA was unique in that the school reportedly had some equity stake in the company. The university has never disclosed the financial terms of the deal, however, so just what benefit there was to UCLA isn"t clear. Some say the university benefited greatly, while others claim it was actually short-changed and that Agensys" private investors were given a favorable deal because they were big donors to UC.
What is clear is that the biggest moneymaker in the Agensys deal was a small network of investors who earned millions. These investors included UCLA professor Arie Belldegrun, a doctor who has created and advised numerous biotechnology companies over his career. Roy Doumani, a wealthy Los Angeles banking and real estate investor, and friend of Belldegrun, was also part of Agensys. Doumani has been a major UCLA donor for several decades. In 1989, he gave UCLA a $ 7 million oceanfront house in Venice Beach. One of his more recent gifts to the school was an endowed chair in urologic oncology. This prestigious faculty post is currently occupied by Belldegrun. Although he has no scientific background, Doumani recently became a UCLA faculty member by joining the Department of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology to teach the “business of science.”
Advising Agensys in its dealings with the university was Alan C. Mendelson, a veteran biotechnology lawyer who works in the Menlo Park offices of the Latham Watkins law firm. Mendelson is also a wealthy donor to UC; he became a UC Regent in July of 2012 after a two-year stint as president of the Cal Alumni Association and a one-year term as treasurer of the UC Alumni Association.
Belldegrun, Doumani, and Mendelson are members of a tight-knit network of investors who have made millions by forming startup biotech companies, licensing university-developed technologies, and then selling the companies to bigger corporations for enormous profits.
Newco would effectively impose the model this group of investors has established over the past decade on all of UCLA"s tech transfer activities, and Mendelson has pointed to Agensys as Exhibit A as to why this will benefit the university.
In 1980, Alan Mendelson, then a junior lawyer at the Silicon Valley office of Cooley Godward, was assigned an otherwise obscure and small corporate client: Applied Molecular Genetics. That company later became the $ 76 billion biotech giant known today as Amgen. Mendelson"s role as Amgen"s legal counsel put him at the center of California"s booming biotechnology industry, connecting him to hundreds of venture capitalists and university scientists. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Mendelson represented and served on the boards of numerous small and large companies developing medical technologies. Many of these companies were started and funded by the same entrepreneurs and investors. Along the way, Mendelson also invested in many of these companies, becoming wealthy in the process.
Most of the corporations Mendelson worked with relied on technology licensed from universities. This placed Mendelson firmly on the side of private businesses in their often-contentious negotiations with university tech transfer offices over patent rights, royalties, milestone payments, and equity stakes. Private companies often seek exclusive rights and to lower royalty payments to the university. Sometimes investors want universities to take equity stakes because these are, in effect, public subsidies to highly speculative companies at their seed stage, when no private investor is willing to invest.
In 2005, one of Mendelson"s clients, Kythera Biopharmaceuticals, entered into an exclusive licensing agreement with UCLA and a UCLA Medical Center-affiliated foundation called LA Biomed to exploit patents related to a drug developed by the school. (UCLA has kept the terms of that agreement confidential.)
In addition to working as Kythera"s lawyer, Mendelson was an investor in the company. According to records filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on May 17, 2012, Mendelson advised Kythera in a public stock offering that netted about $ 86 million. The disclosure filing noted that Mendelson owned 13,000 shares of Kythera at the time. Mendelson"s investments were through a family trust, and through VP Company Investments 2008, LLC, a Delaware-registered corporation that partners of the Latham Watkins law firm use as a co-investment vehicle. Mendelson was still a stockowner in Kythera when he became a UC Regent in July of last year.
Mendelson also represents and owns stock in Singulex, Inc., another corporation that licenses technology from UC. Singulex"s offices and labs are in Alameda. In a filing with the SEC last year, Singulex"s executives wrote, “our business is dependent on our exclusive license from the Regents of the University of California,” and warned prospective investors that “termination of this license could negatively impact our market position.” As of September 2012, Mendelson owned 34,004 shares of Singulex through his family"s trust. He also owned a portion of another 34,004 shares, along with partners of the Latham Watkins law firm, held by VP Company Investments 2008, LLC.
As a regent-designate since 2011, and as a full voting member of the UC Regents since July 2012, Mendelson participated in the regents" special Working Group on Technology Transfer, an ad hoc committee of the board that was tasked with studying system-wide tech transfer policies. One of this working group"s recommendations was “establishing separate institutional structures with funding and mandate to invest in UC start-ups.” The regents" Working Group on Technology Transfer also took the lead in advocating for the establishment of Newco.
At last month"s regents meeting, during the discussion preceding the vote to establish Newco, Mendelson recounted his version of the Agensys story. “As some of you may have heard, a mutual friend of chairman Lansing and mine, Dr. Arie Belldegrun at UCLA, he and a number of faculty members started a company. It was called Agensys. It was sold ultimately for $ 500 million dollars and the university benefitted greatly.”
But according to Mendelson"s version of events, UC didn"t benefit much from the terms of the licensing agreement, but instead from the “largesse” of the university"s private investors. Mendelson said UC was rewarded “not so much by the royalty revenues, because I don"t think even now they have products approved, but it was in terms of some of the investors who are UCLA donors giving back. Once they got the largesse, if you will, from the sale of the company, they gave back significant amounts of money to UCLA.”
It"s unclear whether Mendelson has economic stakes in other companies — besides Kythera and Singulex — that license UC technology or otherwise use university resources. Mendelson did not respond to a request for comment for this story, and when I asked the University of California Office of the President for a copy of Mendelson"s Form 700 (a detailed disclosure of personal economic interest required of the UC Regents and many UC administrators), a representative from UCOP responded that Mendelson did not have one on file, and that his annual report was late. I obtained a copy of Mendelson"s Form 700 that he filed in August of 2012 with the California Fair Political Practice Commission. The FPPC also confirmed that Mendelson"s annual filing, which was due April 2, is late.
Mendelson"s August 2012 disclosure showed that he had direct investments in nine biotechnology companies, including Kythera and Singulex, as well as stock in eighteen different venture capital funds with a total value hovering somewhere between $ 1 and $ 10 million (the disclosure forms do not require him to be more specific). In addition, most of his investment funds are focused in biotech companies, giving him indirect financial stakes in perhaps dozens of biotechnology corporations.
The most vocal advocate for Newco at UCLA has been James Economou, the campus vice chancellor of research and a doctor at UCLA Medical Center who holds a faculty appointment in UCLA"s Department of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology. In several presentations to the regents, Economou has stressed that a Newco-type entity would patent greater numbers of faculty inventions and create more financial deals with the private sector, and that the university would benefit from the revenues and wealth this generates.
“The process of patenting inventions involves hard-nosed business decisions. The university needs businesspeople with many years of experience to make decisions on what are risky investments,” Economou told the UC regents at a meeting last year concerning tech transfer, according to the official minutes of the meeting. “The board must be an independent board of directors, reputable individuals with experience in the business of science who would serve the university without pay.”
“The business of science” is the same phrase used by Doumani — the wealthy banking and real estate investor — to describe what he teaches as a faculty member of UCLA"s Department of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology as well. Doumani, in fact, runs an entire center now on UCLA"s campus called the “Business of Science Center,” and the center is sponsored by the Astellas USA Foundation, a grant-making organization set up by the Japanese pharmaceutical giant that bought Agensys in 2007.
“There"s a sense that we have outdated models of entrepreneurship,” Economou told the regents last month. “We lack real-world-business experience and should empower business professionals in the decision-making process.”
Several years ago, Economou asked William Ouchi, a professor at the UCLA Anderson School of Business who specializes in “corporate renewal,” to study the school"s tech transfer policies. In one of his more famous consulting gigs earlier in his career, Ouchi agreed to help Mendelson"s client Amgen reform the company"s drug development process, according to a 1994 Los Angeles Times report. For UCLA, Ouchi eventually produced a series of reports titled, “Ecosystem for Entrepreneurs.” Ouchi"s reports criticized UCLA"s tech transfer record as generating a “low financial yield,” well below UC Berkeley"s, Stanford"s, and MIT"s. Ouchi endorsed the Newco idea to fix this perceived problem. He recommended that a Newco-type entity be capable of raising external funds in the range of $ 50 million to $ 100 million in order to invest in patents of university inventions; partner with and possibly invest in companies, many of them owned and led by faculty; and to cover patent prosecutions. The biggest expense in patenting inventions under a model like Newco involves monitoring intellectual property holdings and hiring lawyers to aggressively go after any company or other party that violates a patent by using the invention without a license or other agreement. Legal expenses can typically run into the millions of dollars.
I asked professor Ouchi who he consulted with at UCLA to produce his reports, including the recommendation to establish a Newco-type entity that would raise private funds. “I prefer not to draw attention to it at this point, because it has just been approved by The Regents and is not actually in operation yet,” Ouchi replied in an email. “Lots of people at UCLA and at UC participated in the design of Newco — it was definitely the product of a very large team.”
Whether Newco will use university funds or external funds to fund private corporations and defend patents licensed by private companies remains unclear. The resolution passed by the regents to create the entity allows it to raise private money, but these funds must be held in UCLA accounts, one of the safeguards built into the Newco structure.
UCLA Vice Chancellor Economou declined an interview request for this article, referring questions to Brenden Rauw, UCLA"s recently hired associate vice chancellor and executive director of entrepreneurship. Rauw was recruited from Columbia University last year specifically to oversee UCLA"s transition into a more proprietary model of tech transfer under Newco. Rauw passed my inquiries to a media relations person who did not provide answers to basic questions about Newco before press time. Belldegrun and Doumani also did not respond to interview requests for this story.
Like Mendelson, Belldegrun, Doumani, and other proponents of the Newco model, Economou is linked to private companies that are already commercializing UCLA technologies. Economou is listed as a scientific advisor to Kite Pharma, a small biotech company. It"s not clear if Kite pays Economou. Kite Pharma"s board of directors also includes Belldegrun and Doumani, who are also investors in the company.
“We tell our faculty that we want them to have as many potential conflicts of interest as possible,” Economou told the regents last month. “We have a process for helping to identify them, and to manage them, and to create transparency, and give them guidelines, so instead of telling our faculty "you can"t do this, and you can"t do that," we encourage them to create startups, we encourage them to file patent disclosures.”
Kite Pharma is just one of several biotechnology companies controlled by Belldegrun and other UCLA-connected investors. For example, also on the board of Kite Pharma is Steven Ruchefsky, a New York hedge fund manager. Ruchefsky is also an investor in Arno Therapeutics, a biotech company located in New Jersey that develops drugs based on exclusive licensing agreements with Ohio State University and the University of Pittsburgh. Mendelson also is an investor in Arno Therapeutics, as is Belldegrun. Belldegrun was, in fact, one of the largest shareholders in Arno Therapeutics as of December 2012, holding 1.3 million shares, according to a registration statement filed with the SEC. Much of Belldegrun"s stock in Arno was held in an offshore trust administered by the Leumi Overseas Trust Corporation on the Island of Jersey, a jurisdiction off the northern coast of France that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has described as a tax haven.
Another investor in Arno is David Tanen, a venture capitalist who runs Two River, a merchant bank that focuses on life sciences companies. Belldegrun is the chairman and a partner of the bank.
CTI Molecular Imaging, another company with roots in UCLA"s Medical School and Department of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology, was provided research services by UCLA professors Michael Phelps and James Heath. As part of three separate agreements in 1994, 2000, and 2001, UCLA granted CTI exclusive rights to any inventions generated by university staff and gave the company an interest in any revenues generated from technologies that might be licensed to third parties. Phelps and Heath also were directors of CTI. Doumani was an investor in the company. The Siemens corporation bought CTI for $ 1 billion in 2005.
Today, professors Phelps and Heath, who both hold appointments in UCLA"s Department of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology, run a private business advisory group called Momentum Biosciences. Doumani is on the board of directors of Momentum, as is Michael Shockro, a lawyer and colleague of Mendelson at the Latham Watkins law firm. Like Doumani, Shockro also holds a faculty appointment in UCLA"s Department of Pharmacology to teach courses in the “business of science.”
The web of companies and investors linking Belldegrun, Mendelson, Doumani and other proponents of the Newco model of tech transfer is complex, but it all swirls around biotech products being developed from inventions licensed largely from universities. Belldegrun"s role in numerous biotech companies with links to UCLA and beyond is perhaps why his name was mentioned numerous times, in tones of admiration and awe, by several of the regents during their May meeting as they excitedly discussed Newco.
***
Some of the regents would like to institute a powerful business entity like Newco at UC Berkeley. Regent Richard Blum, the husband of US Senator Dianne Feinstein, called Berkeley"s tech transfer office “an absolute disaster” at the last regents meeting. To back this up, Blum related a story about an invention developed by a faculty member affiliated with the Blum Center for Developing Economies, an institute he created through a large private gift to the university.
“We went to the center [Berkeley"s tech transfer office] to license this thing, and they said, "Well we don"t want to license it, we don"t want to put the money up to get the patents, and we don"t think it"s worth it." I said, "Okay, that"s fine, I"ll put up the money, and not for me personally, I"ll put up the money for the [Blum] center to get it."”
According to Blum, Berkeley"s tech transfer office staff bungled the invention"s transfer to private industry and the faculty inventor was excluded from further participation. “Next thing I know is this group takes this project, doesn"t tell us what they"re doing with it, licenses this to somebody, and won"t even tell us who they licensed to develop the product.”
A basic web search shows, however, that Blum got much of this story wrong. The invention in question, a hardware and app combination that turns a smartphone into a mobile microscope called the Cellscope, has, in fact, been commercialized, and the inventor, Daniel Fletcher, a professor of bioengineering at UC Berkeley and a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is still very involved in the project.
Berkeley, furthermore, consistently ranks among the top universities in terms of the number of inventions it generates. Many of those inventions generate no revenue for the campus, but they are used by industry, governments, and nonprofits to solve problems and develop new products, and a small number of inventions earn millions each year, qualifying the campus" tech transfer activities as the opposite of a disaster.
Tech transfer offices at the different UC campuses are currently able to do all the things that Newco will be able do at UCLA, from inking complex licensing agreements and industry research partnerships to investing equity in startups. The only difference is they aren"t taking orders directly from a board of businesspeople and investors.
For example, according to Berkeley"s Office of Intellectual Property and Industry Research Alliances, the school can take equity stakes of up to 10 percent in a company licensing its inventions. Berkeley has created about 150 companies specifically to commercialize technologies developed on the campus, and the school has equity stakes in roughly 30 of these. Berkeley has also created the largest industry research alliances in the nation, including the much-criticized deal with BP that many say was a corporate raid on the school"s intellectual property. But even staffers at Berkeley are wary of the degree of privatization and industry dominance that Newco seems to represent.
I asked Graham Fleming, Berkeley"s vice chancellor for research, if the school had plans to institute a Newco-type entity to control tech transfer. “We are not currently considering a similar set-up to manage our technology transfer,” he said. “We are very interested in exploring new and innovative ways to facilitate the translation of our research breakthroughs into goods and services that benefit the public. At the same time we are also well aware that we need to do that in a manner consistent with our values and public character.”
Newfield of UC Santa Barbara said that Berkeley and UCLA currently have “different visions” when it comes to tech transfer. “The contrast is between a narrow revenue goal for commercializing science and a public interest goal for getting science into the world,” he said. The irony of something like Newco, he continued, is that managing university research to maximize patenting and corporate startups doesn"t even appear to increase revenues for the university. “If UCLA doesn"t seem successful enough right now as a science business, it"s not because they don"t think about business enough or have shut out entrepreneurs. They"ve been focused on the business side for at least twenty years.”
Carol Mimura, UC Berkeley"s assistant vice chancellor in charge of tech transfer, is a well-known champion of making technologies more widely available through a public-interest model and has published numerous papers on the subject. Berkeley"s tech transfer office is known for inserting “humanitarian use terms” in licensing agreements with companies. In April of this year, Berkeley won the US Patent Office"s prestigious Patents for Humanity Award for developing and licensing an anti-malarial drug at low cost so that it can be distributed in regions of the world that are most afflicted by the disease, but are least able to afford pharmaceuticals.
Barnett, the former head of the University of Washington and UC Santa Cruz tech transfer offices, believes the whole model of a university holding a maximum number of patents with the intention of exclusively licensing them in hopes of a big payout is flawed. Barnett instead recommends that universities include in their innovation practice something more like a technological commons.
“Universities have an important role, and that is to manage IP [intellectual property] to develop commons and standards and platforms — to coordinate research and to ensure broad access,” he said. “They should hold most of their patents for non-exclusive licensing.”
Barnett added that some of the most lucrative patents have been biotech tools that were licensed non-exclusively, like the Cohen Boyer patents. Applied for in 1974 by Stanford University, and granted by the US Patent Office in 1980, the Cohen Boyer patents covered one of the most fundamental methods used across the entire biotechnology industry today: gene cloning. Stanford purposefully licensed the patents non-exclusively to 468 companies. These companies went on to create more than 2,400 products and billions in sales. The non-exclusive license upset powerful Silicon Valley biotech companies — including Genentech — that wanted to monopolize the method through exclusive licenses for greater profits. Cohen Boyer also reserved the rights of other universities to practice the patented methods without charge. The main reason Cohen Boyer was set up this way, said Barnett, is because faculty and the university, not businesspeople, were driving the process and making the decisions.
***
Mendelson, Belldegrun, and Doumani did not respond to requests for interviews for this story, and Shockro of Mendelson"s law firm and several other members of the UC Board of Regents did not respond to inquiries about their current and past links to various companies that license UC technology and their participation in the creation of Newco.
A UC spokesperson, who appears to have been forwarded emails from me to Mendelson via his law firm, responded: “As an alumni regent, Alan Mendelson is about to complete a two-year term that included one year as a voting member of the Board of Regents. As is the case for all Regents, his biography is publicly available online. Regarding companies in which Regents have a material interest, the rules only prohibit them from decision-making about those companies, not investing in them. There is nothing wrong with Regent Mendelson, or any other Regent, having an interest in companies that license UC technology, so long as this prohibition is followed.”
According to legal counsel within the University of California Office of the President, as a fourth branch of California"s government, the Regents of the University of California are not bound by the Political Reform Act of 1974. Instead, the regents chose to voluntarily follow the act by devising their own ethics policies for the university. According to UCOP, the regents carry out oversight of the university and do not make decisions that materially benefit specific companies, therefore they rarely run into conflict-of-interest problems requiring them to recuse themselves from voting on matters like Newco.
(Reuters) – It hardly sounds like a dream honeymoon: a week charging around a battleground reverberating with the clamor of 135 cannons, the reek of gunpowder smoke and the cacophony of 12,000 soldiers and 400 horses.
Yet for Polish newlyweds Madeline and Lukas Kus, the noise and violence are the main attraction. The couple, both 30-year-olds from Warsaw, are among scores of non-Americans – some from as far afield as Australia – who have come to Pennsylvania to take part in two reenactments commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg in the first week of July.
The Kuses are two of six Poles here to remember the Polish Brigade, originally formed by Polish-American Walery Sulakowski in August 1861. Almost two years later, the brigade, part of the 14th Louisiana Volunteer Infantry Regiment, was deployed to Gettysburg to take part in the largest battle of the American Civil War. Casualties (killed, missing in action, wounded or captured) for Union and Confederate troops totaled 50,000.
Madeline Kus, who is portraying a Confederate drummer boy in the June 27-30 reenactment organized by the Blue Gray Alliance, has been taking part in Civil War re-creations for more than two years.
A second reenactment, sponsored by the Gettysburg Anniversary Committee, will take place at a farm near Gettysburg on July 4-7. That version is expected to include about 300 foreign-born reenactors from a range of countries including Canada, Austria, France, Sweden, Belgium, Denmark and Britain.
All the simulated encounters take place on private farmland. “Officers” assign roles in famously well-known and researched engagements within the battle of Gettysburg, like Pickett’s Charge or the battle of Devil’s Den, and participants arrive already knowledgeable and prepared to feign death.
Military historian Professor Peter Stanley of the Australian Centre for the Study of Armed Conflict and Society at the University of New South Wales, Canberra, will be among the group in the second event.
“I’ll be wearing the ‘undress’ uniform of a major of the 101st Royal Bengal Fusiliers,” said Stanley, author of 25 books, most of them on military history. That means a dark blue patrol jacket, lavender-blue trousers and a cap.
“I’ll be representing one of the British officers who spent time with both sides observing the war in America. Some British officers came especially; many came down from their stations in Canada. My major is stopping off on the way home from India on leave. I’ll be ‘armed’ with a walking stick, since I’m just observing,” he said.
Stanley said he got hooked on his academic specialty after reading Robert Alter’s “Heroes in Blue and Gray” at the age of 11.
For 72-year-old Frederick “Derek” Philips, of Scotland, who portrays Captain William Wilcox of the 95th New York, the occasion affords the chance to relive history. Philips, a member of the American Civil War Society in the UK, said he participates in about five such events a year in the British Isles.
Philips, a history teacher who has visited Gettysburg several times in the past, said he met members of the Confederation of Union Generals 10 years ago at the commemoration. “I was invited to join as an (aide-de-camp) to Major General John F. Reynolds. Wilcox was with General Reynolds when he was killed at Gettysburg on the first day of the battle.”
Gettysburg officials are expecting 250,000 visitors to visit the small south-central Pennsylvania borough of about 7,700 residents for the anniversary. To accommodate them, officials have hired law enforcement and emergency service personnel to provide security and related services.
As a result of the Boston Marathon bombing earlier this year, authorities have put additional security measures in place, banning large backpacks from grandstands and deploying additional police and emergency service personnel.
(Editing by Arlene Getz and Prudence Crowther)
