Senate president wants his legacy to be disease cures

Senate President Jim King hopes a proposed center for stem cell research will be his contribution.

By ALISA ULFERTS, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published February 21, 2003

TALLAHASSEE -- Faced with a budget crisis, Senate President Jim King knows there isn't enough money for the kind of legacy previous leaders have left: medical schools, football stadiums, museums.

So King wants to help find cures for diseases that have robbed him of his friends and parents: heart disease, lung disease, cancer, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. "Too many times we have lost folks who were great Floridians way before their time should have come," King said Thursday as he announced the creation of the Center of Universal Research to Eradicate Disease, or CURED.

If approved by the Legislature, the center would serve as a clearinghouse for stem cell research in the state and coordinate the donation of placentas and umbilical cord blood, both rich in the stem cells researchers seek.

King said he hopes some of the $150-million in an existing biomedical research trust fund will be used for incentives to get women to donate the tissue. That could include having the state help with hospital delivery charges, he said.

Eventually, King hopes the center will have its own building, but for now he's aiming for a modest office and two staffers.

The Jacksonville Republican hopes to sidestep the ethical and religious debate surrounding the use of embryonic stem cells for research by focusing strictly on the stem cells found in afterbirth tissues. Also, his bill likely will travel with a companion bill that would ban human cloning.

King picked Sen. Dan Webster, a Winter Garden Republican known for his conservative religious and political views, to sponsor the bill. "I have no problem at all" with carrying the bill, Webster said.

Culling stem cells from human embryos that were originally intended for in vitro fertilization has met with stiff opposition from a number of religious organizations that believe human life begins at fertilization. But King was joined Thursday by Michael Sheedy, who tracks health issues for the Florida Catholic Conference. "We're supportive of it," Sheedy said of King's bill. "We would not be supportive of efforts to promote embryonic stem cell research."

Whether adult stem cells from umbilical cords are as adaptable as embryonic stem cells is unknown, but it's an issue that needs to be researched, said Jack Pledger, director of research for the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa.

There's no question that stem cells from umbilical cords help cancer patients with bone marrow transplants, but the cells' usefulness beyond is unknown, he said.

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