Final Report (all chapters)

12 days old, as well as safeguards for obtaining informed consent in human subject research. The
initiative carefully removes virtually all institutional constraints that would interfere with the
insiders doing what they want with the funds. Finally, the state legislature is prohibited from
amending the initiative for three years, and then only by a 70 percent margin, which makes it
highly unlikely that it will be able to pass any changes. 42
In sum, while the legislation passed by the California legislature in the fall of 2003 took
some preliminary but promising steps to create appropriate legal safeguards for conducting
cloning research, Proposition 71 was written in a way that all but ensures that the scientific
community will be able to conduct highly controversial research at the taxpayer expense free of
virtually any public oversight. Perhaps because the legislation was so poorly drafted, it has
already been challenged in the courts and faces potentially crippling delays as a series of litigants
challenge various aspects of the proposition.
5.3 Self-Regulatory Initiatives
5.3.1 Introduction
There is a tendency in many policy debates to consider regulatory interventions and selfregulatory
programs mutually exclusive. Typically, industry representatives perceive federal and
state regulations as burdensome and ineffective, and advocate self-regulation as a superior
alternative. Public interest groups, policy-makers, and many academics also subscribe to the
view that government regulation and industry self-regulation are mutually exclusive, but
interpret this observation in a diametrically opposed way. In the view of these critics, selfregulation
can be described as an elaborate public relation exercise meant to improve an
industry’s public image and to prevent regulatory interventions. In the critics’ view, cases of
credible self-regulation are simply too rare for self-regulation to be considered a credible
regulatory option. Neither one of these characterizations is empirically accurate. As we show
below, regulatory systems are almost always an amalgamation of legal requirements and private
standards. Effective and responsive regulatory systems often are based on self-regulatory
elements, an insight that will guide much of the discussion in chapter 13.6.
In the remainder of this section, we first provide several examples of the hybrid nature of
modern regulatory systems. We then examine in some detail the main components of the selfregulatory
system as it exists in the ART industry. As it will quickly become apparent, these selfregulatory
initiatives, while remarkable in their own right, all by themselves are incapable to
credibly adjudicate broad societal disputes produced by new reproductive technologies. Properly
integrated into a formal system of regulation, however, they could play a very important
supporting role.
42
The Center for Genetics and Society has monitored the implementation of Proposition 71 from the start. For a
detailed discussion see http://genetics-and-society.org/resources/cgs/20060118_cirm_press.html.
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