This is a beautiful example of a state, in desperate need of revenue, supporting legislation that encourages businesses to start up without increasing/decreasing taxes.
Now if only the US could do the same thing with stem cells.
Now if only the US could do the same thing with stem cells.
For the last 10 years or more, you're welcome to do anything you want with stem cells. Go crazy. You just haven't been able to get tax money to fund it, if the stem cells happened to be embryonic.
http://stemcells.nih.gov/info/basics/basics5.asp
One major difference between adult and embryonic stem cells is their different abilities in the number and type of differentiated cell types they can become.
Scientists believe that tissues derived from embryonic and adult stem cells may differ in the likelihood of being rejected after transplantation.
The difficulty isn't being able to research them. There's a lot of money flowing both ways that is very politically motivated, but it's pretty simple to say that the adult stem cells have actually resulted in recoveries and cures (embryonic have not) and do not have the ethical problems. Being able to research embryonic stem cells doesn't make them more viable. At this point, they don't have advantages.
This is an empirical observation, and isn't based on micro-economics, though you could frame it as such if you wanted. It's not true in all cases - Google might lure a few top computer scientists away from academia by giving them massive amounts of funding. See, academia has non-monetary rewards - the glory of working for as an academic (this may be a con), and government jobs look stable and for the public good (though libertarians might argue). Thus public funding secures the scares resource (talented scientists) at a lower cost, and private funding goes down (supply and demand, unless research happens to be a Giffen good, which I doubt).