New York’s medical institutions, meanwhile, have historically demonstrated an allergy to anything that might make money from their science. Universities like MIT, on the other hand, have built commercial-science parks right next door, and West Coast institutions have welcomed board members from companies like Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems who were ready to help the schools do business. “In California, they understand it’s good for business to back the next Hewlett-Packard rather than just license out the technology to someone else,” says Bowles. “Until five years ago, some of the institutions here didn’t even have a technology-transfer office.”

In recent years, Columbia has set up an effective biotech office for its faculty (which may be of some help to Asa Abeliovich), but when the man behind it, executive vice-provost Michael Crow, decamped for Arizona State University in 2002, he seemed fed up with the lack of enthusiasm here. “New York is one of the scientific capitals of the world, but you wouldn’t know that,” he said at the time. “There’s no recognition that science and technology is any value at any level to New York City.”

Hospitals are only as great as their high-end research. Without the star scientists and the momentous discoveries, donations dry up and grant money goes elsewhere. Losing the stem-cell race would only speed up this process. Even if most of the city’s more established human embryonic stem-cell researchers stay, suppose the research takes off in California or elsewhere? The hospitals and medical schools here could suddenly find themselves unable to attract the next generation’s most talented medical students and young doctors and researchers, who invariably want to be where the sexiest research is happening—and where most of the jobs are.

“Without young faculty, you cut off the lifeblood of the medical school,” says Antonio Gotto, dean of Weill-Cornell Medical College. “They’re needed for teaching, for the patient work, for the research.” In time, what makes New York known around the world—the experimental-drug trials taking advantage of the city’s genetically diverse population, bringing cures here first; the last-minute, hail-Mary treatments for hopeful patients flying in from other countries—could disappear. “Look at aids as a model,” says Dr. Benjamin Chu, president of the city’s Health and Hospitals Corporation. “Many of the first protease inhibitors were actually tested here. At Bellevue, we had a federally funded aids research unit. If all of this is happening in a California lab and California hospitals, it’s less likely that our patients would be involved in early trials.”

What will the loss of cutting-edge medicine mean to the average New York patient? “If you break your leg, it probably doesn’t make a difference,” says Jo Wiederhorn, executive director of the Associated Medical Schools of New York. “You may not get A-plus physicians treating you, but that doesn’t mean you won’t get good physicians treating you. But if you are diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, it would certainly have an impact. And if you go traveling and you go someplace and you come back and you’re sick and no one can figure it out? It would impact on that.”

Then there’s the doomsday scenario: New York hospitals lose their main profit centers and become like other urban hospitals—catering mainly to the uninsured and subsisting on shoestring budgets.

Since Prop 71 was passed, New Yorkers for the Advancement of Medical Research has been planning a new advance on Albany. “We have to decide if it’s better to move forward with the policy bill or raise the temperature a bit and make it a money bill,” says one of the alliance’s leaders, Robin Elliott of the Parkinson’s Disease Foundation.

Others feel more confident about the bill’s chances because, the thinking is, Prop 71 converted stem-cell research from a political issue dominated by the White House and Congress into a federalist issue that any prudent state now must address. Events may put more pressure on Pataki, who, like the Republican governors of Maryland, Massachusetts, and Georgia, has powerful medical institutions facing brain drains; the science and the money may prove irresistible. It doesn’t hurt that the State Senate has lost a few Republican members. “I think the current circumstances around the country are going to force everybody to look at this differently,” says Maria Mitchell, a former chairman of the board of the Health and Hospitals Corporation under Rudy Giuliani who now lobbies for AMDeC. “There have been members of the State Senate who have been receptive but were waiting for the election. Now it’s clear that this thing has been kicked back to the states.”

Others aren’t waiting for the government. They’re strategizing about finding a way to participate in the California gold rush through a back door—alliances between New York and West Coast institutions. Some have heard it may be possible to leverage grant funding—so, for instance, a Columbia researcher would collaborate with Stanford, and the Stanford part would be funded by ballot and the New York part would be funded privately. But most are searching for private dollars. Harold Varmus says Memorial Sloan-Kettering is financing the work of scientists like Lorenz Studer with donations. And Gerald Fischbach says Columbia will set aside at least 10,000 square feet of space for stem-cell research. “We’re not going to get sidelined,” Fischbach says. “I won’t let that happen. We’re gonna make a huge effort to raise private funds for embryonic stem cells.” They’ll have competition, of course: Johns Hopkins has a $60 million privately funded stem-cell institute, and Harvard is on the way to raising $100 million.

California has its Robert Klein, and a few angels have emerged here. Rockefeller University’s privately funded center for stem-cell research exists because of the generosity of philanthropist Harriet Heilbrunn. Chuck Brunie, a founder of Oppenheimer Capital and chair emeritus of the right-leaning Manhattan Institute whose wife, Jean, has suffered several strokes, has pledged $3 million to the stem-cell center at Columbia where Asa Abeliovich works. And Weill-Cornell’s Ansary Center for Stem Cell Therapeutics started with a $15 million grant from Houston philanthropists Shahla and Hushang Ansary. The dean, Antonio Gotto, says the center is actively considering setting up a lab completely independent of NIH in order to use embryos sitting in Weill-Cornell’s fertility clinic. But that would take more money. “I’m sure there are individuals out there,” Gotto says. A megagift, in fact, may already be in the works. According to one accomplished New York stem-cell researcher, several donors are looking to team up to fund a private, local stem-cell initiative that would be shared by a number of medical centers. The gift could be announced as early as January.

In the long run, stem-cell advocates believe a breakthrough in research will change everything. The first time the next Christopher Reeve walks, or the first Parkinson’s sufferer stops shaking, or the first leukemia patient is given a clean bill of health, public outcry for this research, they say, will be overwhelming. The only question for New York is, will we be so far behind at that point that we can’t catch up? Researchers here would prefer not to wait to find out. “I don’t know what it’ll take,” says Gerald Fischbach. “The scientists have weighed in without effect. But I would like to see New York State, a blue state after all, stand up for its principles.”