The guilty verdicts last Thursday in the conspiracy and fraud cases against Enron founder Ken Lay and former chief executive Jeffrey Skilling won’t help Californians recover any money, but some here are feeling a measure of vindication.

West Coast utilities are still trying to recover $2 billion from Enron stemming from the 2002 electricity crisis.

State Sen. Debra Bowen, D-Redondo Beach, who chaired the Senate energy committee during the energy crisis, said Lay and Skilling ran a Ponzi scheme.

“They ripped off millions of California ratepayers, and cost thousands of people not just their jobs, but their hard-earned pensions as well,” Bowen said. “Sending them to jail won’t undue any of that, but it’s a lot better than watching them laugh their way to the bank and lining up tee times with our money.”

—

A team of scientists who made breakthroughs in research involving human and chimp genomes will be attending a ribbon-cutting ceremony this week with philanthropist Eli Broad for a new Broad Institute building in Cambridge, Mass. The Institute is a partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research that studies the power of genomics to understand human disease.

Researchers at the Broad Institute recently published a groundbreaking theory suggesting that when the ancestors of human beings and the ancestors of chimpanzees parted ways 6 million years ago, it was probably a very long goodbye about 1.2 million years. According to the theory, chimps and humans shared a common, ape-like ancestor much more recently than previously thought.

—

Health care workers staged a protest last week to draw attention to what they believe is low staffing levels at three hospitals operated by HCA Inc., from Nashville, Tenn. Contracts at the three hospitals Riverside Community Hospital, West Hills Medical Center and Los Robles Medical Center are set to expire in July.

—

Steven B. Sample, president of the University of Southern California, was named last week to the board of Intermec Inc., a supplier of mobile computing and wireless network products. The company, formerly called Unova Inc., moved its headquarters from Woodland Hills to Everett, Wash., last year, where the company’s Chairman and Chief Executive Larry Brady lives.

Staff reporter Kate Berry can be reached at (323) 549-5225, ext. 228, or at

[email protected]

.