Last month, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick upstaged the annual BIO extravaganza by announcing a plan to spend $1 billion on biomedical research over 10 years. But some key questions remain - Will the state provide backing? And who gets the money?

Tomorrow morning, about 70 people will gather at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge to sort this out, The Boston Globe reports. Among them will be reps from Harvard, University of Massachusetts, Genzyme, Vertex Pharmaceuticals and officials from hospitals and nonprofits. And this raises another question - who will decide who gets all that money?

Steve Poftak of the conservative Pioneer Institute, a public policy think tank, says that letting biotech leaders suggest ways to give cash to their own industry raises potential conflicts of interest. “This is a very specialized area in which you need a lot of expertise, but a lot of the people with expertise stand to be beneficiaries,” he tells the paper. “You have to be careful that you don’t get a situation where the people making the policy become the recipients of the program.”

Dan O’Connell, the guv’s housing and economic development secretary, whose office is co-hosting the breakfast, tells the Globe that the breadth of invitees would help prevent any one group, such as teaching hospitals or venture capitalists, from wielding undue influence.

Really? Surely, Dan isn’t naive. Better to hunt and dig for qualified people to serve on an independent board - in other words, people few, if any, direct ties to a potential beneficiary. Remember, B is for Boston, biotech and also boondoggle.