President-elect Joe Biden introduced members of his science team on Saturday. He says that “science will always be at the forefront of my administration,” and elevates the position of science adviser to cabinet level – a White House first.
Biden said the scientists “will make sure that everything we do is based on science, facts and truth.”
A pioneer in human genome mapping – the “book of life” – is about to become director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and a science advisor. Eric Lander is the founder and director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and was the lead author of the first paper announcing the details of the human genome. He would be the first life scientist to have that job in the White House. Its predecessor is a meteorologist.
Accepting his nomination, Lander said “the opportunities we have and the challenges we face are greater than ever before,” but stressed that “no country is better equipped” to meet these challenges, as no only country is so diverse. “No one can outperform America in that regard,” Lander said. “But we have to ensure that not only everyone is seated at the table, but also on the lab bench.”
Dr. Princeton’s Alondra Nelson, who has been selected by Mr. Biden as the deputy head of science policy, also stressed the importance of expanding the opportunities in the STEM fields. “As a black researcher, I am well aware of who is missing from these rooms,” said Nelson, a social scientist who studies science, technology and social inequality, of her career.
Frances Arnold, a chemical engineer from the California Institute of Technology who won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and MIT vice president for research and geophysics, Professor Maria Zuber, will lead the external scientific advisory board. Lander held that position during the Obama administration. Zuber said she hopes to “restore confidence in science and pursue breakthroughs that benefit all people.”
The president-elect also said on Friday that he was the director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins, who worked with Lander on the human genome project. Biden also names two prominent women scientists who co-chair the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
Collins called Lander in an email statement “brilliant, visionary, extraordinarily creative, and very effective in the pursuit of others.”
“I predict it will have a profound transformational effect on American science,” said Collins.
The position of director of science and technology policy requires confirmation by the Senate.
Science organizations were also quick to praise Lander and the promotion of the science post.
“The elevation of the role of (the science adviser) to a member of the president’s cabinet clearly indicates the government’s intention to include scientific expertise in every policy discussion,” said Sudip Parikh, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s greatest general. scientific society.
Lander, also a mathematician, is a professor of biology at both Harvard and MIT, and his work has been cited nearly half a million times in the scientific literature, one of the most among scientists. He has won numerous science awards, including a MacArthur “genius” fellowship and a Breakthrough Prize, and is one of Pope Francis’s scientific advisors.
Lander has said in conversations that an opportunity to explain science is its’ Achilles heel ‘:’ I love teaching and more than that, I firmly believe that whatever I do in my own scientific that I could ever have in the world will be through my students. “
Vice President-elect Kamala Harris said that because of her upbringing, she was especially excited about the government’s push to improve science. Harris said her mother, an endocrinologist, lived by the scientific method and taught her daughters that it is “no failure” to reevaluate a hypothesis “when the facts are wrong.”
“President-elect Biden and I will not only listen to science, we will invest in it.”