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Joe Biden names top geneticist Eric Lander as science adviser
From Nature News: Joe Biden names top geneticist Eric Lander as science adviser Nidhi Subbaraman & Alexandra Witze Nature News January 16, 2021.
It should be open sourced.
Some excerpts:
US president-elect Joe Biden has chosen the decorated geneticist Eric Lander as his presidential science adviser and the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). If Lander’s appointment is confirmed by the US Senate, he will serve as a member of Biden’s cabinet — a first for this position.
Many scientists have long called for the OSTP director to be raised to a cabinet-level position. “Having science elevated to its rightful place in the administration seems to me a very positive step,” says Harold Varmus, a cancer researcher at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City and a former head of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). “I think it marks a very important moment in the history of science in the government.”
“It signifies the importance of who will be in the room when decisions are being made,” says Roger Pielke Jr, who studies science policy at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Lander was a key figure in the Human Genome Project — the race to sequence the human genome, which ended in 2003 — and is the president and founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He will be the first biologist to run the OSTP.
Between 2009 and 2017, he co-chaired the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), an elite panel that advises the US president. Among the PCAST reports issued during Lander’s tenure were some dealing with energy, climate change and vaccine response in the face of pandemic influenza...
… Nobel laureate Frances Arnold, a bioengineer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and Maria Zuber, a geophysicist at MIT, will co-chair PCAST under Biden. Alondra Nelson, nominated to be deputy director for science and society at the OSTP, is a social scientist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who studies genetics, race and other societal issues.
“These are excellent appointments, highly qualified and experienced, and well grounded in science,” Rita Colwell, a microbiologist at the University of Maryland at College Park and a former director of the US National Science Foundation, wrote to Nature in an e-mail...
Many scientists have long called for the OSTP director to be raised to a cabinet-level position. “Having science elevated to its rightful place in the administration seems to me a very positive step,” says Harold Varmus, a cancer researcher at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City and a former head of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). “I think it marks a very important moment in the history of science in the government.”
“It signifies the importance of who will be in the room when decisions are being made,” says Roger Pielke Jr, who studies science policy at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Lander was a key figure in the Human Genome Project — the race to sequence the human genome, which ended in 2003 — and is the president and founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He will be the first biologist to run the OSTP.
Between 2009 and 2017, he co-chaired the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), an elite panel that advises the US president. Among the PCAST reports issued during Lander’s tenure were some dealing with energy, climate change and vaccine response in the face of pandemic influenza...
… Nobel laureate Frances Arnold, a bioengineer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and Maria Zuber, a geophysicist at MIT, will co-chair PCAST under Biden. Alondra Nelson, nominated to be deputy director for science and society at the OSTP, is a social scientist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who studies genetics, race and other societal issues.
“These are excellent appointments, highly qualified and experienced, and well grounded in science,” Rita Colwell, a microbiologist at the University of Maryland at College Park and a former director of the US National Science Foundation, wrote to Nature in an e-mail...
Tomorrow...tomorrow...tomorrow...it's only 14 hours away...
