President-elect Joe Biden introduced members of his scientific team on Saturday. He says that “science will always be at the head of my administration” and raises the position of scientific advisor to the Cabinet – first to the White House.
Biden said scientists “will make sure that everything we do is based on science, facts and truth.”
A pioneer in the mapping of the human genome – the “book of life” – is in turn the director of the Office for Science and Technology Policy and advisor in the field of science. Eric Lander is the founding director of the Broad Institute at 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 at the White House. His predecessor is a meteorologist.
Accepting his nomination, Lander said that “the opportunities we have and the challenges we face are greater than ever,” but stressed that “no nation is better equipped” to meet these challenges, because no nation it is not as diverse. “No one can lead America in this regard,” Lander said. “But we need to make sure not only that everyone has a seat at the table, but a seat at the lab bench.”
Dr. Alondra Nelson of Princeton, whom Mr. Biden chose to be Deputy Chief of Science Policy, also stressed the importance of expanding opportunities in STEM areas. “As a black woman researcher, I am very aware of who is missing from these rooms,” said Nelson, a social scientist who studies science, technology and social inequality.
Frances Arnold, a chemical engineer at the California Institute of Technology, who won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and MIT’s vice president of research and geophysics, Maria Zuber, will chair the external advisory board. Lander held this position during the Obama administration. Zuber said he hopes to “restore confidence in science and pursue discoveries that benefit all people.”
The president-elect also said on Friday that he is detaining the director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins, who worked with Lander on the human genome project. Biden also appoints two prominent women scientists to co-chair the President’s Advisory Board for Science and Technology.
Collins, in an e-mail statement, called Lander “brilliant, visionary, exceptionally creative and extremely effective in aspiring others.”
“I predict it will have a profound transformative effect on American science,” Collins said.
The job as director of science and technology policy requires Senate confirmation.
Scientific organizations also rushed to praise Lander and promote the scientific position.
“Raising the role (scientific advisor) as a member of the President’s Office clearly indicates the administration’s intention to involve scientific expertise in every political discussion,” said Sudip Parikh, executive director of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. world 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 popular among scientists. He has won numerous scientific awards, including a MacArthur “genius” scholarship and a discovery award, and is one of Pope Francis’ scientific advisers.
Lander said in discussions that an opportunity to explain science is “Achilles’ heel”: “I like teaching and, moreover, I strongly believe that, no matter what I do in my own scientific career, the most important impact that I could have ever had in the world will be through my students. “
Elected Vice President Kamala Harris said she was particularly pleased with the administration’s effort to raise science through its education. Harris said her mother, an endocrinologist, lived by the scientific method, teaching her daughters to “fail” to reevaluate a hypothesis “when the facts don’t align.”
“President-elect Biden and I will not only listen to science, but invest in it.”