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President-elect Joe Biden announced on Friday that he had chosen a pioneer in mapping the human genome – the so-called ‘book of life’ – to be his chief science adviser and that he was raising the scientific post to the top. cabinet post level.
Biden has appointed Eric Lander, founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, lead author of the first paper announcing details of the human genome, as director of the Bureau of Science and Technology Policy and science adviser. He is the first scientist in life to hold this post. His predecessor is a meteorologist.
Saying that “science will always be at the forefront of my administration,” Biden said he was strengthening the position of cabinet-level science adviser, a first in White House history.
The president-elect also said he retained the post of National Institutes of Health director Dr Francis Collins, who worked with Lander on the Human Genome Project and appointed two leading women scientists to co-chair the Council of advisers to the president on science and technology.
Frances Arnold, a chemical engineer from the California Institute of Technology which won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and MIT’s vice president for research and geophysics, Maria Zuber will co-chair the external scientific advisory board. Lander held this position during the Obama administration.
Collins, in an emailed statement, called Lander “brilliant, visionary, exceptionally creative and very effective in sucking others up.”
“I predict it will have a profound transformational effect on American science,” Collins said.
The post of director of science and technology policy must be confirmed by the Senate.
Scientific organizations also quickly praised the Lander and the promotion of the scientific post.
“The elevation of the role (of the scientific adviser) to the rank of a member of the president’s cabinet clearly indicates the administration’s intention to involve scientific expertise in every policy discussion,” said Sudip Parikh, director general of the ‘American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s greatest general. scientific society.
Biden has selected Princeton’s Alondra Nelson, a social scientist who studies science, technology and social inequalities, as deputy director of science policy.
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 scientific literature, one of the most among scientists. He has won numerous science awards, including a MacArthur “genius” scholarship and a breakthrough award, and is one of Pope Francis’ scientific advisers.
Lander said in discussions that an opportunity to explain science is his ‘Achilles heel’: “I love teaching and more than that, I firmly believe that no matter what I do in my own scientific career, the biggest impact I can ever have on the world is going to be through my students.
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