President-elect Joe Biden introduced members of his scientific team on Saturday. He says “science will always be at the forefront of my administration” and elevates the position of scientific advisor to cabinet level, first the White House.
Biden said scientists “will make sure everything we do is grounded in science, facts and truth.”
A pioneer in human genome mapping – the “book of life” – is online to be director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and a science advisor. Eric Lander is the founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and was the lead author of the first article announcing the details of the human genome. He would be the first scientist in life to have this job in the White House. His predecessor is a meteorologist.
In accepting his candidacy, 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 is so diverse. “No one can surpass America in that regard,” Lander said. “But we need to make sure not only that everyone has a seat at the table, but a place on the lab bench.”
Princeton Dr. Alondra Nelson, whom Mr. Biden has chosen to be deputy head of science policy, also stressed the importance of expanding opportunities in the STEM fields. “As a researcher of black women, I am very aware of who is missing in 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 scientific advisory board. Lander held this position during the Obama administration. Zuber said he hopes to “restore confidence in science and pursue advances that benefit all people.”
The president-elect also said Friday that he retains 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 Science and Technology Advisory Board.
Collins, in an email statement, called Lander “brilliant, visionary, exceptionally creative and highly effective at aspiring to others.”
“I anticipate it will have a profound transformative effect on American science,” Collins said.
Working as director of science and technology policy requires Senate confirmation.
Scientific organizations were also quick to praise Lander and the promotion of the science site.
“Elevating the role (scientific advisor) to the president’s cabinet member clearly indicates the administration’s intention to involve scientific expertise in every policy discussion,” said Sudip Parikh, executive director of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society.
Lander, also a mathematician, is a professor of biology at Harvard and MIT and his work has been cited nearly half a million times in scientific literature, one of the most scientific. He has won numerous scientific awards, including a MacArthur “genius” scholarship and an advanced award, and is one of Pope Francis’ scientific advisers.
Lander has said in conversations that the 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 most important impact I could ever have in the world will go through my students. “
Vice President-elect Kamala Harris said she was especially excited about the administration’s push to elevate science because of its education. Harris said his mother, an endocrinologist, lived by the scientific method, and taught his daughters that “it’s not a failure” to reevaluate a hypothesis “when the facts don’t align.”
“President-elect Biden and I will not only listen to science, but we will invest in it.”