President-elect Joe Biden introduced his science team members on Saturday. He says that “science will always be at the forefront of my administration” and is elevating the position of scientific consultant at cabinet level – first, the White House.
Biden said that scientists “will ensure that everything we do is based on science, facts and truth”.
A pioneer in mapping the human genome – the “book of life” – is in the queue to be director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and a science consultant. Eric Lander is the founding director of the Broad Institute at MIT and Harvard and was the lead author of the first article announcing the details of the human genome. He would be the first life scientist to get that job at the White House. His predecessor is a meteorologist.
In 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 is so diverse. “No one can beat America in that respect,” said Lander. “But we have to make sure not only that everyone has a seat at the table, but a place on the lab bench.”
Dr. Alondra Nelson de Princeton, whom Biden chose to be the deputy head of scientific policy, also emphasized the importance of expanding opportunities in the areas of STEM. “As a black researcher, I am fully aware of who is missing from these rooms,” said Nelson, a social scientist who studies science, technology and social inequality, about his career.
Frances Arnold, a chemical engineer at the California Institute of Technology who won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and MIT vice president of research and professor of geophysics, Maria Zuber, will lead the external science advisory board. Lander held that position during the Obama administration. Zuber said he hopes to “restore confidence in science and pursue discoveries that benefit everyone.”
The president-elect also said on Friday that he is hiring the director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins, who worked with Lander on the human genome project. Biden is also appointing two prominent scientists to co-chair the President’s Council of Science and Technology Advisers.
Collins, in an e-mailed statement, called Lander “brilliant, visionary, exceptionally creative and highly effective in aspiring to others.”
“I predict that it will have a profound transformative effect on American science,” said Collins.
The position of director of scientific and technological policy requires confirmation by the Senate.
Scientific organizations also praised Lander and the promotion of the science post.
“Raising the role (of scientific adviser) to a member of the President’s Cabinet clearly signals the government’s intention to involve scientific knowledge in all political discussions,” said Sudip Parikh, executive director of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the greatest general the world’s scientific society.
Lander, also a mathematician, is a professor of biology at Harvard and MIT and his work has been cited almost half a million times in scientific literature, one of the most cited among scientists. He has won several scientific awards, including a MacArthur “genius” grant and a Revelation Award, and is one of Pope Francis’ scientific advisers.
Lander said in lectures 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 scientific career, the most important impact I could never in the world will it be through my students. “
Vice President-elect Kamala Harris said she was particularly excited about government pressure to elevate science due to her education. Harris said his mother, an endocrinologist, lived by the scientific method, teaching his daughters that “it is not a failure” to reevaluate a hypothesis “when the facts do not align”.
“President-elect Biden and I will not just listen to science, we will invest in it.”