If confirmed, Eric Lander would be the first biologist to run the US Workplace of Science and Know-how Coverage.
US president-elect Joe Biden has chosen embellished geneticist Eric Lander as presidential science adviser and director of the Workplace of Science and Know-how Coverage (OSTP). In what can be a primary for this place, if Lander is confirmed by the US Senate, he’ll function a member of Biden’s cupboard.
Many scientists have long called for the OSTP director to be raised to a cabinet-level place. “Having science elevated to its rightful place within the administration appears to me a really constructive step,” says Harold Varmus, a professor at Weill Cornell Medication in New York and former head of the Nationwide Institutes of Well being. “I feel it marks an important second within the historical past of science within the authorities.”
“It signifies the significance of who can be within the room when choices are being made,” says Roger Pielke Jr., a science coverage knowledgeable on the College of Colorado Boulder.
Lander was a key chief of the Human Genome Undertaking — the race to sequence the human genome, which led to 2003 — and is president and founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He would be the first biologist to run OSTP.
Between 2009 and 2017, he additionally co-chaired the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Know-how (PCAST), an elite panel that advises the US president. Among the many PCAST experiences issued throughout Lander’s tenure have been some coping with pandemics, vaccination, vitality and local weather change.
“This can be a marvelous appointment, it’s nice to see a life scientist operating the OSTP,” says Varmus, who co-chaired PCAST with Lander.
When Biden named Lander to his crew on 15 January, he additionally introduced plenty of different revered scientists to key positions in his administration. “Science will at all times be on the forefront of my administration — and these world-renowned scientists will guarantee all the pieces we do is grounded in science, info, and the reality,” Biden said in a statement.
Caltech bioengineer and Nobel laureate Frances Arnold and MIT geophysicist Maria Zuber will co-chair PCAST below Biden. Alondra Nelson, nominated to be deputy director for science and society at OSTP, is a social scientist on the Institute for Superior Examine in Princeton, New Jersey, who research genetics, race and different societal points.
“These are wonderful appointments, extremely certified and skilled, and nicely grounded in science,” Rita Colwell, a microbiologist on the College of Maryland at School Park, and a former director of the Nationwide Science Basis, wrote to Nature in an e-mail.
Biden additionally introduced that geneticist Francis Collins would keep on as head of the Nationwide Institutes of Well being. Collins was appointed to guide the biomedical analysis company in 2009 by President Barack Obama.
One main query is what components of science coverage Lander and his workplace can be accountable for. Biden has already established a separate, high-level crew to guide the nationwide response to the COVID-19 pandemic, in addition to a crew to drive ahead his local weather agenda. With COVID-19 and local weather tasked to different teams, it stays to be seen what science points OSTP will be capable to take the lead on, says Pielke. “OSTP at all times has a problem in determining what coverage lanes it performs in,” he says.
OSTP sometimes coordinates science coverage and priorities throughout US federal businesses, together with organizing how a lot cash the president will ask Congress to allocate for numerous analysis areas all through the federal government.
Biden has given no less than a touch of what he’d like Lander to work on, nonetheless. In a letter to Lander, Biden outlined 5 key questions he wished OSTP to deal with, together with how to attract classes from the pandemic to tell public well being extra broadly and the way science and expertise breakthroughs might assist handle local weather change.
Initially educated as a mathematician, Lander is a strong determine in US science circles and one of many highest-cited researchers on the earth. As one of many leaders of the epic race to sequence the human genome, he oversaw the massive centre of automated machines that carried out a lot of the sequencing. In 2016, he was criticized for writing a historical past of the gene-editing approach CRISPR that emphasised the function of his Broad colleague Feng Zhang and downplayed the function of Jennifer Doudna of the College California, Berkeley, and Emmanuelle Charpentier of the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens, in Berlin. The Broad Institute was embroiled in a CRISPR patent battle with Berkeley on the time. Charpentier and Doudna went on to win the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his or her pioneering work on CRISPR.
Biden is scheduled to be inaugurated as president on 20 January. Lander’s appointment is simply the fourth time because the OSTP was created, in 1976, {that a} chief has been tapped for it previous to Inauguration Day, says Pielke. The outgoing OSTP director, meteorologist Kelvin Droegemeier, wasn’t appointed by President Donald Trump till more than a year and a half into his administration.
