Biden breaks new ground with science team picks

doi:10.1126/science.371.6528.452

GSTDTAP > 气候变化

DOI	10.1126/science.371.6528.452
	Biden breaks new ground with science team picks
	Jeffrey Mervis
	2021-01-29
发表期刊	Science
出版年	2021
英文摘要	Days before President Joe Biden was sworn in on 20 January, he took steps to fulfill a campaign promise to draw on the best scientific evidence in making policy. He picked a science team of prominent researchers who have extensive knowledge of the federal government. Biden also signaled that science will play an elevated role in his administration by announcing that his science adviser, for the first time, will also hold a seat in the Cabinet. At a 16 January press conference, Biden formally introduced mathematician and geneticist Eric Lander to be both director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and his science adviser. If the Senate confirms Lander as OSTP director, he will be the first life scientist to hold the posts. Biden also released a letter that asks Lander to focus on five grand challenges facing the country, including applying lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic to improve public health, dealing more aggressively with climate change, and creating new industries from emerging technologies such as quantum information science and artificial intelligence. Lander, who will take leave as founding director of the Broad Institute run jointly by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is well-versed in those issues and other policies affecting research. He spent the entirety of the Obama administration as co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), a blue-ribbon group of outside experts, and years earlier helped lead the government's team that sequenced the human genome. Biden also introduced sociologist Alondra Nelson, who will fill the new position of OSTP deputy director for science and society. Nelson's title and appointment, which does not require Senate confirmation, appear to reflect Biden's interest in using the federal research machinery to address social inequality. “The benefits of science and technology remain unevenly distributed across racial, gender, economic, and geographic lines,” Biden wrote in his 15 January letter to Lander. “How can we guarantee that the fruits of science and technology are fully shared across America and among all Americans?” Nelson, a faculty member at the Institute for Advanced Study, has spent her academic career wrestling with the societal impacts of technology on marginalized groups. And although she hasn't been a White House insider, she has been interviewing former OSTP staffers for an upcoming book on former President Barack Obama's major science initiatives, including the Cancer Moonshot that Biden personally led as vice president. Biden also chose Nobel Prize–winning chemist Frances Arnold and pioneering astrophysicist Maria Zuber to lead PCAST. The selection of two women is a first for the panel, which was moribund for most of former President Donald Trump's tenure, but has played a key role in incubating policy initiatives under previous presidents. Some observers are disappointed Biden didn't pick a scientist of color or a woman to lead his science team. But science advocacy groups generally applaud Biden's moves, viewing him as a desperately needed antidote to his predecessor. “These excellent picks … recognize that science is interwoven into all aspects of federal policy and critical to fueling economic growth and job creation,” says Peter McPherson, president of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities. As a Cabinet member, Lander will have an easier time providing Biden and his team with the latest scientific findings, believes physicist Neal Lane, who led OSTP and served as science adviser under former President Bill Clinton. “It's the difference between sitting silently along the back wall of the room and engaging the principals in real time,” Lane says. He attended Cabinet meetings, he says, but “I never remember being asked to comment during the meeting.” Lane also thinks Lander, as a Cabinet member, will have greater leverage in seeking more staff and a larger budget. (OSTP was seen as too lean under his predecessor, Kelvin Droegemeier, who filled a spot that Trump had left vacant for 2 years.) But Harvard's John Holdren, who was Obama's science adviser, doesn't see the need for the elevated status. “It wouldn't have made any difference when I was at OSTP,” says Holdren, a physicist who has specialized in environmental policy. “I had access to the president whenever I needed it.” Nelson's newly created position, meanwhile, “is the best news I've heard this year,” says Dorothy Roberts, a legal scholar and social scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who has interacted with Nelson over the years, and regards her as “a former mentee who has far surpassed me in prominence.” At the press conference, Nelson gave a glimpse of what she expects to tackle. “Science is a social activity,” she said. “When we design and carry out experiments, we are making human choices. It matters who makes those choices. And as a Black woman researcher, I'm keenly aware of who has been missing from the room.” Nelson has backed efforts by Roberts and other scholars to push the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other government agencies to end their use of race as a biological category. But Nelson is no enemy of bench science, Roberts notes. “She is excited by the possibilities that flow from innovation,” Roberts says, “but she understands that it also imbeds inequities.” Nelson's research has also highlighted the scientific contributions of activists working with marginalized groups. Her 2011 book examining community health programs run by the Black Panthers “shattered the myth that Black [people] don't believe science is important,” Roberts says. In his letter to Lander, Biden emphasizes the vital role of science in a thriving democracy and mentions a similar letter former President Franklin Roosevelt sent to his science adviser, Vannevar Bush. Bush's response—a 1945 report titled Science: The Endless Frontier —became the blueprint for how the U.S. government supports academic research. But Bush's vision fell short in one crucial aspect that Biden is trying to address, says physicist Rush Holt, a former member of Congress (and former CEO of AAAS, which publishes Science ). “In the belief that scientific progress ultimately relies on the freedom of scientists to pursue basic research without thought of practical ends, [Bush] promoted a system that has also had the effect of distancing science from the public, and vice versa,” Holt writes in a foreword to a new, 75-year-anniversary edition of the report. That separation has resulted in distrust, as well as policies and practices that have failed “to give citizens some important things they need,” Holt says, including more effective U.S. responses to the pandemic and climate change. Biden has already named teams that are expected to work toward closing that gap as they tackle climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic. It's not yet clear how Lander and Nelson will interact with those efforts and, as Science went to press, Biden had not announced other key science appointees, including the heads of NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. But he is retaining at least one familiar face: Francis Collins will continue his tenure as NIH director, working under his third president since taking the job in 2009.
领域	气候变化 ; 资源环境
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文献类型	期刊论文
条目标识符	http://119.78.100.173/C666/handle/2XK7JSWQ/313983
专题	气候变化资源环境科学
推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714	Jeffrey Mervis. Biden breaks new ground with science team picks[J]. Science,2021.
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MLA	Jeffrey Mervis."Biden breaks new ground with science team picks".Science (2021).