In a dig at the outgoing Trump administration, President-elect Joe Biden says his team of scientific advisers will lead with "science and truth. We believe in both."
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Biden is elevating the position of science advisor to Cabinet level, a White House first, and said that Eric Lander, who is in line to be director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, is "one of the most brilliant guys I know."
Lander is the founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and was the lead author of the first paper announcing the details of the human genome. He would be the first life scientist to have that White House job. His predecessor is a meteorologist.
The president-elect is retaining the director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins, who worked with Lander on the human genome project.
Collins, in an email statement, called Lander "brilliant, visionary, exceptionally creative and highly effective in aspiring others."
"I predict he will have a profound transformational effect on American science," Collins said.
Lander said Biden has tasked his advisers and "the whole scientific community and the American public" to "rise to this moment."
Biden also named two prominent female scientists to co-chair the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
Frances Arnold, a California Institute of Technology chemical engineer who won the 2018 Nobel Prize in chemistry, and MIT vice president for research and geophysics professor Maria Zuber will lead the outside science advisory council.
Science organisations were also quick to praise the promotion of the science post to Cabinet level.
Elevating the position "clearly signals the administration's intent to involve scientific expertise in every policy discussion," said Sudip Parikh, chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world's largest general scientific society.
Biden picked Princeton's Alondra Nelson, a social scientist who studies science, technology and social inequality, as deputy science policy chief.
Vice President-elect Kamala Harris used the rollout of the science team to recall her late mother, a cancer researcher whom she credited with teaching her to think critically.
"The science behind climate change is not a hoax. The science behind the virus is not partisan," Harris said. "The same laws apply, the same evidence holds true regardless of whether or not you accept them."
Australian Associated Press