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President-Elect Obama names Holdren, Varmus, Lander and Lubchenco to Key Scientific Posts

Colleagues,

As reported in Scientific American...President-elect Barack Obama recently named more top science advisors. John Holdren, a 64-year-old physicist and environmental policy professor at Harvard, will be his chief science adviser, as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology. Obama also named chairs of the Presidential Council of Advisers on Science and Technology: Nobel Prize winner Harold Varmus and biologist Eric Lander, who heads the Broad Institute, a Harvard-M.I.T. collaborative for genomics research.

Varmus, who turned 69 last week, shared the 1989 Nobel for the discovery of viral genes that cause cancer and has had Obama's ear on science. He is the president of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. He has also been a staunch supporter of the open access movement, which gives the public access to published research, and has called for a global science corps, similar to the Peace Corps, in which scientists would spend time in the developing world. From 1993 until 2000, Varmus was director of the National Institutes of Health.

Lander, 51, was a major player in the Human Genome Project. Both he and Varmus support increased funding for scientific research.

Jane Lubchenco, a professor of marine biology at Oregon State University, will direct the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Lubchenco, 61, has been an outspoken critic of NOAA, saying they do not do enough to prevent overfishing.

Taken together with Obama's choice of Nobel Laureate Steven Chu as secretary of energy, the appointments suggest that Obama's stance on climate change will be significantly different from that of his predecessor....

Read on at: http://www.sciam.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=obama-names-holdren-lubchenko-varmu-2008-12-21

ENJOY!

CC

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