Obama's science team

While I was in New Zealand, Obama picked a very distinguished coterie of scientists to advise him.

Stephen Chu (nominee for Secretary of Energy) has been director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 2004. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics (1997) for developing methods to trap atoms and cool them with lasers (press release from Nobelprize.org). As director of LBL Chu oversees more than 4000 employees. He brings both scientific excellence and significant administrative experience as a leader of one of the national laboratories supported by the Department of Energy through its Office of Science. He has been a forceful advocate for solutions to global warming and for developing carbon-neutral renewable sources of energy.
 
John Holdren (named Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Co-Chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology) is Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy and Director of the Science, Technology and Public Policy Program at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs in the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. From 2005 to 2008 he served as President-Elect, President, and Chair of the Board for the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In his Presidential Address earlier this year Holdren identified five challenges "in which science and technology ... have particularly important roles to play":

• Meeting the basic needs of the poor;
• Managing the competition for the land, water, and terrestrial biota of the planet;
• Maintaining the integrity of the oceans;
• Mastering the energy-economy-environment dilemma; and
• Moving toward a nuclear weapon-free world.

Holdren has had a distinguished career as an environmental scientist, specializing in energy and resources and founding the Energy and Resources Group at UC Berkeley while he was on the faculty there.¹

Harold Varmus and Eric Lander will co-chair PCAST with Holdren. Varmus is President of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, served as Director of the National Institutes of Health from 1993 to 1999, and received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1989 for work with Michael Bishop on oncogenes. Lander is Founding Director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and, as his web page at MIT says, "one of the driving forces behind today's revolution in genomics."

Jane Lubchenco (nominee for administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) is Past-President of the International Council for Science and a former President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She has a long and distinguished career in marine biology and ecology and for many years has led a large interdisciplinary team seeking to understand the marine ecosystem off the west coast of the United States.

And as encouraging as his choices are, his words about them in his radio address on 20 December are even more encouraging:²

The truth is that promoting science isn't just about providing resources--it's about protecting free and open inquiry. It's about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology. It's about listening to what our scientists have to say, even when it's inconvenient--especially when it's inconvenient. Because the highest purpose of science is the search for knowledge, truth and a greater understanding of the world around us. That will be my goal as President of the United States--and I could not have a better team to guide me in this work.