Joe Biden’s presence at meetings of the Obama administration’s scientific advisory council sometimes tested his staff’s patience.
It wasn’t that the vice president was unwelcome, of course. It was that Biden’s tendency to linger long after the meetings ended invariably caused scheduling hiccups. From his seat across the table from Eric Lander, then the council’s co-chair, Biden would pepper the group with questions about cancer research, climate change, and everything in between. On several occasions, Biden stayed until his scheduler was “almost tearing her hair out,” recalled John Holdren, Lander’s council co-chair and President Obama’s science adviser.
Now President Biden has brought Lander back in a far more influential role: White House science adviser. The selection, and Biden’s decision to instantly elevate the role to Cabinet status, comes at a pivotal moment for the future of American science, and underscores the new administration’s pledge to place science at the center of government. Biden has set lofty expectations, introducing Lander as a researcher whose work “has changed the course of human history” and pledging that his science staff “will help restore your faith in America’s place on the frontier of science and discovery and hope.”
As a key player in the Human Genome Project and the founding director of the Broad Institute, Lander is no stranger to herculean tasks. Nor is he a stranger to Washington, where his penchant for rubbing elbows has earned him connections to high-level government scientists, members of Congress, and even Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, who once played charades in the Lander family living room.
Lander is described by friends and associates as an engaging, uber-talented science communicator who does not suffer fools, with an ability to both envision and execute complex and ambitious scientific projects. He is not, however, without a healthy ego, and has had his share of controversy. And he won’t be content to serve as scientific window dressing — if Lander has an opinion, he will almost certainly voice it.
“He is able to explain complex science and technology issues in ways that people immediately understand, in ways that resonate,” Holdren said. “Obama loved him, and Biden loved him. And so in my judgment, Eric Lander was, in many respects, the obvious choice.”
Lander has his work cut out for him.
Nearly a half-million Americans are dead from a pandemic, and swaths of the country have rejected basic, science-backed measures like wearing masks. Climate change is accelerating. Government science agencies are confronted with a crisis in public confidence. A host of other issues, including the militarization of space, Chinese threats to U.S.-backed research, the proliferation of self-driving cars, and genetic data privacy, will also require the White House’s attention.
It is clear, already, that Biden expects Lander to play an active role addressing each. In an open letter modeled on President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1941 challenge to his own science adviser to leverage science for the benefit of the county’s health, safety, and prosperity, Biden assigned Lander a similarly formidable task: to “refresh and reinvigorate our national science and technology strategy to set us on a strong course for the next 75 years.”
While the Senate hasn’t yet confirmed Lander to lead the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, he began on Jan. 25 as Biden’s science adviser, a role that does not require Senate approval.
The foundation of Lander’s team is already in place. Alondra Nelson, previously the president of the Social Science Research Council, has been installed as Lander’s deputy. Kei Koizumi, an expert in government science agency budgets and an Obama administration OSTP veteran, is the office’s chief of staff.
Amid a pandemic and a redoubled effort to confront racism in health care, science, and society at large, the selection of a biologist and social scientist to steer the White House’s science strategy is clearly purposeful.
As one of the world’s leading genomics researchers, Lander is also uniquely suited to help address one of the country’s biggest pandemic-response shortcomings: a lack of capacity for viral genome sequencing, which has prevented the U.S. from detecting new variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus before they begin spreading in earnest.
“If you look at presidential science advisers over time, in general, they are physicists,” said Marjory Blumenthal, a RAND Corporation researcher who served as executive director of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology during the Obama administration. “At this moment, when the country and the world are dealing with a pandemic, bringing in somebody who understands the life sciences underscores the need to really engage science in those discussions.”
“He is able to explain complex science and technology issues in ways that people immediately understand, in ways that resonate.”
JOHN HOLDREN, PRESIDENT OBAMA’S SCIENCE ADVISER
Lander is hardly the picture of a scientist alone at his lab bench.
He enjoys friendships with senators, and has hosted at least one Supreme Court justice in his Cambridge, Mass., living room. Despite his pioneering work in genomics, he is deeply engaged in issues ranging from criminal justice to mathematics, his original academic discipline. As of 2020, he held a seat on a scientific council that reports directly to the pope.
His connections in academia run deep, too. Lander, 63, has worked for decades with many of the world’s leading scientists, including several who have played key government roles. He’s a longtime friend of Harold Varmus, the former director of the National Institutes of Health. He has known the NIH’s current director, Francis Collins, for decades, dating back to Lander’s time leading the Whitehead Institute, a leading genomic research center, and Collins’ time directing the U.S. government component of the Human Genome Project.
But Lander may provide a more political counterpoint to the nonpartisan role that Collins, known for winning over progressive Democrats and conservative Republicans alike, has played in D.C. since he was appointed NIH director in 2009.
“Francis is the guitar-playing, motorcycle-riding, folksy guy who can talk to evangelical Republicans as well as Democrats,” said Robert Cook-Deegan, an Arizona State science policy professor and the founding director for Genome Ethics, Law & Policy in Duke’s Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy. “I don’t think [Lander] has that kind of political flexibility.”
Lander, however, has never sought to play both sides of the aisle. He is a reliable Democrat, and has donated thousands to Biden and the two Massachusetts senators, Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren (he first donated to Warren’s 2020 presidential campaign six months before he donated to Biden’s). His warm relations with Massachusetts politicians may also help Lander’s standing with Biden’s special envoy on climate change: the former senator and presidential candidate John Kerry.
He enjoys a friendly rapport with Warren, in particular, and one of his adult sons worked for her 2020 presidential campaign.
“He’s a social being, and has the opportunity because of his position in life to meet a lot of interesting people in politics,” said Varmus, who briefly co-chaired PCAST with Lander in 2009 and sits on the Broad Institute’s board. “Elizabeth Warren is an engaging person, they like each other, and why shouldn’t they see each other? He’s going to be working with people he knows well, and that’s an advantage.”
Lander’s connections in politics and law extend beyond Congress. He has long consulted lawyers and judges about forensic science and the role DNA samples play in the criminal justice system. As a former board member of the Innocence Project, Lander’s appointment has sparked hopes of a reinvigorated debate over the use of the sometimes-shoddy forensic science that often passes for irrefutable evidence in American courtrooms.
Years earlier, Breyer had relied heavily on the scientist’s input for one of the most consequential scientific court rulings in history. In 2013, Lander submitted a brief to the Supreme Court in a historic case that determined the right to patent naturally occurring genes. Though his submission was one of dozens, the court fixated on it throughout the oral arguments, beginning with a mid-hearing Breyer reference to “the Lander brief.”
“I was sitting in the room, and I was blown away, because six of the justices quoted his brief,” Cook-Deegan said. “That doesn’t just happen by itself.” (In reality, it was only three — Breyer, Samuel Alito, and the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg — though Lander’s brief served as a factual basis for much of the court’s debate.)
The Supreme Court, eventually, ruled as Lander suggested it should, issuing a landmark 9-0 decision that naturally occurring genes cannot be patented.
Lander’s success has not earned him universal popularity, and his ascendance to the White House has not come without controversy.
In recent years, Lander has committed a number of gaffes that his critics say exemplify a certain arrogance and feed into science’s history of mistreating researchers who are women or people of color. While some attacks on Lander can likely be chalked up to professional jealousy, other missteps have provided a release valve for pent-up frustration over what some scientists view as his sharp elbows, and his ability to soak up attention and funding for himself, the Broad Institute, and his scientific approach.
In 2018, for example, Lander toasted James Watson for his 90th birthday. Watson co-discovered DNA’s double helix and is one of the world’s most celebrated scientists, but he has long been criticized for minimizing the role Rosalind Franklin played in the seminal research; he also has a history of racist and sexist comments. Other researchers — including Maria Zuber, the geophysicist who will co-chair Biden’s scientific advisory council — have also feted Watson in recent years as science, like other fields, has grappled with how to recognize historic work from people with racist, sexist, or otherwise prejudiced legacies. After immense backlash, Lander apologized for toasting Watson, saying he shouldn’t have done so, and that he had personally been subjected to Watson’s anti-Semitism.
In 2016, Lander earned the distinctly Washington dishonor of a “gate” — in this case, “Landergate,” a controversy that centered on his perceived failure to sufficiently credit other scientists, especially his female competitors. In an essay titled “The Heroes of CRISPR,” Lander described key discoveries that led to CRISPR being used as a genome-editing tool. His lengthy review, critics alleged, failed to give sufficient credit to the work of Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, with whom the Broad Institute has long been entangled in a legal battle over certain CRISPR patents. Doudna and Lander, however, may have buried the hatchet: They recently co-authored a perspective piece about progress in genomic medicine. (That piece’s lead author: NIH Director Francis Collins.)
In a recent Scientific American op-ed, the advocacy group 500 Women Scientists panned Lander’s appointment, arguing it symbolizes complacency with a science world whose gatekeepers are largely white and male, and often either actively or passively discriminatory to researchers who are women or people of color.
“His nomination does not fill us with hope that he will shepherd the kind of transformation in science we need if we are to ensure science delivers equity and justice for all,” the group wrote.
Many of his detractors, however, still credit his ability to fundraise, gin up enthusiasm for new research, and oversee major endeavors, traits that could help to further elevate science within an administration already pushing for science to be elevated.
“I have mixed feelings,” Michael Eisen, a UC Berkeley biologist who is arguably Lander’s biggest critic, wrote on Twitter after Biden announced the appointment. “Lander is serially dishonest and chronically full of s**t. But he is really good at organizing big projects (probably the most important aspect of the job right now) and advocating for science.”
Biden’s early science picks are clearly intended to demonstrate a new direction for the White House’s science efforts.
Selecting Lander elevates a life scientist amid a pandemic, showcasing a broader pivot from Cold War-era scientific concerns. Nelson, who Lander picked as his deputy, represents a historic win for the social science world, though perhaps not coincidentally, many of her interests align closely with Lander’s: She’s the author of an award-winning book on the implications that genomics and DNA sequencing hold for race and reparations.
The selection of a social scientist, and Nelson in particular, is “long overdue and very creative,” said Joanne Padrón Carney, the chief government relations officer for the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “She’s an exceptional choice. We tend to always consider the social sciences and the behavioral sciences as an afterthought, to a certain extent, and it’s really critical to ensure that those sciences have a place at the table.”
Former OSTP aides view Lander’s selection to Cabinet status as both a continuation and expansion of the Obama administration’s active science policy apparatus. It continues a string of symbolic moves aimed at boosting the office’s profile: In 2009, for example, Obama moved OSTP back from the New Executive Office Building, an across-the-street annex, to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, a stone’s throw from the West Wing. Awarding the science adviser a Cabinet seat is seen as one-upping that move.
Practically, too, it allows the past administration’s science advisers to pick up where they left off. Under Lander’s leadership, PCAST, the advisory committee, authored dozens of reports during the eight-year presidency. Salient-seeming topics, in retrospect, include vaccine production during a pandemic, drug discovery, and bioterrorism. (President Trump did not appoint a science adviser until July 2018, and waited nearly three years to re-establish PCAST. The panel authored just one report during Trump’s term, though the adviser, Kelvin Droegemeier, argued reports are a poor metric for assessing the White House science staff’s performance.)
It seems clear Biden will bestow Lander with immense sway over the administration’s broader scientific operation: Nelson’s selection, and those of PCAST co-chairs Zuber and Frances Arnold, were largely Lander’s choice.
But it remains to be seen whether the moves are PR-driven or whether they represent a true increase in science aides’ influence with the president. Holdren, after all, attended every Obama administration Cabinet meeting, and said in an interview he never had trouble getting Cabinet secretaries to return his calls. Practically speaking, Lander’s promotion merely moves him from the outer ring of chairs to the seats at the Cabinet Room table itself.
The only thing Lander lacks, in effect, is a budget worth billions of dollars. While he is nominally the government’s highest-ranking scientist, he will not run the NIH or the National Science Foundation, or play a direct role in Cabinet branches that oversee huge scientific research operations, like the Pentagon, Department of Energy, or Department of Commerce.
But Lander came to Washington for a fundamentally different role, argued Carney, the AAAS government relations officer.
“This isn’t about money,” she said. “It’s about ensuring that science is used in the decision-making process.”
Still, Carney and others acknowledged that in the Biden administration’s early days, scientific symbolism may carry more weight than hard-to-parse policy initiatives. For now, it appears Biden’s biggest scientific goal is not only to recenter science in his pandemic response, but also to broadcast that science will drive nearly every administration decision.
So far, however, Biden and his science office have stayed mum on whether they’ll bring back perhaps the most enduring symbol of the Obama era’s scientific focus: the White House Science Fair.
But according to current and former White House aides, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, all signs point to yes.
https://www.statnews.com/2021/02/01/eric-lander-connected-controversial-biden-pick/
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