Eric Lander addresses controversies at hearing

Abstract

US president Joe Biden’s decision to elevate the role of presidential science adviser to cabinet level fulfills his campaign promise to return science to a place of prominence in government. In many ways, his choice of Eric Lander to fill that position and lead the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is an obvious one. Lander, a mathematician and geneticist at Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, earned fame for his role in the international Human Genome Project. He is lauded for his ability to make science both interesting and understandable, and he cochaired the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) under former president Barack Obama. But in recent years, critics have charged that Lander has been dismissive of or insensitive to women and people of color, most notably by praising the contributions of a male colleague while minimizing the Nobel Prize–winning CRISPR genome-editing