On her Lab Notes blog, Sharon Begley runs down the reaction from the scientific community over reports that Barack Obama will chose a prominent physicist as his science adviser:
That sigh of relief emanating from laboratories around the world is the sound of scientists reacting to reports that president-elect Obama will name physicist John Holdren
his science adviser. Holdren has a resume longer than your arm (he is
Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy and Director of
the Program on Science, Technology, and Public Policy at Harvard's
Kennedy School of Government, President and Director of the Woods Hole
Research Center, Professor of Environmental Science and Policy in
Harvard’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, and
former president, and chairman of the board of American Association for
the Advancement of Science), but what he will bring to the table is an
unflinching commitment to evidence-based policy making.
That, of course, has been in short supply over the last 8 years, as I detailed in Newsweek's recent election issue.
Whether it was programs on sex education (abstinence only! who cares if
that doesn't reduce teen pregnancy, STDs or achieve other outcomes
you'd think would be one of the purposes of sex ed), or policies on
endangered species or climate change or stem cells or . . . (the list
goes on), the Bush Administration seemed to have never met a fact it
wasn't perfectly content to dismiss.
Climate change is arguably the most egregious example, and on this
issue Holdren has been a leading voice for reducing greenhouse gas
emissions as well as adapting to the inevitable changes already locked
into the climate system. Among the themes he has reiterated in public
as well as private:
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