Saturday, December 20, 2008

Obama offers science vision

In his radio address, Barack Obama said, “Today, more than ever before, science holds the key to our survival as a planet and our security and prosperity as a nation. It’s time we once again put science at the top of our agenda and worked to restore America’s place as the world leader in science and technology.”

As expected, John Holdren was named presidential science advisor today and Jane Lubchenco as head of NOAA. In addition, Harold Varmus and Eric Lander were named co-chairs of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

Varmus is a 1989 Nobel laureate in medicine, former director of NIH, and president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Lander is the Director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; the first author of the Human Genome Project, and one of TIME's 100 most influential people of our time (2004).

The video is of president-elect Obama's Saturday radio address.