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President-elect Barack Obama named four top science advisors in his radio address yesterday. As reported widely last week, John Holdren will be his chief science adviser, as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology, and Jane Lubchenco, a professor of marine biology at Oregon State University, will direct the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Lubchenco, 61, will be the first woman to hold the NOAA post if she is confirmed by the Senate. As the Washington Post noted last week, she has been an outspoken critic of NOAA, saying they do not do enough to prevent overfishing. Holdren advised Obama during the presidential campaign and directs of the program on science, technology, and public policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Taken together with Obama's choice of Steven Chu as secretary of energy, the appointments suggest that Obama's stance on climate change will be significantly different from that of his predecessor.

Obama also named the chairs of the Presidential Council of Advisers on Science and Technology yesterday: Nobel Prize winner Harold Varmus and MIT genome biologist Eric Lander.

Varmus, who turned 69 last week, shared the 1989 Nobel for the discovery of viral genes that cause cancer and has had Obama's ear on science. He is the president of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. He has also been a staunch supporter of the open access movement, which gives the public access to published research, and has called for a global science corps, similar to the Peace Corps, in which scientists would spend time in the developing world.

From 1993 until 2000, Varmus was director of the National Institutes of Health, where he loosened conflict of interest rules to make it easier for the agency to attract top scientists, a move that some say paved the way for later significant breaches in which some NIH scientists earned hundreds of thousands of dollars from drug companies. Following investigations in 2003 by the Los Angeles Times and members of Congress into such deals, Varmus later backed limiting the deals such scientists could make.

Lander, 51, was a major player in the Human Genome Project. Both he and Varmus support increased funding for scientific research. (Listen to Varmus describe his feelings on the Bush administration's science policies in a 2006 episode of Science Talk.)

Photo of Jane Lubchenco courtesy of the Obama-Biden Transition Project

1 Comments

1. 1. Gosha 11:45 AM 12/22/08

   For Jane Lubchenco,
   
   From: Russia, 129085, Moscow, r. Mira 91 / 3, sq. 433 Vinogradov Juriy.
   Email: vettov@gmail.com About the author: http://news.rosprom.org/news.php?id=5617
   The telephone 7- 495-687-1056 SKUPE: // Vinogradovje
   
   Dear madam Jane Lubchenco!
   At first - substantiation of the offer:
   The known contradiction works.
   There is a problem of preservation of life on the Earth and she is discussed by the conducting scientists in this area.
   It is logical to consider, that the problem of preservation of life on the Earth has appeared because she can not be decided by these known scientists. The conferences, acting from a tribune, the scientists do not correspond I call of time. Them learned for a long time and not correctly!
   On the other hand, on a tribune of a conference on ecology the persons can not rise which know as it is possible to decide a problem.
   They know the decision because work in other fields of knowledge or on a joint of several sciences.
   
   In particular, the author of these lines (on education) radioengineer, radio physics, but was compelled to understand in heat to physics and warmly to power.
   In result the opening allowing to not burn fuel at reception of mechanical job and an electrical current has appeared.
   The application of this opening would relieve mankind of a problem with deficiency of energy and fresh water.
   How about it to inform the world?
   The world listens to those who by the incompetence has created these problems!
   
   Wishing can arrive and see at the working isothermal converter of heat of an environment in a constant electrical current.
   Wishing can familiarize with accounts of piston isothermal converters of heat in mechanical job.
   Specific weight of units, which do not require for job of fuel - no more than 1:3/kw, but there can be less than 0.05 kg / kw (less air turbine).
   Cost of the new equipment pays off by economy of fuel on an interval of job of the unit within 6 months.
   These units do not require fuel for the job, do not allocate harmful substances in an environment, are not dangerous in the fire and radiating attitude, are not attractive to the terrorists. The units can work without maintenance service of decade.
   The enterprises of motor industry can for one year, working in additional third change, to let out so much converters, that their total capacity in some times will exceed capacity of power stations, which burn fuel.
   The excessive capacity can be directed on reception of hydrogen and to feed by hydrogen the automobiles translated to a feed compressed natural gas.
   
   But, persons, which can not decide a problem of preservation of life on the Earth, having left(abandoned) a tribune, as a rule, are engaged in editing of scientific clauses in scientific magazines. If to them clause about new the technologists of reception of energy gets, speak, that it can not be, because it can be never, in the publication refuse. On an appeal to tear off from an armchair fanny (buttocks) and to arrive to see at the working isothermal converter - do not answer.
   Who they your dear scientists after that?
   

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