Thread by @davelevitan

🚨🚨🚨Science advisor and OSTP director will become a Cabinet position!🚨🚨🚨

Eric Lander will be among the first non-physicists in the role. This is exciting.

washingtonpost.com/science/2021/0…

If you're following me you're probably aware that the presidential science advisor position is a bit of an obsession for me. Here's the #longread I put up a couple months back on the position's history. It's weird and fun and interesting, I swear.

davelevitan.medium.com/the-presidents…

And here's my piece for @WIRED from late 2016 where I went to the WH and interviewed Obama's science advisor:

https://twitter.com/davelevitan/status/1338491837112332289

Here's some weird and wild documents relating to presidential science advisors I found in a few archives a few years ago:

https://twitter.com/davelevitan/status/1204589940056547328

And finally, here's my piece for @mental_floss on the letters that presidential science advisors received from the nation's crazy people over the years:

mentalfloss.com/article/541371…

Okay all that random stuff aside, science advisor to the president is a fascinating position with a fascinating history, and the fact that Biden has made it a Cabinet-level appointment is SUPER interesting.

One more thing: Back in the 60s, there was talk of creating a Department of Science in the executive branch. Among the people helping shoot this down was Nixon's first science advisor Lee Dubridge. Why?

Because science was *everywhere* he argued. Everyone in government (then) used a typewriter -- do we have a Department of Typewriters?

Elevating the science advisor position to the Cabinet isn't a Department of Typewriters, but it's an acknowledgement that EVERYONE types.

Anyway @eric_lander, please let me interview you immediately, thank you.

Ok predictably I wasn't actually done:

For 70 years, the president's science advisors were physicists. At first, this made sense -- it was more or less a "let's get ready for a nuclear war" position in the early years. ...

Obama's advisor John Holdren was an interesting compromise -- a physicist, who even gave a Nobel Prize acceptance speech on behalf of the Pugwash Conferences, on nuclear disarmament, but also a climate change expert who saw that as the defining issue of his tenure.

Elevating life sciences to the role now is an AWESOME idea. Climate change is now everywhere -- and Biden's appointments and plans make clear that it will dominate his policy choices. An advisor who can now help elevate CRISPR, and antibiotic resistance, and so on, will be HUGE.

Okay ONE more. Here are three ways presidential administrations dealt with/saw their advisors and OSTP. I find this instructive.