Obama Names 4 Top Science Advisers

Barack Obama today selected a Harvard physicist and a marine biologist for key science posts, in a sign he plans a more aggressive response to global warming than did the Bush administration. John Holdren and Jane Lubchenco are leading experts on climate change who have advocated forceful government action. “It's time we once again put science at the top of our agenda,” Obama said today.

Holdren will become Obama's science adviser as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Lubchenco will lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Joining Holdren on the Council of Advisers on Science and Technology will be Nobel Prize-winning scientist Harold Varmus, a former director of the NIH, and MIT professor Eric Lander, a specialist in human genome research. (More Barack Obama stories.)