Lander wins key Senate vote to be Biden science adviser

A US Senate panel approved Eric Lander to be White House science adviser, setting aside earlier doubts raised by the Broad Institute founding director’s record on race and gender issues.

The Senate’s 28-member committee on commerce and science issues, with only five Republicans in opposition, sent Professor Lander’s nomination to the full Senate, where the Democrat-led chamber is likely to confirm him.

At his confirmation hearing last month, even some Democrats expressed wariness about Professor Lander and incidents such as his meetings with Jeffrey Epstein long after the financier had admitted to sex crimes.

Professor Lander also admitted to senators that he had understated the central work of Nobel prizewinners Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier in creating the transformative CRISPR gene-editing technology.

Joe Biden had raised the position of science adviser to Cabinet level, hoping to emphasise its importance to his governing approach, only to have Professor Lander’s troubles leave him the only member of the president’s formal inner circle still awaiting Senate approval.

The chair of the Senate committee, Maria Cantwell, a Democrat from Washington state, began the vote on Professor Lander’s nomination by admitting her still-reluctant support for him.

Ms Cantwell called Professor Lander an accomplished geneticist, molecular biologist and mathematician, but said she would have preferred to see Mr Biden choose a woman for the role.

Failing that, she said she took comfort in seeing the large number of women Mr Biden has surrounding Professor Lander in the White House science office, and in extracting from him a promise to provide semi-annual reports on improving equity in academic science.

“Dr Lander and I have come to a focus and understanding that the very first task that he should focus on is helping all of us add diversity of women and minorities in the science fields,” Ms Cantwell said. “So he and I will be working aggressively on that.”

She also made note of a study from her home state institution, the University of Washington, pointing out the need to help women in science handle their mix of workplace demands and family responsibilities. “Their most important recommendation to us is we couldn’t be passive about this issue,” she said of the study.

Earlier, during his confirmation hearing, Professor Lander also was pushed to promise that he would show no favouritism towards his former colleagues at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, a centre for genomics research that he led since its founding in 2004.

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com