WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama’s selection Saturday of a Harvard physicist and a marine biologist for science posts is a sign he plans a more aggressive response to global warming than did the Bush administration.
“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,” Obama said in announcing the selections in his weekly radio address.
Obama’s picks:
• John Holdren will become Obama’s science adviser as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Holdren, 64, is a former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington who has pushed for more urgent action on global warming.
• Jane Lubchenco will be the first woman to lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees ocean and atmospheric studies and does much of the government’s research on global warming. Lubchenco is an Oregon State University professor specializing in overfishing and climate change. A member of the Pew Oceans Commission, Lubchenco has recommended steps to overcome crippling damage to the world’s oceans from overfishing and pollution.
• Harold Varmus, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist and former director of the National Institutes of Health, will join Holdren as co-chairman of the president’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology.
• Another co-chairman of the council will be Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Eric Lander, a specialist in human genome research.
