Icon: enlarge
Future US President Joe Biden
Photo: Gretchen Ertl / REUTERS
The future US President Joe Biden gives his government's top scientific advisor cabinet rank - and is sending a clear signal in the middle of the corona pandemic.
As Biden announced, the biologist Eric Lander should head the Office for Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in the White House and advise the government.
Lander is a geneticist and helped decipher the human genome.
Biden announced that science will always be at the forefront of his government.
Lander and his team of "world-famous scientists" should make sure that "everything we do is based on science, facts and the truth."
Your "reliable advice" will be of crucial importance to end the corona pandemic, to revive the economy and to "improve the quality of life of all Americans."
Lander, who heads the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University, said on Twitter that he was "honored" and "excited" about his new role.
Joe Biden has put together a team of brilliant scientists and "emphasizes the role of research".
The USA is badly affected by the corona pandemic.
Since the pandemic began, more than 23 million people in the United States have been shown to have contracted the coronavirus, nearly 400,000 of whom have died.
Biden faces the challenge of containing the pandemic and the resulting economic crisis.
The outgoing US President Donald Trump is skeptical of science and has been criticized for his handling of the corona pandemic and his often misleading or false statements about the virus.
Icon: The mirror
lmd / AFP