Biden el­e­vates White House sci­ence of­fice to Cab­i­net-lev­el, with ge­neti­cist Er­ic Lan­der put for­ward to lead pol­i­cy

As in­com­ing Pres­i­dent-elect Joe Biden fills out his ad­min­is­tra­tion, he has plans to el­e­vate a long­time White House of­fice to a Cab­i­net-lev­el agency — and has tapped a promi­nent ge­neti­cist to lead its ef­forts.

Biden will nom­i­nate Er­ic Lan­der to head up the Of­fice of Sci­ence and Tech­nol­o­gy Pol­i­cy, his tran­si­tion team an­nounced last Fri­day, in a move the Pres­i­dent-elect said will em­pha­size the fo­cus of sci­ence in his gov­ern­ment. In ad­di­tion to be­ing a math­e­mati­cian, Lan­der was a key leader of the team that mapped the hu­man genome in 2003 and found­ed the Broad In­sti­tute at MIT, which is fa­mous for its work with CRISPR-Cas9 tech­nol­o­gy.

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