Science advisers mull priorities—Climate change and energy are high on the agenda for Obama's panel.

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http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090811/full/460785a.html

Published online 11 August 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/460785a

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Science advisers mull priorities

Climate change and energy are high on the agenda for Obama's panel.

Alexandra Witze & Lizzie Buchen

An elite group of 21 US researchers met publicly for the first time last week as the new advisory panel to US President Barack Obama on scientific and technical matters. But despite an enthusiastic inaugural meeting, it will take time to know how effective the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) will be.

PCAST has already put together its first report, on the government's H1N1 pandemic strategy. Other topics likely to be high on its agenda include how science can help the economic recovery, and how best to deliver on Obama's ambitious climate and energy research portfolio.

Opening the meeting on 6 August, co-chair John Holdren called the council "a spectacular cast of leaders of our science, technology and innovation communities". Holdren, who is Obama's chief science adviser, chairs PCAST with Harold Varmus, former director of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and Eric Lander, director of the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The full group boasts three Nobel laureates and 16 members of the national academies of science, engineering or medicine.

The new PCAST "has a great membership and outstanding co-chairs, but its ability to influence events depends on who listens", cautions John Marburger, who co-chaired the previous incarnation of PCAST as the science adviser to President George W. Bush. PCAST's success or failure depends mainly on its access to the president and on its interactions with various other advisory groups within the administration. These include the Office of Science & Technology Policy, which Holdren directs, and the National Science and Technology Council, composed mainly of the heads of agencies that deal with scientific matters, along with the US vice-president.

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