Can this man bring science back to the White House?
WASHINGTON — For the past 19 months, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has operated with a skeleton crew. For over a year, the top-ranking adviser has not even been a scientist, but rather a 30-something political science major who most recently worked for Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. Desperate former employees even set up a secret shadow network to provide advice to lawmakers.
Gone are the days when science was high on the agenda, when a staff of more than a hundred helped coordinate the federal government’s response to the Ebola outbreak, launched the Precision Medicine Initiative to personalize health treatments, and spearheaded a $100 million BRAIN Initiative that boosted research into conditions like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. Gone, too, is the president who might fire off a marshmallow cannon at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
But now that the president has nominated meteorologist Kelvin Droegemeier to lead the office, some of that science might be coming back.
If he is confirmed by the Senate, Droegemeier will instantly become the country’s top-ranking scientist. The post will
