Today’s newspapers showcased stories about President-elect Joe Biden’s announcement he will make his chief science adviser a member of his Cabinet and generally elevate the importance of science in his administration.
“Biden: Advisers will lead with ‘science, truth’” reads the headline over a Sunday Republican report by the Associated Press quoting him as saying “We believe in both.”
This is potentially a breakthrough for those of us who contest the official accounts of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the anthrax attacks that quickly followed, and the 1960s assassinations of President Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Sen. Robert Kennedy, all of which accounts have relied on false science and the willingness of government and news media to look the other way.
There is science that matters to those in power, and science that doesn’t. At some point in the next year or so it will become apparent which intentionally neglected science will continue to be neglected by the executive branch of government and the news media.
“The science behind climate change is not a hoax,” Vice President-elect Kamala Harris said in association with Biden’s science announcements. “The science behind the virus is not partisan. The same laws apply, the same evidence holds true regardless of whether or not you accept them.”
AP reported that Harris “recall[ed] her mother, a cancer researcher whom she credited with teaching her to think critically.”
Biden’s chief science adviser will be Eric Lander, founding director of the Broad Institute at MIT and Harvard, which evolved from the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, created in 1982. Lander was co-chair of the Council of Advisors on Science and Technology during the Obama administration.
Francis Collins, who has worked with him on the human genome project, will continue as director of the National Institutes of Health. Co-chair of Biden’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology will be Frances Arnold, a Nobel Prize winning chemical engineer, and Maria Zuber, who is MIT vice president for research and geophysics.
The AP story included a quote from Sudip Parikh, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, that the new administration’s having the chief science adviser on the president’s Cabinet for the first time “clearly signals the administration’s intent to involve scientific expertise in every policy decision.”
Two organizations, Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth and the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry, have based much of their scientific and legal challenges on evidence showing that key assertions upon which official accounts of the September 2001 attacks are based are scientifically indefensible. Proponents of new investigations into the Kennedy and King assassinations of 1963 and 1968 cite experts’ contentions that the official accounts cannot be true, including ballistics reports on all three.
— Mark Channing Miller