You have to hand it to Eric Lander: he gives a good talk. At last night’s plenary session, he admitted he would have been more comfortable talking about the human genome. But as one of three co-chairs of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) he was instead tasked with reflecting on science and technology in the Obama administration just over one year in, and he kept the full house rapt.

Here’s a one-minute version (of Lander’s version) of the last 13 months:

Jan: Inauguration speech: “We’ll restore science to its rightful place.”

Feb: >$100 billion for science and technology in the economic stimulus package.

March: Obama overturns Bush-era restrictions on human embryonic stem cells

April: Obama sets goal of spending 3% of GDP on R&D.

June: “We will open centers of scientific excellence in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, and appoint new Science Envoys.”

July-Sept: Summer; PCAST meets; plus lots of H1N1 influenza.

Oct: Presidential commission rethinks space program

Nov: Launches program to boost science education. National Lab Day launched, but turns out to be every day.

Dec-Jan: Winter

Feb: Freeze on discretionary spending; yet Obama budget requests nearly 6% increase for R&D.

Lander emphasized that he was talking about his own experiences, not speaking on behalf of the White House. The White House would have been pretty happy with his talk though; at some points you had to wonder if Obama had been doing anything but furthering science in its first year.

They may look the same, and behave the same — but under the surface pluripotent stem cells are not the same. That was the message coming from a well-attended AAAS session this afternoon.

After sitting through some pretty heavy science policy sessions, it feels good to get back to some solid biology, and stem cell heavyweights including Rudy Jaenisch and George Daley of MIT provided a flavour of where the field stands some four years after induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells swept through it.

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They may look the same, and behave the same — but under the surface pluripotent stem cells are not the same. That was the message coming from a well-attended AAAS session this afternoon.

After sitting through some pretty heavy science policy sessions, it feels good to get back to some solid biology, and stem cell heavyweights including Rudy Jaenisch and George Daley of MIT provided a flavour of where the field stands some four years after induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells swept through it.

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His first six months as director of NIH have “been a wild ride”.

If he had an anxiety it’s how the NIH is going to support all the investigators heading for a funding cliff when the two-year federal stimulus grants run out. “There is no question we will once again see a difficult time,” he says. “That’s what keeps me up at night”.

“If I were starting today” as a scientist in high school or college, “I’d be in computational biology”. Nowadays anyone can crank out the data but it’s all about sorting out what it means.

There are some “radical” projects that “put meat on the bones” of systems biology, to be unveiled next week when the NIH announces some new Common Fund projects.

“Genetics is not that hard — thank God — not like neuroscience or immunology”. (This said in response to a question about how to improve the genetics literacy of the medical profession.)

He’d like to come up with more opportunities to “skip the post-doc” and go straight from PhD to independent lab.

His first six months as director of NIH have “been a wild ride”.

If he had an anxiety it’s how the NIH is going to support all the investigators heading for a funding cliff when the two-year federal stimulus grants run out. “There is no question we will once again see a difficult time,” he says. “That’s what keeps me up at night”.

“If I were starting today” as a scientist in high school or college, “I’d be in computational biology”. Nowadays anyone can crank out the data but it’s all about sorting out what it means.

There are some “radical” projects that “put meat on the bones” of systems biology, to be unveiled next week when the NIH announces some new Common Fund projects.

“Genetics is not that hard — thank God — not like neuroscience or immunology”. (This said in response to a question about how to improve the genetics literacy of the medical profession.)

He’d like to come up with more opportunities to “skip the post-doc” and go straight from PhD to independent lab.

Should every research group have a full time data-handler?

I’m persuaded after hearing about the multiple pitfalls associated with handling scientific data in modern research. “We are in the midst of a revolution in the way that data is handled and shared,” said Phil Sharp of MIT.

Sharp was speaking at a ‘late-breaking’ session put together in response to the dissemination of e-mails from the UK’s Climatic Research Unit late last year. The content has been seized upon by climate skeptics who have used it to question manmade climate change, and challenge the way that scientists behaved in terms of manipulating and presenting their data.

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Should every research group have a full time data-handler?

I’m persuaded after hearing about the multiple pitfalls associated with handling scientific data in modern research. “We are in the midst of a revolution in the way that data is handled and shared,” said Phil Sharp of MIT.

Sharp was speaking at a ‘late-breaking’ session put together in response to the dissemination of e-mails from the UK’s Climatic Research Unit late last year. The content has been seized upon by climate skeptics who have used it to question manmade climate change, and challenge the way that scientists behaved in terms of manipulating and presenting their data.

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Scientists aren’t just building bridges to the rest of society – they are, of course, part of society. And to me, science is fascinating because it is about people: people obsessive about what they do, who make mistakes and do normal people-things.

That’s partly the tack that Peter Agre, President of the AAAS, took at his talk to open the meeting last night. He said the big challenge in science is to get over the common impression of scientists as “nerd-like individuals” and convey the “passionate humans we really are”.

Agre showed us some of the people who had inspired and fuelled his own passion: his dad (a chemist who entertained him by turning solutions pink); Linus Pauling (a Nobel prize-winning chemist); his postdoctoral advisor Pedro Cuatrecasas (a chemist – anyone seeing a pattern here?). All these people and more guided Agre down the path to the discovery of aqauporins, protein channels that allow water across membranes and that secured Agre’s share of a Nobel in 2003.

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Scientists aren’t just building bridges to the rest of society – they are, of course, part of society. And to me, science is fascinating because it is about people: people obsessive about what they do, who make mistakes and do normal people-things.

That’s partly the tack that Peter Agre, President of the AAAS, took at his talk to open the meeting last night. He said the big challenge in science is to get over the common impression of scientists as “nerd-like individuals” and convey the “passionate humans we really are”.

Agre showed us some of the people who had inspired and fuelled his own passion: his dad (a chemist who entertained him by turning solutions pink); Linus Pauling (a Nobel prize-winning chemist); his postdoctoral advisor Pedro Cuatrecasas (a chemist – anyone seeing a pattern here?). All these people and more guided Agre down the path to the discovery of aqauporins, protein channels that allow water across membranes and that secured Agre’s share of a Nobel in 2003.

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Posted on behalf of Rex Dalton.

The gorgeous warm winter weather of Southern California greeted an expected 8,000 attendees in San Diego for this year’s meeting, where most scientific sessions begin Friday February 19. Along with workshops and clinics on various specialties, Thursday was dominated by press conferences that will begin a cycle of such things carrying issues of scientific import to the world. The theme of this year’s meeting is “Bridging Science and Society.” Fittingly, the press conferences heralding scientific symposia were on translational medicine, dolphins and their capabilities for human research; green power, the census of marine life, and nuclear weapons – both reductions and verification.

This is the first time the AAAS has ever ventured to San Diego, the closest previously was about 100 kilometres north to Anaheim in 1999. The San Diego region boasts one of the nation’s most enviable scientific communities: the University of California at San Diego, always top ranked in biomedical research; UCSD’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, a pioneer in marine research; San Diego State University, with a storied history of turning out undergraduates who have gone on to stellar academic careers; non-profit institutions like The Salk Institute for Biomedical Studies; and myriad biotech firms – both startups and established publicly traded firms – that make the region arguably the most envied biotech cluster.

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