Holden on Science Advice in the White House

John P. Holdren, President Obama's science advisor, had an editorial in Science a couple of weeks ago in which he wrote (bullets added):

I see the top S&T priorities for the Obama administration in terms of four practical challenges and four cross-cutting foundations of success in addressing all of them. The practical challenges are:

• bringing S&T more fully to bear on driving economic recovery, job creation, and growth;
  
• driving the energy-technology innovation needed to reduce energy imports and climate-change risks while creating green jobs and competitive new businesses;
  
• applying advances in biomedical science and information technology together to help Americans live longer, healthier lives with reduced health care costs; and
  
• ensuring that we have the defense, homeland security, and national intelligence technologies needed to protect our troops, citizens, and national interests, and to verify the old and new arms control and nonproliferation agreements that are likewise essential to our security.

The cross-cutting foundations of success are:

• increasing the capacities and output of our country's fundamental research institutions, including our great research universities and major public and private laboratories and research centers;
  
• strengthening STEM education at every level, from precollege to postgraduate to lifelong learning;
  
• improving and protecting the information, communication, and transportation infrastructures that are essential to our commerce, science, and security alike; and
  
• maintaining and vigorously exploiting a cutting-edge set of capabilities in space, which must be understood not just as grand adventure and focus for expanding our knowledge of how the universe works, but also as a driver of innovation and a linchpin of communications, geopositioning technology, intelligence gathering, and Earth observation.

Comment: That seems a pretty big set of priorities, and of course if everything is a priority then nothing is a priority. I suppose I might hope that Holden will focus on advise directed at maintaining high levels of technological innovation and deepening technological capacity as the nation goes through this financial crisis and as the recovery efforts are planned and implemented. JAD