White House’s top scientist resigns over accusations of bullying

President Joe Biden’s renowned and widely respected science adviser Eric Lander has resigned amid allegations that he ‘bullied and demeaned subordinates’. Lander is the first Cabinet member of the Biden administration to leave or be terminated.

Lander’s appointment a year ago by Biden was met with an enthusiastic response from the scientific community and prior to joining the White House team he served as president and founding director of the Broad Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. The geneticist, molecular biologist and mathematician sparked controversy with a 2016 essay in Cell that downplayed the role of two women – University of California, Berkeley’s Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier from the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens in Germany – in developing the revolutionary gene-editing system Crispr-Cas9. Lander’s essay instead played up the role of the Broad Institute’s male biochemist Feng Zhang in that discovery. Doudna and Charpentier went on to win the chemistry Nobel prize in 2020 for their work.