Newsman: President Joe Biden’s top science adviser, Dr. Eric Lander, has resigned after an investigation into his mistreatment of staff. Lander said he will leave by Feb. 18 – not immediately – in order to “permit an orderly transfer.”
Reporters repeatedly pushed Psaki during the daily White House news conference to explain why Lander had not been fired despite Biden’s zero-tolerance pledge on staff conduct.
“The President accepted Dr. Eric Lander’s resignation letter this evening with gratitude for his work at OSTP on the pandemic, the Cancer Moonshot, climate change, and other key priorities,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement Monday night. “He knows that Dr. Lander will continue to make important contributions to the scientific community in the years ahead.”
In his letter to the president, Lander said that his resignation “is my fault and my responsiblity.”
“He knows that Dr. Lander will continue to make important contributions to the scientific community in the years ahead,” she said in a statement.
“The work of this office is far too important to be hindered,” Lander wrote in his resignation letter.
“I am devastated that I caused hurt to past and present colleagues by the way in which I have spoken to them,” he wrote.
“I have sought to push myself and my colleagues to reach our shared goals — including at times challenging and criticizing. But it is clear that things I said, and the way I said them, crossed the line at times into being disrespectful and demeaning, to both men and women,” he wrote. “That was never my intention. Nonetheless, it is my fault and my responsibility. I will take this lesson forward.”
During the briefing, Psaki had said senior White House officials conveyed directly to Lander that his behavior was “inappropriate” and that corrective actions were needed.
His confirmation to his role in the Biden administration was delayed for months as senators sought more information about meetings he had with Jeffrey Epstein, a disgraced financier who was charged with sex trafficking before his suicide in 2019.
Lander also was criticized for downplaying the contributions of two Nobel Prize-winning female scientists to gene editing technology. At his confirmation hearing last year, Lander apologized for a 2016 article he wrote that minimizedthe work of the female scientists. At the hearing, he also called Epstein “an abhorrent individual.”
Lander said he “understated the importance of those key advances” by biochemists Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna. The two were later awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
The founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Lander is a mathematician and molecular biologist. He was lead author of the first paper announcing the details of the human genome, the “book of life.”
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said a “full, thorough investigation” into the allegations occurred as a result of Biden’s Safe and Respectful Workplace Policy.
“The president has been crystal-clear with all of us about his high expectations of how he and his staff should be creating a respectful work environment,” said Psaki, who defended the administration’s vetting of Lander before his nomination. “Our objective is, of course, to prevent any of this behavior from happening again.”
Lander described his office behavior – which he said was “at times challenging and criticizing” – as the result of pushing his colleagues to achieve “the most ambitious goals that this agency has ever attempted.”
“But it is clear that things I said, and the way I said them, crossed the line at times into being disrespectful and demeaning, to both men and women. That was never my intention,” he wrote in his resignation letter. “Nonetheless, it is my fault and my responsibility. I will take this lesson forward.”
Politico first reported the allegations against Lander, whose position was elevated to Cabinet rank by Biden. His role has taken on greater prominence as the president pursues a Cancer Moonshot program to use federal resources to cut the nation’s cancer death rate in half over the next 25 years.
The White House said that the review did not find “credible evidence” of gender-based discrimination and that the reassignment of the staffer who filed the original complaint was “deemed appropriate.”
In an email Friday to his staff reported by Politico, Lander apologized and said he realizes his conduct “reflects poorly on this administration.”
“It’s my responsibility to set a respectful tone for our community. It’s clear that I have not lived up to this responsibility,” Lander wrote in the email. “This is not only wrong, but also inconsistent with our Safe and Respectful Workplace Policy. It is never acceptable for me to speak that way. I am deeply sorry for my conduct. I especially want to apologize to those of you who I treated poorly or were present at the time.”
