Obama Administration Seeks to Fill Multiple Science Leadership Posts with Super-Star Female Nominees

"The extraordinary dedication these individuals bring to their new

roles will greatly serve the American people.  I am grateful they

have agreed to serve in this Administration and I look forward to

working with them in the months and years to come."

- President Barack Obama, White House Press Release (July 31, 2013)

This summer, the turnover of key scientific leadership roles in several federal agencies and Administration offices are coming fast and furious.  One of the vacancies, the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), has already been filled by the former assistant administrator of EPA's Office of Air and Radiation, Gina McCarthy.  Nominations for three other posts are currently pending Senate approval.  Yale microbiologist Jo Handelsman has been nominated for the Associate Director position in the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).  Kathryn Sullivan, the first American woman to walk in space, has been nominated to fill the lead role at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).  To replace Subra Suresh, the current National Science Foundation (NSF) leader, Pres. Obama has nominated France Córdova, an astrophysicist and President Emeritus of Purdue University.  All of the nominees are exceptionally impressive and warrant a brief introduction.


Gina McCarthy - EPA Administrator (current)

Gina McCarthy (photo)

After over 4 months of wrangling (nomination submitted by Pres. Obama on Monday, March 4), the Senate voted on Thursday, July 18 to confirm Gina McCarthy to the post of EPA Administrator in a 59 to 40 vote.  All Senate Democrats, with the exception of Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), voted to confirm McCarthy.  Six Republicans voted to confirm the nomination as well; Sen. Lamar Alexander (TN), Sen. Bob Corker (TN), Sen. Kelly Ayotte (NH), Sen. Susan Collins (ME), Sen. Jeff Flake (AZ), and Sen. John McCain (AZ).  Sen. Roger Wicker (MS) did not vote.  A lengthy filibuster that blocked an up-or-down vote was broken in a 69-31 vote only after the Senate Democratic leadership threatened rule changes that would have diminished the rights of the minority to filibuster executive branch nominees.

McCarthy faced fierce opposition that stemmed from Republican fears that she would be a staunch and forceful advocate for limiting greenhouse gas emissions.  Democrats countered that she had successfully worked with conservative leaders in the past, a prime example being her service as the Undersecretary of Policy in the Massachusetts Executive Office of Environmental Affairs under Republican Gov. Mitt Romney.  Environmental advocacy groups quickly applauded her confirmation (see NRDC, Union of Concerned Scientists for examples).

Moving forward, McCarthy will make climate change a top priority of the EPA.  In a speech at Harvard Law School on Tuesday, July 30, she emphasized the environmental and economic impacts of global climate change.


Jo Handelsman - Associate Director OSTP (nominee)

Dr. Handelsman and Pres. Obama (photo)

On Wednesday, July 31, the White House put forward its nomination of Prof. Jo Handelsman, a Yale microbiologist, to step in as Associate Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, replacing physicist and Nobel recipient Carl Weiman.  Prof. Handelsman has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute professor since 2002.  Once confirmed (and it is assumed she will be confirmed), she would like to follow in the footsteps of Weiman as a leader and advocate for STEM education.  She was the recipient of the 2013 Graduate Microbiology Teaching Award from the American Society of Microbiology.  She has also published multiple books on teaching and mentoring.  In 2011, Prof. Handelsman was the recipient of one of only 11 Presidential Awards for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring in recognition of her leadership and accomplishments in mentoring science students.

Prof. Handelsman's research at Yale focuses on understanding microbial communities, with an emphasis on the genetic factors that contribute to community stability and dynamics.  She is particularly interested in the gut microbiota of insects and the microbial community structures that exist in soil environments.  Readers of this blog know that these are big, complicated, and important research areas with implications for human heath, agriculture, and environmental stability and well-being!  Prof. Handelsman and colleagues have recently published a review article that lays out the current state of knowledge on microbial community stability.


Kathryn Sullivan - Head of NOAA (nominee)

Kathryn Sullivan (photo)

On Thursday, August 1, Pres. Obama nominated Dr. Kathryn Sullivan to replace Jane Lubchenco as the Undersecretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere (i.e. head of NOAA).  Sullivan has had a storied career thus far, with the obvious highlight of being the first American woman to walk in space on October 5, 1984.  Not to be outdone, she was a member of the shuttle crew that took off on April 24, 1990, that deployed the Hubble space telescope.  Dr. Sullivan has also served important leadership roles on Earth.  She has served as the assistant secretary at the Department of Commerce (which oversees NOAA) since 2011 and was the chief scientist at NOAA from 1993 to 1996.  Dr. Sullivan has also been engaged in academic research and has served administrative and leadership roles at various STEM related associations (see John Glenn School of Public Affairs, Center of Science and Industry).

NOAA is a fairly hefty federal entity with a multi-billion dollar annual budget (NOAA FY2014 budget request was $5.4 billion).  In tough fiscal times, Dr. Sullivan will have her hands full.  She will have to continue to grapple with the effects of sequestration while simultaneously navigating the political currents attempting to direct NOAA's emphasis toward weather forecasting over climate change research. 


France Córdova - National Science Foundation Director (nominee)

France Córdova (photo)

On the same day that Pres. Obama nominated Jo Handelsman for the OSTP post, the White House also requested that Dr. France Córdova follow Subra Suresh as the Director of the NSF.  Córdova has an exceptionally impressive resume and is expected to be approved for the post without much of a fuss.  She is trained as an astrophysicist and has served as president of two major research universities; the University of California Riverside and Purdue University, where she served as the first female president.  From 1993 to 1996, Córdova worked as the first female chief scientist at NASA.  She has conducted research at Los Alamos National Laboratory, served as head of the Astronomy and Astrophysics Department at Penn State, was chair of the Board of Reagents at the Smithsonian, and has been a member of the National Science Board.  (For more details, see an interview conducted by the AAAS or a brief digest by Scientific American).

France Córdova's long, successful history of research excellence clearly shows that she's got the scientific chops to handle the NSF directorship, hands down.  What sets her apart from many past directors is her extensive administrative experience and her knowledge and familiarity with Washington.  The NSF, like other federal agencies, is feeling the pinch of the sequester.  Add to that a FY2014 budget request of $7.6 billion with no budget resolution from Congress leading into the August recess, talk of government shutdowns, and scientists everywhere grappling for research funding, and it is clear that Dr. Córdova will have her work as a scientist and administrator cut out for her.  She remarked to the AAAS that, "every time I’ve had a leadership position there have been big budget concerns" but that she's, "not worried about navigating budget constraints. It’s part of every job." 

As readers of this blog know, the NSF has been forced to play politics this year.  Republicans on the House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, chaired by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), have been critical of the NSF grant review process (see my May 28 post).  This behavior by cost-cutting politicians is in many ways not shocking (but yes, still disappointing), given the difficult fiscal times.  As the funding battles in Congress are not likely to go away any time soon (the 2014 mid-terms are coming up!), we can be sure that France Córdova will end up carrying the fight for peer review forward just as her predecessors have done. 


As of the publication of this post, only Gina McCarthy has been approved by the Senate, with the other three nominees awaiting a vote.  As Congress is out of town for a while, political and scientific followers will have to keep their eyes and ears peeled when Congress reconvenes for the fall session.  I'll follow up here as things progress.  Let's hope Prof. Handelsman, Dr. Sullivan, and Dr. Córdova won't have to wait as long as Director McCarthy did for the Senate to get around to an up-or-down vote.

- @EJDimise

Akkermansia muciniphila, the Weight Loss Bug

"These results provide a rationale for the development of a 

treatment that uses this human mucus colonizer [A. muciniphila]

for the prevention or treatment of obesity and its associated

metabolic disorders."

- A. Everard et. al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 2013, 110(22), 9066-9071

Looking over my recent posts, it appears that I've been focusing on all of the reasons why we should be afraid of bacteria.  They're in your food, and they're antibiotic resistant.  Tuberculosis is a world wide scourge.  Killer MRSA strains are lurking everywhere, and they're practically invincible.  Be afraid, be very afraid!  And to think that a few days ago, I complained about the news media always trying to scare the hell out of everyone.  Back in my July 3rd post, I promised I'd discuss something that would make us all feel a little bit better about the bugs we live with, and today, I'm finally going to make good on that promise.

I'd like to introduce you to a bug named Akkermansia muciniphila (IJSEM, 2004, 54(5), 1469-1476).  A. muciniphila is a rod shaped bug.  It's so intolerant of oxygen that it dies if it encounters any.  It secretes a sticky layer of molecular goo all over the surface of its cells.  It survives by eating mucus (yum!).  Oh, and by the way, it's living in your intestine.  Well, according to a report that came out in May in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (A. Everard et. al., 2013, 110(22), 9066-9071, I at least hope it's living in your intestine.  We'll get to why I hope that in a moment, but first, a little bit about your intestine.  Readers of this blog know that the human gastrointestinal (GI) tract is populated, top to bottom, with many 100s of different species of bacteria - the collective bacterial population is known as the human microbiota.  Our bacterial cohabitants cover our inner surfaces and they fill the spaces in the middle.  The vast majority do not cause disease and are actually supposed to be there.  They help us digest and absorb food and nutrients, they share resources with each other, they stimulate our immune system, and sometimes they even protect us from disease causing microbes.  It is now commonly accepted in the research community that the composition of our microbiota (what bugs are there?, where are they?, how many of them are there?) is dependent upon diet.  For a healthy adult, studies have shown that A. muciniphila comprises no less than 3-5% of the bacteria residing in the human gut.  This bug certainly makes its presence known.  It lives in the layer of mucus that lines the surface of the gut.  In every day parlance, "mucus" usually elicits a "yuck!" response, but the mucus lining of the GI tract is exceptionally important.  It plays a large protective role for the delicate tissue underneath and it is important for nutrient absorption into the rest of the body.  The researchers in this impressive study were able to show that A. muciniphila is far more abundant in lean, healthy mice compared to obese and/or diabetic mice.  More interestingly, feeding obese/diabetic mice live cultures of A. muciniphila helped reverse the effects of obesity, diabetes, and the low-level systemic inflammation associated with these disorders.  Lastly, they were able to show that a high percentage of A. muciniphila was correlated with a healthier, thicker mucus layer.  Given these results, the popular scientific press as well as high visibility research journals couldn't help but slyly suggest that A. muciniphila could be the next big weight loss therapy or treatment for adult onset diabetes.  Like good microbiota researchers, the authors asserted similar sentiments (see quote at top), but delivered their message along side a solid dose of, "... but there's still a lot that we don't know, so let's not get carried away."  Let's look at some details, shall we?

Mice are the model organisms for microbiota research.

The most headline worthy result was that administering live Akkermansia muciniphila cells to obese and diabetic mice counteracted many of the deleterious issues associated with these disorders.  Reductions in fat tissue, body weight, toxic metabolic byproducts, glucose tolerance (diabetes symptoms), and improved mucus layer health were all observed by providing living A. muciniphila cultures orally (i.e. the mice "ate" the bacteria).  None of this was observed by administering nonviable ("dead") A. muciniphila in the same fashion.  Thus, the positive effects are only observed if a diseased individual is populated with some threshold level of living, metabolizing, A. muciniphila cells, and not simply from chemical factors that would have been present from the dead cells passing through the GI tract.  To get the benefits, you need a viable population of this microbial symbiont!

Giving diseased mice a healthy dose of live bacteria seems like a very obvious thing to test, right?  After all, probiotics - cultures of living "good" bacteria that you take like medicine - are kind-of all the rage right now (think Activia*, for example).  But the beauty of this paper is that it demonstrates more subtlety than meets the eye, at least from our discussion thus far.  Recall one very important thing: A. muciniphila comprises 3-5% of a healthy microbiota.  The obese and diabetic mice aren't missing the bug, they just have less of it.  Given that the composition of the microbiota, and many of the negative effects associated with obesity and diabetes, are impacted directly by diet, the researchers explored the possibility of rehabbing the microbiota directly.  What would happen if you fed mice something that would favor the regrowth of A. muciniphila to the levels associated with a healthy mouse gut?  To answer this question, the group fed obese mice a diet rich in oligofructose, a mixture of short-chain sugar polymers that avoid digestion in the upper GI tract and that A. muciniphila can tap as a preferential food source.  The team found that feeding the mice oligofructose resulted in the restoration of healthy levels of A. muciniphila, and they observed a concomitant reversal of the adverse effects of obesity and diabetes - just like feeding the mice live cultures of the bug.  This suggests that diet alone can help reverse the most common problems associated with these health disorders.  You might read this and think, "Well, duh!  You're telling me all I have to do to lose weight is change my diet!"  And you might say this because you aren't thinking like a drug manufacturer or purveyor of dietary supplements.  Here's the vision you ought to be having:  1 pill, consisting of 50% A. muciniphila and 50% oligofructose, a bright shiny label reading, "The #1 All Natural Weight Loss Probiotic-Prebiotic on the Market!", and full page adds and billboards declaring, "Buy 1 bottle for $24.99, get the second one Absolutely Free!".  Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.  Snake oil peddling aside, the link the researchers made here is important and interesting.  It ties a specific probiotic bacterium, A. muciniphila, to a very specific prebiotic - the stuff you can eat that favors the growth of your "good" bugs.  Oligofructose anyone? (Hint: this shows that the high-fiber "hype" may not be all hype.)

Anti-inflammatory endocannabinoids

The chemically minded reader my now be asking, "So, what are the mechanisms here?  It sounds like this bug is altering metabolism, so what are the chemical details of this system?"  It's a good question, and to be honest, many of the chemical issues still need to be worked out.  However, this study did look at the effect A. muciniphila had on a suite of anti-inflamatory compounds called endocannabinoids.  Specifically, the inflammation fighting compounds 2-arachidonoylglycerol (2-AG), 2-oleoylglycerol (2-OG), and 2-palmitoylglycerol (2-PG) were found to be produced at higher levels by intestinal cells when the A. muciniphila population was maintained at healthy levels.  The factors stimulating the production of these natural anti-inflamatory compounds needs to be investigated further, but this paper now gives chemists a viable system and target to study.  This should come as welcome news to patients suffering from inflammatory bowel disorders, who currently must undergo surgery to affect long-term fixes to any of a number of given disease states.

If anything, this study once again demonstrates the centrality of human bacterial symbionts - our microbiota - in maintaining good health.  A. muciniphila now has its claim to fame as a jack-of-all-trades bug that can potentially be used to combat a lengthy list of metabolic issues that negatively impact huge portions of the western population.  Whether or not this bug can or will be sold as a panacea remains to be seen.  Well informed scientists would caution that we still have much to learn about our microbial symbionts.  That the ecosystem we call our gut is very complex and that we've barely scratched the surface.  Indeed, the overblown promises of the human genome project ("Sequence the genome, and cancer and diabetes will be a thing of the past!") are fresh in the minds of all stripes of biological scientist.  Nevertheless, this study is important in its detailed looked at a microbe that is clearly consequential to human health.  This ought to illustrate that, even though the media usually hypes the bad bugs, we have a lot of friends in the microbial world.

- @EJDimise

(* Not an endorsement of Activia and/or the health/nutritional benefits claimed by the manufacturer.)