US president-elect Joe Biden has chosen the decorated geneticist Eric Lander as his presidential science adviser and the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). If Lander’s appointment is confirmed by the US Senate, he will serve as a member of Biden’s cabinet — a first for this position.

Many scientists have long called for the OSTP director to be raised to a cabinet-level position. “Having science elevated to its rightful place in the administration seems to me a very positive step,” says Harold Varmus, a cancer researcher at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City and a former head of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). “I think it marks a very important moment in the history of science in the government.”

“It signifies the importance of who will be in the room when decisions are being made,” says Roger Pielke Jr, who studies science policy at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Lander was a key figure in the Human Genome Project — the race to sequence the human genome, which ended in 2003 — and is the president and founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He will be the first biologist to run the OSTP.

Between 2009 and 2017, he co-chaired the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), an elite panel that advises the US president. Among the PCAST reports issued during Lander’s tenure were some dealing with energy, climate change and vaccine response in the face of pandemic influenza...

… Nobel laureate Frances Arnold, a bioengineer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and Maria Zuber, a geophysicist at MIT, will co-chair PCAST under Biden. Alondra Nelson, nominated to be deputy director for science and society at the OSTP, is a social scientist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who studies genetics, race and other societal issues.

“These are excellent appointments, highly qualified and experienced, and well grounded in science,” Rita Colwell, a microbiologist at the University of Maryland at College Park and a former director of the US National Science Foundation, wrote to Nature in an e-mail...

Fig. 1. The coffee plant.

Coffee is an important plantation crop belonging to the family Rubiaceae, subfamily Cinchonoideae and tribe Coffeae (Clifford et al., 1989). The Rubiaceae members are largely tropical or subtropical comprising nearly 400 genera and 4800–5000 species. Botanically, coffee belongs to the genus Coffea of the family Rubiaceae. The sub-genus Coffea is reported to comprise over 80 species, which are prevalent in Africa and Madagascar (Bridson and Verdcourt, 1988). Coffee is a perennial plant and evergreen in nature (Fig. 1). It has a prominent vertical stem with shallow root system, the feeder roots of arabica coffee penetrate relatively deeper into the soil whereas robusta has feeder roots concentrated very close to the soil surface.

Coffee leaves are opposite decussate on suckers. The leaves appear shiny, wavy, and dark green in color with conspicuous veins. The inflorescence is a condensed cymose type subtended by bracts. Coffee is a short day plant and hence the floral initiation takes place in short day conditions of 8–11 h of day light. Pollination takes place within 6 h after flowering (Fig. 2). Arabica coffee is autogamous with different degrees of natural cross-pollination in contrast to Robusta coffee, which is strictly allogamous with an inbuilt ametophytic system of self-compatibility. The process of fertilization is completed within 24–48 h after pollination. Seeds are elliptical or egg shaped and the seed coat is represented by the silver skin which is also made up of scleroides. The size, thickness or number of pits in the walls of scleroides is considered as important taxonomic characters in differentiating between species. Germination takes place in about 45 days.

Fig. 2. Coffee flowers blossomed in the estate.

Fig. 3. Coffee pulping using pulper in wet processing of coffee.

Fig. 4. Coffee drying in the drying yards after wet processing.

Fig. 5. Coffee roasting to obtain volatiles.

Fig. 6. Cross-section of the coffee cherry.

Fig. 7. (a) Sketch of the production of various by-products from coffee industry. (b) Coffee by-products obtained during coffee processing.

In Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises,” someone asks Mike Campbell, the troubled Scottish war veteran who is engaged to Lady Brett Ashley, how he ended up bankrupt. “Two ways,” Campbell replies. “Gradually, and then suddenly.” Campbell’s interlocutor goes on to ask what brought about his collapse. “Friends,” Campbell says. “I had a lot of friends. False friends. Then I had creditors, too. Probably had more creditors than anybody in England.”

It’s too early to determine whether Donald Trump might be headed for the same fate as the wretched Campbell, but there are intriguing parallels. Not so long ago, Trump also had lots of friends and creditors...

...His most important creditor was Deutsche Bank, which, during the past decade, had defied internal dissension and extended hundreds of millions of dollars of loans to him. On top of these invaluable relationships, Trump had nearly ninety million Twitter followers, a vast audience that appeared to provide lucrative possibilities for monetization after he left office.

But, in the week since Trump incited a mob of his supporters to attack the Capitol, he and his businesses have suffered a series of blows. Key corporate partners have abandoned him; some of his fellow-billionaires have spoken out against his sedition; Deutsche Bank has let it be known that it doesn’t want anything more to do with him; and Twitter stripped him of his following...

... Trump’s attempt at a Presidential “self-coup” came at what was already a troubled time for the Trump Organization, which has consistently struggled to eke out much in the way of taxable profits. As the coronavirus ravaged the travel and hospitality industries in 2020, Trump-owned hotels and golf resorts suffered along with other businesses in these sectors. Like other companies, the Trump Organization shuttered some of its properties for several months, including a hotel in Las Vegas and golf courses in Florida, Scotland, and Ireland. The virus also impacted two of Trump’s most valuable real-estate assets: a pair of prime office towers that he co-owns with Vornado Realty Trust...

...Shortly after Trump lost the election, according to the Washington Post, one of his closest business associates, the real-estate investor Tom Barrack, called Trump and advised him to abandon his efforts to overturn the result, and to opt, instead, for an “ ‘elegant’ exit...”

...Trump ignored it.

...After the deadly violence at the Capitol, on January 6th, the financial blowback on Trump came quickly. Within twenty-four hours, Shopify, the e-commerce provider, shut down a number of online stores affiliated with Trump, including ones that sold Trump campaign merchandise. A bigger blow for the President came last Sunday, when the P.G.A. of America, which has had a long-standing relationship with him, announced that the 2022 P.G.A. Championship, one of professional golf’s four major tournaments, would no longer be held at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey. Twenty-four hours later, the R. & A., the ruling body of golf outside of the United States, followed the P.G.A.’s lead and announced that, for the foreseeable future, the British Open would not be played at Turnberry, a famous old course that Trump owns in Scotland...

Dr. Bahar currently resides in Pittsburgh. She came to the United States to become a professor at University of Pittsburgh, Department of Molecular Genetics & Biochemistry in 2001. Notably, she is the first Turkish female scientist elected to the National Academy of Sciences of the United States.[4] In 2016, she was invited by President Barack Obama as a guest speaker to the White House to give a speech titled "Big Data in Multiscale Modeling and Biology".[5]

I got my bachelor’s from the University of Dayton in biology, and I had a minor in computer science. After realizing that medical school was not for me, I was quite interested in blending my curiosity for mathematics and programming with my long-term excitement for biology. Initially, I did not know anyone in the field of computational biology, but I had mentors and advisors who pushed me in the direction of relevant resources, since the University of Dayton didn’t have a computational biology curriculum. By the time I completed a bioinformatics Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program at the University of Pittsburgh, I realized that I wanted to pursue a PhD in this field, not only because it was an exciting field research-wise, but also due to the diversity in terms of people’s backgrounds. Eventually, this led me to the University of Pennsylvania, where I have been working with computational genomics...

...My main role model was Ivet Bahar from the University of Pittsburgh, who was my advisor during my REU program. I saw a really powerful woman leading an important department at the university and in computational science, and she inspired me to reach for more and think outside of my comfort zone. At the time, I didn’t know many women in the field, and I certainly didn’t know any women who looked like me in the field, so she was definitely inspiring to me...

... It was honestly a natural process. I decided to search for ‘number of Black women with degrees in computational biology’ on the Internet and found nothing. There was an editorial on women in the field, but nothing relevant to race or ethnicity demographics of the field. I didn’t put that much thought into it, but I knew that someone like me was going to really appreciate being able to find other Black women by doing a simple search...

... Now, we have a new website that is so much more and symbolizes our growth into a full organization. The next person that searches for Black women in computational biology will be able to find us...