29 Items

President Barack Obama gets direction from his science advisor John P. Holdren during an event on the South Lawn of the White House to explore the stars with middle school students.

Reuters

- Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center Newsletter

Spotlight on John P. Holdren

| Fall/Winter 2016-2017

As assistant to the president for science and technology, director of the White House Office for Science and Technology Policy, and co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), Holdren has worked closely with Obama to reinvigorate America’s scientific capabilities on a range of policy fronts, from climate change and renewable energy to health care and nanotechnology.

The kernels on the left are conventional white maize kernels. The maize kernels on the right are enhanced with a provitamin A trait using biotechnology. This maize would benefit Africa where millions of children suffer from vitamin A deficiency.

AP Photo

Newspaper Article - The East African

Africa Needs to Invest More in 'Life Sciences' to Benefit from Technology

    Author:
  • Steve Mbogo
| August 18, 2012

Africa is yet to adopt full scale technology-led development. Steve Mbogo spoke to the Director of the Belfer Center's Science, Technology, and Globalisation Project and professor at Harvard University Calestous Juma on the opportunities that await the continent as a late comer.

In this Sept. 24, 2010, file photo the National Cybersecurity & Communications Integration Center (NCCIC) prepares for the Cyber Storm III exercise at its operations center in Arlington, Va.

AP Photo

Magazine Article - Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

The Future of Power

| Spring 2011

"The conventional wisdom among those who looked at the Middle East used to be that you had a choice either of supporting the autocrat or being stuck with the religious extremists. The extraordinary diffusion of information created in Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries reveals a strong middle that we weren't fully aware of. What is more, new technologies allow this new middle to coordinate in ways unseen before Twitter, Facebook, and so forth, and this could lead to a very different politics of the Middle East. This introduces a new complexity to our government's dealings with the region."

Journal Article - Minerva

Chemistry, Green Chemistry, and the Instrumental Valuation of Sustainability

| March 2011

Using the Public Value Mapping framework, the author addresses the values successes and failures of chemistry as compared to the emerging field of green chemistry, in which the promoters attempt to incorporate new and expanded values, such as health, safety, and environmental sustainability, to the processes of prioritizing and conducting chemistry research.

Analysis & Opinions - The Washington Post

The Cybersecurity Changes We Need

| May 29, 2010

"There is widespread agreement that this long-term trend of grabbing the economic gains from information technology advances and ignoring their security costs has reached a crisis point," write Melissa Hathaway and Jack Goldsmith. "As we progress digitally, we must also adopt and embed sometimes-costly security solutions into our core infrastructures and enterprises and stop playing the game of chance."

President Barack Obama signs the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010, Oct. 28, 2009, in the East Room of the White House in Washington, D.C.

AP Photo

Analysis & Opinions - DoD Buzz

US Less Dominant But So What

| November 25, 2009

"Our military strength, we are warned, is declining. But is it? In the end, it is important to remember that there is no objective limit to the size or power of the U.S. armed forces; they are as strong as Americans are willing to pay for. And in a country where personal spending exceeds 4 billion dollars a year on cat food and another 6 billion or so on potato chips, that is a huge amount of military potential. America is a land of choice, and right now Americans are worrying more about their homes, schools, health care and jobs than whether the U.S. government spends more on its military than the next fifteen countries, or just the next ten (including multiples of the Chinese military budget), even considering the well-earned personnel and health care costs that makes our military budget seem so much larger than so many others."