U.S. President-elect Barack Obama has formed his technology team with a pledge to ensure that "facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology," CNN reported on Sunday.

Quoting a statement from the Obama transition team, the report said that Harvard University professor John Holdren will serve as assistant to the president for science and technology and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Environmental scientist and marine ecologist Jane Lubchenco of Oregon State University was nominated as the next administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The president-elect also named Nobel Prize winner Harold Varmus, a former director of the National Institutes of Health, and Eric Lander of MIT and Harvard, a leader of the Human Genome Project, to co-chair the Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

In Obama's Saturday radio address, he outlined his science and technology policy.

"It is time we once again put science at the top of our agenda and worked to restore America's place as the world leader in science and technology," he said.

"It's about listening to what our scientists have to say, even when it's inconvenient -- especially when it's inconvenient," Obama said, adding that government support had been essential for the greatest scientific breakthroughs of recent history, like the development of the Internet.

(Xinhua News Agency December 22, 2008)