Pope Appoints Protestant as Chief Science Adviser

by Edwin Cartlidge
18 January 2011

Pope Benedict XVI has appointed Swiss microbiologist Werner Arber as the new president of the Vatican's scientific advisory body, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Arber, a Protestant, becomes the first non-Catholic to head the organization, which has roots dating back to the early 17th century. He succeeds Italian physicist Nicola Cabibbo, who died in August last year.

The academy is designed to keep the church up to date with the latest scientific advances and so help it avoid making the kind of errors that brought it into conflict with science in the past. Set up in its present form by Pope Pius XI in 1936, it consists of 80 distinguished scientists, both men and women, who have a variety of religious affiliations or are nonreligious and who include a significant number of Nobel Prize winners. the rest