Francis Collins was recently confirmed as the new Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He was born in 1950 and raised on a small farm in Virginia. He was homeschooled until age eleven. He had a high school chemistry teacher he credits for inspiring his interest in science. This was the first time he learned that science could be about learning how to solve a problem rather than just memorizing facts.

Source: Wikipedia

At age sixteen Francis started college at the University of Virginia, majoring in chemistry. There he first heard about DNA, which was a totally new field at the time. From there it was on to Yale University where he got his Ph.D. in chemistry. In 1978 he entered medical school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was impressed on seeing patients with genetic disorders. “It was so powerful to see the consequences of a small change in this wonderful molecule called DNA. Just one letter out of place could cause a disease like Sickle Cell Anemia.” There, he did a residency in internal medicine. He returned to Yale to do a post-doctoral fellowship in human genetics in 1981. In 1984 he joined the faculty at the University of Michigan where he was an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. It was there that he developed the technique of positional cloning. This allowed him to identify a number of disease-causing genes. In 1989, he identified a gene associated with cystic fibrosis. Subsequently, he found the gene associated with neurofibromatosis in 1990 and for Huntington’s disease in 1993. He always felt that his background in chemistry allowed him to take a more rigorous approach to sequencing DNA. He was excited about the idea that genetic research would allow us to tell people if they will get a disease or not.

From 1993, Dr. Collins became the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at NIH. There, he led the Human Genome Project to sequence the entire human genome. The project was completed ahead of schedule and under budget. The complete sequencing was finished in 2003 instead of the projected 2005. He had to spend much of his time on ethical and legal problems to ensure the information did not get misused and that people could not get discriminated against if they had a gene for a disease. “We can use that information to try to prevent a disease before it even starts,” he said in an interview in 1998.

On his role as leader of that project, he is quoted in the same interview as saying, “I can only weigh in when it comes to scientific facts.” In that interview he said, “We spend about one and a half percent of our health care budget on research. No company would dream of only plowing back one and a half percent of their business into research. Yet we seem comfortable doing that with something as important as healthcare. That’s frustrating. There are so many things we can do.”

There has been some concern as to whether his religious beliefs will interfere with his role as NIH Director. At age twenty-seven, he became religious based on “a series of basically logical explorations into whether or not a belief in God is something that makes sense.” He also credits C.S.Lewis’s book, Mere Christianity. He is founder of the BioLogos Foundation, a group that promotes dialogue between the church and science. He wrote a book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence of Belief in 2006. However, he is on record as rejecting intelligent design.

Collins nomination has been lauded by David Baltimore, the American Heart Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Collins has been elected to the Institute of Medicine and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

He is also known for dabbling in guitar and riding a motorcycle. He formed the band, The NIH Directors, which plays at NIH events.