God, Science, and Francis Collins
The geneticist and Christian evangelical will bring a unique zeal to the National Institutes of Health.
In
2005, I wrote a profile of the geneticist Francis Collins that referred to him
as an apostle of genetics. Then the director of the Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health, Collins was, and
is, an evangelical Christian who also believes strongly in evidence-based
science and evolution–and in spreading the word about the power of genetics
and molecular biology to radically reshape medicine and society.
Whether
talking to members of Congress, high-powered scientific leaders from around the
world, one of his patients, or students in his lab, Collins’s zeal
and ambition for pushing his vision of science is palpable and intense–and
often delivered with a rural Virginia drawl that puts listeners at ease even as
he aggressively pushes his agenda.
He
acquired his aw-shucks demeanor–and penchant for wearing flannel shirts and
corduroy pants–growing up in the Shenandoah River Valley in Virginia. His
parents came from New York City but checked out of urban life to run a
back-to-nature farm, and to produce a professional summer Shakespeare theatrical
company. Folk singers often showed up when he was a boy, and Bob Dylan spent
his 18th birthday in the Collins farmhouse.
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A
man who loves to speak and to play his guitar–he was recently shown with his
ax dressed like Bon Jovi in a GQ spread
called “Rock Stars of Science”–Collins learned to be skilled at performing
and persuading, he told me, by playing roles in his parents’ plays. At the age
of seven, he wrote a children’s play version of The Wizard of Oz and played a role uncharacteristic for this firebrand
of science: the Cowardly Lion.
He
first trained as a chemist, then became a physician, discovering God while
trying to sort out the mysteries of life and death at age 27 during his
residency at the University of North Carolina. He later landed at the
University of Michigan, where he drew attention for codiscovering the gene
mutations for cystic fibrosis in 1989. In 1993, he received an unexpected
invitation from then director of the NIH, Bernadine Healy, to succeed James
Watson as the head of the Human Genome Project–which Collins first declined,
but later accepted.
Collins
has a preference for big ideas, and has continued to organize large-scale
projects to map and organize the genomes of humans and other organisms. Lately,
he has been pushing a stronger linkage between environmental factors, such as
chemical pollutants and stress, that interact with genes, calling for a $400 million
increase in the Gene Environment Initiative, which he helped get passed by Congress in
2006.
He
is a savvy operator on Capitol Hill, where he succeeded in not only funding
billions of dollars in genetics research, but also pushing the passage last year
of legislation that protects Americans from being genetically discriminated against
by insurers and employers.
We
can expect much more in the way of big projects that link different disciplines
and institutes at the NIH–and possibly a reorganization of an organization
that has many overlapping institutes that have grown up ad hoc over the years.
His
emphasis on big might explain why Collins loves big motorcycles, including a red
Harley-Davidson that he wheeled out one day a couple of years ago when I visited him
at the NIH. Looking a little incongruous with his lean, tall, slightly nerdy
look riding high on his hog, he took me on a ride–and proceeded to roar up
and down Wisconsin Avenue in Bethesda like a big kid. Like a good scientist, he
also meticulously obeyed every traffic rule, signaling turns and
shoulder checking when he changed lanes. I’m sure he followed the speed limit,
though I couldn’t see his speedometer from the backseat.
Collins
will be a fierce advocate for personalized medicine. Last year, he left the NIH
after 15 years to write a book that he was unable to publish while still
working for the government. He has been mum on the details, but in talking to
him over the years, I suspect that it will describe the need to move more
aggressively with validating genetic markers and other crucial elements of
personalized medicine, while calling for a broad plan to move research and
applications of medical discoveries toward a more individualized approach
based on a person’s own genetics and physiology.
The
announcement of Collins’s nomination has been long expected and was delayed in
part because he has been finishing his book–his second endeavor as an author
after the 2007 publication of the best-selling The
Language of God, which argued in favor of theistic evolution–a process
that Collins calls BioLogos. Recently, Collins cofounded the BioLogos Foundation to support the idea of
fusing faith and science.
He
has strong opinions about how to organize scientific endeavors, leaning toward an open exchange of data and information and less toward
commercialization–a point that he has made repeatedly since fending off efforts to
privatize the results of the Human Genome Project, which he headed up in the 1990s.
Yet he has been careful in recent years to balance the need to promote accuracy
and validation of genetic testing with a desire to promote commercial endeavors
such as 23andMe and deCodeme–companies that offer the direct-to-consumer genetic
testing for dozens of diseases and traits.
Though
critical of the accuracy of some of these tests, Collins believes that they will be
useful in the long run. Under a Collins directorate, we could see an accelerated
effort to standardize and regulate these companies, either voluntarily or, if
that fails, through mandatory rules.
Francis
Collins has been known to make enemies. He still bristles when the rivalry between
him and Craig Venter, his bitter adversary during the race to sequence the
human genome in the 1990s, is brought up. Other rivals from his past also
remember that the young Collins was willing to aggressively outmaneuver rivals
to get ahead.
“I
have to be honest about my own personality,” Collins said. “I am competitive. I
find it particularly exciting as a scientist to get at something that hasn’t
been done before. It’s an incredible downer to get scooped. This is human
nature.”
When
I sent Collins the profile that I wrote, with the allusion to St. Paul–which appears in my
2006 book Masterminds:
Genius, DNA and the Quest to Rewrite Life–I was sure that he would be
annoyed. But he wasn’t. He found it amusing, signing an e-mail soon after as
coming from “Francis, aka St. Paul.”