Francis Collins
Francis Sellers Collins is an American physician-scientist who discovered the genes associated with a number of diseases and led the Human Genome Project. He served as director of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, from 17 August 2009 to 19 December 2021, serving under three presidents. Collins announced his retirement publicly from the NIH on March 1, 2025, after 32 years of service.
Before being appointed director of the NIH, Collins led the Human Genome Project and other genomics research initiatives as director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, one of the 27 institutes and centers at NIH. Before joining NHGRI, he earned a reputation as a gene hunter at the University of Michigan. He has been elected to the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences, and has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Medal of Science.
Collins has written books on science, medicine, and religion, including the New York Times bestseller The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. After leaving the directorship of NHGRI and before becoming director of the NIH, he founded and served as president of The BioLogos Foundation, which promotes discourse on the relationship between science and religion and advocates the perspective that belief in Christianity can be reconciled with acceptance of evolution and science, especially through the theistic evolution idea that the Creator brought about his plan through the processes of evolution. In 2009, Pope Benedict XVI appointed Collins to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
On October 5, 2021, Collins announced that he would resign as NIH director by the end of the year. Four months later in February 2022, he joined the Cabinet of Joe Biden as Acting Science Advisor to the President, replacing Eric Lander.
Early life and education
Collins was born in Staunton, Virginia, the youngest of four sons of Fletcher Collins and Margaret James Collins. Raised on a small farm in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, Collins was home schooled until the sixth grade. He attended Robert E. Lee High School in Staunton, Virginia. Through most of his high school and college years he aspired to be a chemist, and he had little interest in what he then considered the "messy" field of biology. What he referred to as his "formative education" was received at the University of Virginia, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry in 1970. He went on to graduate as a Doctor of Philosophy in physical chemistry at Yale University in 1974.During his time at Yale, a course in biochemistry sparked his interest in the subject. After consulting with his mentor from the University of Virginia, Carl Trindle, he changed fields and enrolled in medical school at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, earning a Doctor of Medicine degree there in 1977. From 1978 to 1981, Collins served a residency and chief residency in internal medicine at North Carolina Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill. He then returned to Yale, where he was a fellow in human genetics at the medical school from 1981 to 1984.
Genetics research
At Yale, Collins worked under the direction of Sherman Weissman, and in 1984 the two published a paper, "Directional cloning of DNA fragments at a large distance from an initial probe: a circularization method". The method described was named chromosome jumping, to emphasize the contrast with an older and much more time-consuming method of copying DNA fragments called chromosome walking. Collins joined the University of Michigan faculty in 1984, rising to the rank of professor in internal medicine and human genetics. His gene-hunting approach, which he named "positional cloning", developed into a powerful component of modern molecular genetics.Several scientific teams worked in the 1970s and 1980s to identify genes and their loci as a cause of cystic fibrosis. Progress was modest until 1985, when Lap-Chee Tsui and colleagues at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children identified the locus for the gene. It was then determined that a shortcut was needed to speed the process of identification, so Tsui contacted Collins, who agreed to collaborate with the Toronto team and share his chromosome-jumping technique. The gene was identified in June 1989, and the results were published in the journal Science on September 8, 1989. This identification was followed by other genetic discoveries made by Collins and a variety of collaborators. They included isolation of the genes for Huntington's disease, neurofibromatosis, multiple endocrine neoplasia type 1, inv AML and Hutchinson–Gilford progeria syndrome.
Genomics
In 1993, National Institutes of Health Director Bernadine Healy appointed Collins to succeed James D. Watson as director of the National Center for Human Genome Research, which became National Human Genome Research Institute in 1997. As director he oversaw the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium, which was the group that successfully carried out the Human Genome Project. In 1994, Collins founded NHGRI's Division of Intramural Research, a collection of investigator-directed laboratories that conduct genome research on the NIH campus.In June 2000 Collins was joined by President Bill Clinton and biologist Craig Venter in making the announcement of a working draft of the human genome. He stated that "It is humbling for me, and awe-inspiring to realize that we have caught the first glimpse of our own instruction book, previously known only to God." An initial analysis was published in February 2001, and scientists worked toward finishing the reference version of the human genome sequence by 2003, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of James D. Watson and Francis Crick's publication of the structure of DNA.
Another major activity at NHGRI during his tenure as director was the creation of the haplotype map of the human genome. This International HapMap Project produced a catalog of human genetic variations—called single-nucleotide polymorphisms—which is now being used to discover variants correlated with disease risk. Among the labs engaged in that effort is Collins's own lab at NHGRI, which has sought to identify and understand the genetic variations that influence the risk of developing type 2 diabetes.
In addition to his basic genetic research and scientific leadership, Collins is known for his close attention to ethical and legal issues in genetics. He has been a strong advocate for protecting the privacy of genetic information and has served as a national leader in securing the passage of the federal Genetic Information and Nondiscrimination Act, which prohibits gene-based discrimination in employment and health insurance. In 2013, spurred by concerns over the publication of the genome of the widely used HeLa cell line derived from the late Henrietta Lacks, Collins and other NIH leaders worked with the Lacks family to reach an agreement to protect their privacy, while giving researchers controlled access to the genomic data.
Building on his own experiences as a physician volunteer in a rural missionary hospital in Nigeria, Collins is also very interested in opening avenues for genome research to benefit the health of people living in developing nations. For example, in 2010, he helped establish an initiative called Human Heredity and Health in Africa to advance African capacity and expertise in genomic science. Collins announced his resignation as NHGRI director on May 28, 2008, but has continued to lead an active lab there with a research focus on progeria and type 2 diabetes.
NIH director
Nomination and confirmation
On July 8, 2009, President Barack Obama nominated Collins as director of the National Institutes of Health, and the Senate unanimously confirmed him for the post. He was sworn in by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on August 17, 2009. Science writer Jocelyn Kaiser opined that Collins was "known as a skilled administrator and excellent communicator", that Obama's nomination "did not come as a big surprise", and that the appointment "ignited a volley of flattering remarks from researchers and biomedical groups." She also wrote that Collins "does have his critics", some of them who were concerned with the new director's "outspoken Christian faith". Washington Post staffer David Brown wrote that Collins's status as a "born-again Christian... may help him build bridges with those who view some gene-based research as a potential threat to religious values." Collins's appointment was welcomed by the chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and by Bernadine Healy, the former head of the National Institutes of Health.In October 2009, shortly after his appointment as NIH director, Collins stated in an interview in The New York Times: "I have made it clear that I have no religious agenda for the N.I.H., and I think the vast majority of scientists have been reassured by that and have moved on." On October 1, 2009, in the second of his four appearances on The Colbert Report, Collins discussed his leadership at the NIH and other topics such as personalized medicine and stem cell research. And, in November 2011, Collins was included on The New Republic's list of Washington's most powerful, least famous people. Collins appeared on the series finale of The Colbert Report, participating in a chorus with several other famous people singing "We'll Meet Again".
On June 6, 2017, President Donald Trump announced his selection of Collins to continue to serve as the NIH Director. On 19 December 2017, Collins and the NIH lifted the Obama moratorium on gain of function research because it was deemed to be "important in helping us identify, understand, and develop strategies and effective countermeasures against rapidly evolving pathogens that pose a threat to public health." In October 2020, Collins criticized the Great Barrington Declaration's "focused protection" herd immunity strategy, calling it "a fringe component of epidemiology. This is not mainstream science. It's dangerous. It fits into the political views of certain parts of our confused political establishment." In a private email to Fauci, Collins called the authors of the declaration "fringe epidemiologists" and said: "There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises." The Wall Street Journal