Francis Collins, Faith, and Stem Cell Research

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Francis Collins, a fervent Christian, thought he had resolved the stem-cell debate. A federal judge disagreed.
by Peter J. Boyer
SEPTEMBER 6, 2010

The choice of Collins to head the N.I.H. seemed to reflect the President’s own view of the harmony between science and religion.

Francis Collins; Geneticists; N.I.H. (National Institutes of Health); Scientists; Stem-Cell Research; Christians; Religion
hen the geneticist Francis Collins was named director of the National Institutes of Health, last summer, he became the public face of American science and the keeper of the world’s deepest biomedical-research-funding purse. He was praised by President Obama and waved through the Senate confirmation process without objection. There also came a peer review of a sort that he’d never experienced, conducted in the press and in Internet science forums. Collins read in the Times that many of his colleagues in the scientific community believed that he suffered from “dementia.” Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard, questioned the appointment on the ground that Collins was “an advocate of profoundly anti-scientific beliefs.” P. Z. Myers, a biologist at the University of Minnesota at Morris, complained, “I don’t want American science to be represented by a clown.”

Collins’s detractors did not question his professional achievements, which long ago secured his place in the first rank of international scientists. As a young researcher at Yale, Collins conceived a method of hastening the laborious process of hunting disease-causing genes by skipping across long stretches of chromosomes until the suspect gene’s neighborhood was located. As an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, in the nineteen-eighties, he and collaborators at the University of Toronto employed this method to find the gene that causes cystic fibrosis and, a year later, the genetic flaw responsible for neurofibromatosis. These breakthroughs brought him fame and, eventually, the job of director of the Human Genome Project, which promised to revolutionize medicine by identifying and mapping all the approximately twenty thousand human genes that code for protein.

Thanks to that job, there wasn’t much doubt about Collins’s ability to handle the formidable management challenge of running the N.I.H., which directly employs twenty thousand scientists and staff, funds three hundred and twenty-five thousand outside researchers, and operates twenty-seven institutes and research centers on its campus, in Bethesda, Maryland. A key duty of the N.I.H. director is to justify the agency’s budget and defend before Congress the programs it funds, a duty that requires a skill quite apart from prowess in the laboratory. In fifteen years at the National Human Genome Research Institute, Collins had proved himself an able manager, bringing the Genome Project to a successful conclusion in 2003—two and a half years early and four hundred million dollars under budget. He also won friends in Congress with a genial manner and a gift for conveying complex scientific information in felicitous language.


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