Francis Collins (geneticist)

Francis S. Collins (born April 14, 1950), M.D., Ph.D., is a physician-geneticist, noted for his landmark discoveries of disease genes, and his leadership of the Human Genome Project (HGP). He is the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI).

With Collins at the helm, the HGP has attained several milestones, while running ahead of schedule and under budget. A working draft of the human genome was announced in June 2000, and Collins was joined by US President Bill Clinton and rival scientist Craig Venter in making the announcement.^[1] Venter and Collins thus shared the "Biography of the Year" title from A&E Network.^[2] An initial analysis was published in February 2001. HGP scientists continued to work toward finishing the sequence of all three billion base pairs by 2003, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of Watson and Crick's seminal publication of the structure of DNA.

Collins's commitment to free, rapid access to genomic information helped to make all data immediately available to the worldwide scientific community. With these data sets of DNA sequence and variation in hand, researchers around the globe work on the process of understanding the connection between genes and disease. Collins envisions as a new era of individualized, prevention-oriented medicine.

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Beginnings

Raised on a small farm in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, Francis Sellers Collins was home-schooled by his mother until the sixth grade. His brother, Fletcher Collins, currently works at The Collegiate School. Throughout most of his high school and college years, the aspiring chemist had little interest in what he then considered the "messy" field of biology. What he refers to as his "formative education" was received at the University of Virginia, where he earned a B.S. in Chemistry in 1970. He went on to attain a Ph.D. in physical chemistry at Yale University in 1974. While at Yale, however, a course in biochemistry sparked his interest in the molecules that hold the blueprint for life: DNA and RNA. Collins recognized that a revolution was on the horizon in molecular biology and genetics. After consulting with his old mentor from the University of Virginia, Carl Trindle, he changed fields and enrolled in medical school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, earning there an M.D. 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 named a Fellow in Human Genetics at the medical school from 1981 to 1984. During that time, he developed innovative methods of crossing large stretches of DNA to identify disease genes.

After joining the University of Michigan in 1984 in a position that would eventually lead to a Professorship of Internal Medicine and Human Genetics, Collins heightened his reputation as a relentless gene hunter. That gene-hunting approach, which he named "positional cloning," has developed into a powerful component of modern molecular genetics.

In contrast to previous methods for finding genes, positional cloning enabled scientists to identify disease genes without knowing in advance what the functional abnormality underlying the disease might be. Collins' team, together with collaborators, applied the new approach in 1989 in their successful quest for the long-sought gene responsible for cystic fibrosis. Other major discoveries soon followed, including isolation of the genes for Huntington's disease, neurofibromatosis, multiple endocrine neoplasia type 1, and the M4 type of adult acute leukemia.

In 1996, a graduate student in Collins's lab was found guilty of scientific misconduct. Collins denied any prior knowledge or involvement in the data fabrication.

Leadership at NHGRI

Tapped to take on the leadership of the HGP, Collins accepted an invitation in 1993 to succeed James Watson and become director of the National Center for Human Genome Research, which became NHGRI in 1997. As director, he oversees the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium and many other aspects of what he has called "an adventure that beats going to the moon or splitting the atom."

In 1994, Collins founded NHGRI's Division of Intramural Research (DIR), an intramural program of genome research that has developed into one of the nation's premier research centers in human genetics.

With new tools arising from the human genome project, Collins is optimistic about the chances of uncovering hereditary contributors to common diseases, such as heart disease, cancer and mental illness. In the overall research agenda of NHGRI, this interest is reflected in the highly ambitious effort to construct a haplotype map of the human genome. The "hap map" will serve as a catalog of genetic variations - called single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) - and will help with discovering how these variations correlate with disease risk. Collins's work in his highly active lab demonstrates that research emphasis, which is devoted to finding the genes that contribute to adult-onset, Type 2 diabetes.

In addition to his long list of contributions to 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 efforts to prohibit gene-based insurance discrimination. 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.

Collins' accomplishments have been recognized by numerous awards and honors, including election to the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences. On Monday, November 5, 2007, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George W. Bush.

Religious views

Collins has described his parents as "only nominally Christian" and by graduate school he considered himself an atheist. However, dealing with dying patients led him to question his religious views, and he investigated various faiths. He became a believer after observing the faith of his critically ill patients and reading Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis.^[3]

In Collins' book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (published in July 2006), he considers scientific discoveries an "opportunity to worship." In his book Collins examines and subsequently rejects creationism and Intelligent Design. His own belief system is Theistic Evolution (TE) which he prefers to term BioLogos. BioLogos rests on the following premises: (1) The universe came into being out of nothingness, approximately 14 billion years ago, (2) Despite massive improbabilities, the properties of the universe appear to have been precisely tuned for life, (3) While the precise mechanism of the origin of life on earth remains unknown, once life arose, the process of evolution and natural selection permitted the development of biological diversity and complexity over very long periods of time, (4) Once evolution got under way no special supernatural intervention was required, (5) Humans are part of this process, sharing a common ancestor with the great apes, (6) But humans are also unique in ways that defy evolutionary explanation and point to our spiritual nature. This includes the existence of the Moral Law (the knowledge of right and wrong) and the search for God that characterizes all human cultures throughout history.

A documentary titled "Darwin's Deadly Legacy" by the Coral Ridge Ministries released in August 2006 originally advertised that it featured Collins and claims to "show why evolution is a bad idea that should be discarded into the dustbin of history." However, in email exchanged with science blogger PZ Myers, Collins was "unambiguous in stating that he was interviewed about his book, and that was then inserted into the video without his knowledge."^[4] When asked by the Anti-Defamation League why he agreed to appear in such a production, Collins stated that he was "absolutely appalled by what Coral Ridge Ministries is doing. I had NO knowledge that Coral Ridge Ministries was planning a TV special on Darwin and Hitler, and I find the thesis of Dr. Kennedy's program utterly misguided and inflammatory."^[5] Collins' name has since been removed from the Coral Ridge Ministries' promotional site^[6]; however, the interview segment was left in place with Collins saying that "Man is a special creature. We are not just part of some random evolutionary process with no purpose." He also commented on the large amount of data in the genetic code of humans and on the percentage of scientists who believe in God.

In an interview with National Geographic published in February 2007, interviewer John Horgan, a scientist and agnostic, criticized Collins' description of agnosticism as "a cop-out". In response, Collins clarified his position on agnosticism so as not to include "earnest agnostics who have considered the evidence and still don't find an answer. I was reacting to the agnosticism I see in the scientific community, which has not been arrived at by a careful examination of the evidence. I went through a phase when I was a casual agnostic, and I am perhaps too quick to assume that others have no more depth than I did."^[7] During a debate with Richard Dawkins, Collins stated that God is the object of the unanswered questions about the universe that science does not ask, and that God himself does not need an explanation since he is beyond the universe. Dawkins called this "the mother and father of all cop-outs" and "an incredible evasion of the responsibility to explain." ^[8]

In reviewing The Dawkins Delusion?: Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine? by Alister McGrath, Collins says "'Addressing the conclusions of The God Delusion point by point with the devastating insight of a molecular biologist turned theologian, Alister McGrath dismantles the argument that science should lead to atheism, and demonstrates instead that Dawkins has abandoned his much-cherished rationality to embrace an embittered manifesto of dogmatic atheist fundamentalism."^[9]

Quotations

• "Evolution is God's way of giving upgrades" (Stephen Colbert Interview, December 7, 2006)
• "I concluded at the age of 15 or 16 that I had no interest in biology, or medicine, or any of those aspects of science that dealt with this messy thing called life. It just wasn't organized, and I wanted to stick with the nice pristine sciences of chemistry and physics, where everything made sense."
• "I wish I had learned sooner that biology could be fun as well."
• (When asked, "What do you say to your fellow Christians who say, 'Evolution is just a theory, and I can't put that together with my idea of a creator God'?") "Well, evolution is a theory. It's a very compelling one. As somebody who studies DNA, the fact that we are 98.4 percent identical at the DNA level to a chimpanzee, it's pretty hard to ignore the fact that when I am studying a particular gene, I can go to the mouse and find it's the similar gene, and it's 90 percent the same. It's certainly compatible with the theory of evolution, although it will always be a theory that we cannot actually prove. I'm a theistic evolutionist. I take the view that God, in His wisdom, used evolution as His creative scheme. I don't see why that's such a bad idea. That's pretty amazingly creative on His part. And what is wrong with that as a way of putting together in a synthetic way the view of God who is interested in creating a group of individuals that He can have fellowship with -- us? Why is evolution not an appropriate way to get to that goal? I don't see a problem with that."^[10]

References

• Breaking the Code: Francis Collins' take on God and DNA
• Director Francis Collins' Biography from genome.gov
• Commencement Address, University of Virginia, May 20, 2001
• "I’ve found God, says man who cracked the genome", The Times, June 11, 2006
• The believer, Salon.com article on his religious beliefs
• Science Friday: Science and Religion, with Collins
• Religion & Ethics Newsweekly: Interview transcript
• "Falsified Data Found in Gene Studies", NY Times article on scientific misconduct by a graduate student in Collins's NIH laboratory
• On-line video of a lecture entitled The Language of God: A Believer Looks at the Human Genome given at the 2006 meeting of the American Scientific Affiliation
• Interview on CNN on Anderson Cooper's "What is a Christian?" on Youtube
• Sam Harris: The Language of Ignorance, His review of "The Language of God", Truthdig, Aug 15, 2006
• Francis Collins talks to Nigel Bovey of The War Cry (part1)
• Francis Collins talks to Nigel Bovey of The War Cry (part2)