Francis Collins

The farm in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley came with livestock, crops, and a summer theater the family carved out of a stand of oaks. Fletcher Collins taught drama at Mary Baldwin College and collected Anglo-American folk songs for the Library of Congress. Margaret wrote plays. They schooled their youngest son at home until the sixth grade. He wanted to be a chemist, thought biology was messy, and finished a doctorate in physical chemistry at Yale in 1974 before a biochemistry course sent him to medical school at North Carolina instead. By graduate school he had settled into unbelief. Then a gravely ill patient asked him what he believed, and he had no answer. He was 27 when he decided he did, and he has written about it himself since.

His method was positional cloning: find a disease gene from its address on the chromosome, not from its protein. It produced the cystic fibrosis gene in 1989 with Lap-Chee Tsui's Toronto team, and then, with others, Huntington's disease and neurofibromatosis. From 1993 he directed the National Center for Human Genome Research and ran the public consortium against Craig Venter's private company, to a joint announcement in June 2000 and an essentially complete sequence in 2003. The public project's rule, fixed in Bermuda in 1996: every stretch of sequence went into a free database within 24 hours. The genome stayed unowned.

Obama nominated him in 2009, Trump kept him in 2017, Biden kept him in 2021 — the longest-serving presidentially appointed NIH director and the only one to serve three presidents. He arrived carrying a bestseller. The Language of God, published in 2006, argued that evolutionary biology and Christian belief fit together, and rejected young-earth creationism and intelligent design alike. It drew fire from two directions. Sam Harris called reading it an act of intellectual suicide and found no more warrant in the frozen waterfall that preceded Collins's conversion than in the founding myth of Rome. A producer of the 2008 creationist film Expelled said Collins was toeing the party line, which Collins called ludicrous. He said publicly that he had no religious agenda for the NIH.

COVID made him one of the most visible officials in the country, then one of the most attacked. In October 2020 he called the Great Barrington Declaration's focused-protection strategy a fringe component of epidemiology and dangerous. A private email to Anthony Fauci, made public a year later through a records disclosure, asked for a quick and devastating published take down of its premises. The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote that he had shut down debate. In 2023 Collins said he regretted the terminology though not the judgment, and that public health had taken too narrow a view, weighing the virus against nothing else. House Republicans went on investigating the NIH coronavirus grants. The verdict on him is not settled.

Francis Collins's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Chromosome jumping discovery
  A way to reach genes far from any known marker, published with Sherman Weissman 1984
• Identification of the cystic fibrosis gene discovery
  CFTR, found with Lap-Chee Tsui and John Riordan in Toronto 1989
• Human Genome Project reference sequence discovery
  Led the public consortium, whose data went into free databases within 24 hours 2003
• The Language of God book
  Argues that evolutionary biology and Christian belief are compatible 2006
• The BioLogos Foundation other
  Founded to make the case for harmony between science and faith 2007
• The Road to Wisdom book
  On truth, science, faith and trust, written after the pandemic 2024

• April 14, 1950 aged 0 Born in Staunton, Virginia, the youngest of four sons Raised on a Shenandoah Valley farm and taught at home until the sixth grade.
• 1974 aged ~24 Finishes a doctorate in physical chemistry at Yale and leaves the field A biochemistry course sent him to medical school at North Carolina instead.
• 1984 aged ~34 Publishes chromosome jumping and joins the Michigan faculty The technique that made the gene hunts possible.
• September 8, 1989 aged 39 The cystic fibrosis gene appears in Science Identified that June with the Toronto team after Collins shared his method.
• 1993 aged ~43 Succeeds James Watson at the National Center for Human Genome Research
• June 26, 2000 aged 50 Announces a working draft of the human genome at the White House Alongside Bill Clinton and his private-sector rival Craig Venter.
• April 14, 2003 aged 52 The Human Genome Project declares the sequence essentially complete His 53rd birthday, and 50 years after Watson and Crick published the structure of DNA.
• August 17, 2009 aged 59 Sworn in as director of the National Institutes of Health
• December 19, 2021 aged 71 Leaves the NIH after more than 12 years and three presidents

• James Watson 1928–2025
  Co-discoverer of the DNA double helix structure, earning a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. succeeded
• Bill Clinton b. 1946
  42nd president whose centrist politics, economic agenda, and impeachment shaped the post-Cold War era. announced the genome with
• Anthony Fauci b. 1940
  Physician-scientist who shaped federal responses to HIV/AIDS, emerging infections, and the COVID-19 pandemic. colleague
• Henrietta Lacks 1920–1951
  Her cells were taken without her knowledge in 1951 and became the most used human cell line in science. reached an agreement with the family of