Francis S. Collins

“Francis Collins has combined the talents of rigorous science and a profound sensitivity to ethical, legal and social issues. He is a physician scientist of great faith, compassion, energy and integrity.” – President Bill Clinton

THE LANGUAGE OF GOD makes the case for God and for science. As one of the world’s leading scientists, Dr. Francis Collins works at the cutting edge of the study of DNA, the code of life. Yet he is also a man of unshakable faith in God and scripture. He believes that God cares about us, and can intervene in human affairs—on rare occasions, even miraculously. Dr. Collins has personally discovered some of the scientific evidence for the common descent of all living creatures, yet he rejects the materialist, atheistic worldview argued by many prominent Darwinists.

Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., is a physician-geneticist and currently serves as the Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. In this capacity, he oversaw the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium, and its landmark effort to sequence the entire human DNA code, the Human Genome Project. Building on the foundation laid by the Human Genome Project, Dr. Collins is now leading the NHGRI effort to ensure that this new trove of sequence data is translated into powerful tools and thoughtful strategies to advance biological knowledge and improve human health.

Dr. Collins obtained his undergraduate degree in chemistry at the University of Virginia, and went on to obtain a Ph.D. in physical chemistry at Yale University. Recognizing that a revolution was beginning in molecular biology and genetics, he changed fields and enrolled in medical school at the University of North Carolina. He continued in Chapel Hill for his residency and chief residency in internal medicine. Dr. Collins then returned to Yale for a fellowship in human genetics, where he worked on methods of crossing large stretches of DNA to identify disease genes. He continued to develop these ideas after joining the faculty at the University of Michigan in 1984, and later coined the term “positional cloning” to describe the technique. This strategy has now become a fundamental approach to identify disease genes in the absence of known functional abnormalities, and is a powerful component of modern molecular genetics. His laboratories at the University of Michigan and the National Institutes of Health have discovered a number of important genes, including those responsible for cystic fibrosis, neurofibromatosis, Huntington's disease and most recently, the gene that causes Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome, a dramatic form of premature aging.