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The U.S. Senate on Friday confirmed prominent geneticist Francis S. Collins as the new director of the National Institutes of Health.
With unanimous Senate approval, Collins, who is best known for leading the Human Genome Project, has become the NIH’s 16th director.
The NIH is the world’s largest biomedical organization, comprising of 27 institutes and research centers that together employs about 18,000 individuals. Its research program, which has an annual budget of $29.5 billion, is only second to the Department of Defense.
"Dr. Collins is one of our generation's great scientific leaders," Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a statement. "Dr. Collins will be an outstanding leader. Today is an exciting day for NIH and for science in this country."
But aside from his scientific prowess, Collins is well known for his openness about his Christian faith. He has spoken at countless universities and churches across the nation about the compatibility between science and religion, including the consistency between the Bible’s creation story and evolution.
Collins has strongly criticized fundamentalist teachings that say you have to either choose faith or science, especially on the subject of evolution. Many young Christian scientists, he has said, feel that science and their faith are in complete conflict when they are not.
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“There is simply no way to come up with an explanation of the earth being two thousand years old without basically throwing out all the basic principles of cosmology, theology, chemistry, physics and biology,” said Collins, who believes evolution is part of God’s creation process, during a lecture at the famed Washington National Cathedral in 2007.
Collins became a Christian during medical school at the age of 27. A chemist-physician-geneticist, he served as director of the National Human Genome Research Institute from 1993 to 2008.
He received his B.S. in chemistry from the University of Virginia, a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Yale University, and an M.D. with Honors from the University of North Carolina.
In 2007, Collins released his best-selling book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.
“For me – as a scientist who is a believer [that] doesn’t think those things have to be compartmentalized – the exploration of nature and the discovery about good things about the human body becomes not only an exhilaration of personal resort but also becomes a glimpse of God’s mind,” Collins said.
“In that regard, science can be and should be a form of worship. You meet God in the laboratory and not only in a setting like this.”
But science has its limits in the extent of questions it can answer. It cannot answer, for example, a question such as “what is the meaning of life?”
“Science is great at ‘how’ but science is not good at ‘why,’” Collins noted.
The Christian geneticist was nominated in July by President Barack Obama to head the NIH.
