It balances only the moral status of the embryo with the good that might result from its being experimented on. But his is a materialist vision of compassion. So as much as I think human embryos deserve moral status, it is hard to see why it’s more ethical to throw them away than to take some that are destined for discarding and do something that might help somebody.Īt first blush this seems a compassionate response to a situation Collins would prefer had never arisen.
And it is absolutely unrealistic to imagine that anything will happen to those other than they’re eventually getting discarded. “So I would be opposed to the idea of creating embryos by mixing sperm and eggs together and then experimenting on the outcome of that, purely to understand research questions.” In an interview with PBS, he added: There are hundreds of thousands of those embryos currently frozen away in in vitro fertilization clinics. “I believe that the product of a sperm and an egg, which is the first cell that goes on to develop a human being, deserves considerable moral consequences,” Collins told Salon in 2006. Collins has tried to reconcile his commitment to stem cell research with his evangelical faith. His witness is singular, and singularly powerful-if we don’t look too closely.įrom the beginning of his tenure as director of the NIH, Collins pursued a policy of expanding embryonic stem cell research, a priority of Obama’s that likely influenced Collins's decision to join his campaign in 2008. Collins has championed the compatibility of science and religion and encouraged Christians to accept theistic evolution through his bestselling 2006 book The Language of God and a spin-off organization, BioLogos. His presence in the halls of medical power was also a testament to the harmony of faith and reason. He showed that it was possible for an evangelical from a working-class background to rise to the heights of scientific and bureaucratic accomplishment. These achievements are remarkable on their own, but all the more resonant because Collins is an outspoken evangelical Christian. Most recently, Collins was a steady leader during the pandemic, and instrumental in the public-private partnerships that made possible the rapid development of vaccines.
These included the 10-year Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative, the Cancer Moonshot, and the Precision Medicine Initiative, which yielded All of Us, “an effort to amass a trove of data on the genomic basis of disease by collecting health records and DNA sequences from 1 million volunteers.” He was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom, a National Medal of Science, and even appointed to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences by Pope Benedict XVI. He leaves behind an ambivalent legacy.Īfter President Obama appointed him director of the NIH in 2009, Collins became the most transformative leader in the institute’s history, emphasizing big data approaches to health science and launching ambitious projects. This, too, is the kind of man Francis Collins is.Ĭollins recently announced that this year will be his last at the NIH, bringing to a close twelve years of tireless public service in charge of the largest biomedical research body in the world. Their research findings were published by Nature in September 2020 and include photos showing patches of soft, wispy baby hair growing amid coarse rodent fur. One month earlier, Collins's NIH had approved a research grant requested by University of Pittsburgh scientists who desired to graft the scalps of aborted fetuses onto rats and mice. This is the kind of man Francis Collins is. He concluded his performance with an emotional benediction, promising that he would see the young man again and that he and his staff would not give up searching for a cure. The man had enjoyed the song, and Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, cared dearly for him.
On June 8, 2019, Francis Collins finger-picked his guitar and sang Andy Grammer’s song “Don’t Give Up On Me” at the memorial service for a young man who had died after a four-year battle with a rare kidney cancer.