Francis Collins
Francis Collins
Francis Sellers Collinsis an American physician-geneticist noted for his discoveries of disease genes and his leadership of the Human Genome Project. He is director of the National Institutes of Healthin Bethesda, Maryland, USA...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth14 April 1950
CountryUnited States of America
atheist reading years
As an atheist evolving to agnosticism, and seeking answers to whether or not belief in God is potentially rational, my life was turned upside down 35 years ago by reading C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity.
made made-it threatened
God is most certainly not threatened by science; He made it all possible.
beautiful majestic creation
The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. He can be worshipped in the cathedral or in the laboratory. His creation is majestic, awesome, intricate, and beautiful.
strong stars people
There are 15 constants- the gravitational constant, various constants about the strong and weak nuclear force, etc.- that have precise values. If any one of those constants was off by even one part in a million, or in some cases, by one part in a million million, the universe could not have actually come to the point where we see it. Matter would not have been able to coalesce, there would have been no galaxy, stars, planets or people
views order iron
One must dig deeply into opposing points of view in order to know whether your own position remains defensible. Iron sharpens iron.
dna doubt records
Yes, evolution by descent from a common ancestor is clearly true. If there was any lingering doubt about the evidence from the fossil record, the study of DNA provides the strongest possible proof of our relatedness to all other living things.
religious scientific-method logical
By committing the scientific method to religious claims you're committing a logical fallacy
prayer opportunity trying
Prayer is, for me, not an opportunity to ask God to do stuff for me. Prayer is an opportunity to open myself, to try and understand his will, and oftentimes it's a prayer of thanksgiving, and sometimes it's a prayer of supplication, and sometimes it is just worship.
atheist atheism argument
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.
religious soul able
When does life begin? When does the soul enter? That's a religious question. Science is not going to be able to help with that.
opposites reason revelations
Faith is not the opposite of reason. Faith rests squarely upon reason, but with the added component of revelation.
spiritual children couple
The human genome will not help us to understand the spiritual side of humankind, or to know who God is or what love is. The well-heeled couple who decide they want to use genetics to have a child that is a gifted musician may end up with a sullen adolescent who smokes marijuana and doesn't talk to them.
daughter believe frustration
My daughter is a practicing physician so believe me I get a lot of the frustration from her. You get it from patients. For me personally, when I ask my doctor to send me my record, what I get is a scanned PDF of his hard copy! This is not good. It would be hopeless to work with a million people if you had to do this on paper, and one of the reasons this is the right time for this is because of the existence of EHRs.
fda people drug
When a drug comes out [that's broadly prescribed] there are going to start to be a lot of people on it [in a million person cohort] and you might get therefore an early signal of something unexpected that hadn't come through in the clinical trials. And I'm sure [drug companies] would love it if, in fact, FDA, recognizing that, would say, OK, maybe you don't have to do your trial with 30,000 people because we're going to find out shortly after registration because we'll have a lot of people taking the drug and we'll be able to see what happened using PMI.