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The Covenant...Francis Collins, a fervent Christian, thought he had resolved the stem-cell debate. A federal judge disagreed.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/09/06/100906fa_fact_boyer#ixzz0yrFmPfjU

by Peter J. Boyer
September 6, 2010 Text Size:
The choice of Collins to head the N.I.H. seemed to reflect the President’s own view of the harmony between science and religion.

When the geneticist Francis Collins was named director of the National Institutes of Health, last summer, he became the public face of American science and the keeper of the world’s deepest biomedical-research-funding purse. He was praised by President Obama and waved through the Senate confirmation process without objection. There also came a peer review of a sort that he’d never experienced, conducted in the press and in Internet science forums. Collins read in the Times that many of his colleagues in the scientific community believed that he suffered from “dementia.” Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard, questioned the appointment on the ground that Collins was “an advocate of profoundly anti-scientific beliefs.” P. Z. Myers, a biologist at the University of Minnesota at Morris, complained, “I don’t want American science to be represented by a clown.”

Collins’s detractors did not question his professional achievements, which long ago secured his place in the first rank of international scientists. As a young researcher at Yale, Collins conceived a method of hastening the laborious process of hunting disease-causing genes by skipping across long stretches of chromosomes until the suspect gene’s neighborhood was located. As an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, in the nineteen-eighties, he and collaborators at the University of Toronto employed this method to find the gene that causes cystic fibrosis and, a year later, the genetic flaw responsible for neurofibromatosis. These breakthroughs brought him fame and, eventually, the job of director of the Human Genome Project, which promised to revolutionize medicine by identifying and mapping all the approximately twenty thousand human genes that code for protein.

Thanks to that job, there wasn’t much doubt about Collins’s ability to handle the formidable management challenge of running the N.I.H., which directly employs twenty thousand scientists and staff, funds three hundred and twenty-five thousand outside researchers, and operates twenty-seven institutes and research centers on its campus, in Bethesda, Maryland. A key duty of the N.I.H. director is to justify the agency’s budget and defend before Congress the programs it funds, a duty that requires a skill quite apart from prowess in the laboratory. In fifteen years at the National Human Genome Research Institute, Collins had proved himself an able manager, bringing the Genome Project to a successful conclusion in 2003—two and a half years early and four hundred million dollars under budget. He also won friends in Congress with a genial manner and a gift for conveying complex scientific information in felicitous language.

The objection to Collins was his faith—or, at least, the ardency of it. Collins is a believing Christian, which places him in the minority among his peers in the National Academy of Science. (Of its members, according to a study, only seven per cent believe in God.)
After leaving the Genome Research Institute, Collins began drawing large crowds on the college lecture circuit; he created a Web site, BioLogos, to advance his idea of the companionability of reason and faith; and he wrote a best-selling book, “The Language of God,” in which he presented what he claims to be scientific evidence of the existence of God.

President Obama’s choice of Collins for the N.I.H. touched a nerve.
The George W. Bush era had been an extraordinarily fractious time in public science, beginning with Bush’s first prime-time address to the nation, in which he announced restrictions on embryonic-stem-cell research. That move, and others that followed, convinced Bush’s critics that the religious right had become the final arbiter of public policy, an impression that Bush seemed little inclined to dispel. “Well, we thought we’d seen the last of the theocracy of George W. Bush, but it apparently ain’t so,” Dr. Jerry Coyne, a University of Chicago professor, wrote when Collins was appointed. “I am funded by the N.I.H., and I’m worried. Not about my own funding (although I’m a heathen cultural Jew), but about how this will affect things like stem-cell research and its funding.”

A year later, Obama’s appointment of Collins seemed an inspired choice. The President had found not only a man who reflected his own view of the harmony between science and faith but an evangelical Christian who hoped that the government’s expansion of embryonic-stem-cell research might bring the culture war over science to a quiet end. On August 23rd, however, Judge Royce C. Lamberth, of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, halted federal spending for embryonic-stem-cell research, putting hundreds of research projects in limbo and plunging the N.I.H. back into a newly contentious national debate.

At the N.I.H., the ability to deal with controversies, as a generation of Collins’s predecessors learned, matters at least as much as credentials; political combat comes with the job. Collins does not seem a likely combatant. His physical aspect—gray mustache and hair (cut in an early-Beatles mop top), thin-rimmed eyeglasses, and a distinct pallor—suggests a man best acquainted with a sunless existence in some laboratory. Yet, in a relatively colorless town, Collins has come to be known as something of a character, a model of geek cool. He likes big, noisy motorcycles, and, despite a mild manner, he is famously unself-conscious. At the unlikeliest moments, he will strap on a guitar and accompany himself in song, often a tune he has composed for the occasion.

In dealing with Congress, Collins is less given to sentiment. A few weeks after moving into the director’s office, he received a letter from two Republican congressmen pressing him about a handful of N.I.H. grants “that do not seem to be of the highest scientific rigor.” The lawmakers, Joe Barton, of Texas, and Greg Walden, of Oregon, demanded to know the process by which the agency had funded a $423,500 study of why young heterosexual men did not consistently use condoms during sex. Barton and Walden were also curious about an N.I.H.-funded study investigating substance use and H.I.V.-risk behaviors among female and transgender sex workers in Thailand, and a $29,469 grant to researchers studying patterns of drug abuse in the Brazilian rave culture. The Barton-Walden inquiry was, in practical terms, just a gesture, as the programs in question had already been funded. Sometimes, though, such a gesture hits a vein of real political opportunity.