Francis Collins Interview (page: 8 / 9) Presidential Medal of Freedom	Print Interview

What challenges do you see for America in the 21st century?

Francis Collins: It's hard for me to look more than 5 or 10 years into the future. When I think about what I knew 20 years ago, I would not have been able to predict what's going on now. I think we need to live up to our responsibility as the leaders of the free world. I think we need to look at the ways that we are treating our own people and root out some of the inequities that we turn our heads always from. Inequities that relate to prejudice. We are always figuring out ways to think that somebody else is lesser and we are greater.

As a geneticist, I look forward to the time when we can say -- because we'll have all the data -- that race doesn't really exist. It may be a social construct, it may be a cultural construct, but it sure ain't a scientific construct. And I think we already know that in some generalities, but we'll know that in detail pretty soon. And that will be good, because I think that is a chronic sore on our culture that we are unwilling to cope with. And for the 21st century, if we could focus on that as our highest priority, that would be wonderful.
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There are many other inequities, for me as a physician. A situation where we allow 40 million people to go without any form of health care is appalling. We, of all the countries in the civilized world, have the least sense of equity in the way we distribute those resources. It's an embarrassment, yet we go on year after year accepting this, and crowing about how wonderful our medical system is. It is if you've got money, but it sure isn't if you don't. That does not reflect well on us as a country that prizes justice. I don't think access to health care is a privilege, I think it's a right. We have not offered those rights to everybody equitably.

As the leader of the free world, with such wonderful resources, we ought to invest more in the way of research. I'm not just talking about the kind of research I do. We need to encourage research of all sorts. The things that are going on in space and physics and chemistry and engineering are all exciting. We never know how they're going to fit together. We should attach more value to that. We're not fighting any wars right now. We don't have any great enemies. If there was ever a time in history that we ought to put more value in planning for the future, this is it.

Was there someone in your career who was instrumental in giving you the start that you needed? Who saw you and believed in you?

Francis Collins: As a senior in college I had a mentor who had just arrived from Yale as an assistant professor. He oversaw my senior research project, and spent countless hours helping me understand issues that related to theoretical calculations in quantum mechanics, something I was very interested in. He made me believe in myself, that I had the ability not just to copy somebody else's ideas, but to come up with one of my own occasionally. That was very important.

After I went to medical school and got into molecular biology, made this transition into research and genetics, I was fortunate to work in the laboratory of the most brilliant man I've ever met. He has 10 new ideas an hour. He's also somebody who doesn't communicate very well. He's on another plane. In the first month I was there I don't think I understood a word he said. He was speaking English, but it made no sense to me. I was really lucky to have a chance to watch his mind work and to see how he could take really disparate observations and come up with an idea.

That was inspiring, opening up your mind, getting rid of the limitations of the direct approach. When somebody said, "That's not an experiment that you can do," questioning it. "Why not? Just because nobody ever did it before?" He really taught me that.

When you become a grandfather, and sit down to read something to your grandchildren, what do you think it might be?

Francis Collins: Probably Winnie The Pooh or The Wizard of Oz, hearkening back to my own youth, and wanting to recreate that for a grandchild.

Are there books that have been important to you as an adult?

Francis Collins: There are several.

Perhaps the books that have changed my life most profoundly are a couple of books written by the Oxford scholar, C.S. Lewis. Not about science, actually, about faith. When I was 27, I was a medical intern, I was a pretty obnoxious atheist at that point. I began to realize that while in other parts of my life I didn't make decisions without accumulating data and then looking at it, I hadn't really done that when it came to this very important decision about, "Do you believe in God, or not?"
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Because I had no real grounding for that, I discovered in college that I couldn't debate those who said, faith was just a superstitious carry-over from the past and we've gone beyond that. I assumed that must be right, and I promoted that same view. And at 27, particularly as a medical intern, watching so many tumultuous things happening around me -- young people dying for terrible reasons that shouldn't have come to pass -- you can't avoid noticing some pretty scary questions that don't seem to have answers. So I decide I'd better resolve this.

Somebody pointed me towards C.S. Lewis's little book called Mere Christianity, which took all of my arguments that I thought were so airtight about the fact that faith is just irrational, and proved them totally full of holes. And in fact, turned them around the other way, and convinced me that the choice to believe is actually the most rational conclusion when you look at the evidence around you. That was a shocking sort of revelation, and one that I fought bitterly for about a year and then finally decided to accept. And that's a book I go back to regularly, to dig through there for the truths that you find there, which are not truths that Lewis would claim he discovered for the first time, but he certainly expresses them in a very powerful way to somebody who is not willing to accept faith on an emotional basis, and I wasn't.
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