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
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Sequencing the chimp genome is a historic achievement that is destined to lead to many more exciting discoveries with implications for human health,
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As a Christian, but also as a scientist responsible for overseeing the Human Genome Project, one of my concerns has been the limits on applications of our understanding of the genome. Should there be limits? I think there should. I think the public has expressed their concern about ways this information might be misused.
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The brain is the most complicated organ in the universe. We have learned a lot about other human organs. We know how the heart pumps and how the kidney does what it does. To a certain degree, we have read the letters of the human genome. But the brain has 100 billion neurons. Each one of those has about 10,000 connections.
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My own area of expertise is the genetics of human disease. I was fortunate to be part of the team that found the genes for cystic fibrosis, and Huntington's disease and neurofibromatosis.
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If you are in support of in vitro fertilization, then you have to recognize that human embryos are being created in excess of what can be used safely to reimplant for a pregnancy. So they're going to end up being discarded.
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I finished up my graduate degree in quantum mechanics, but underwent a bit of a personal crisis, recognizing that I didn't want to do that for the rest of my life. It was too abstract, too far removed from human concerns.
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it's hard to overstate the importance of reading our own instruction book and that's what the human genome project is all about.
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These revelations arrive almost five years early from the original predictions of not having this information until 2005, and here we are. We have the first draft of our own book of life and we've read it from cover to cover, and we've discovered some pretty amazing surprises,
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The time is right to bring the full power of genomics to bear on the problem of cancer. Waiting another two years would have been too long. The biological research planets are aligned.
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Scientists must venture outside their comfort zones to show the public how cool - and how important - their work really is.
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We can peek into evolution's lab notebook and see what went on there.
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We need effective legislation to make those kinds of misuse illegal,
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Four years ago, we took down the book called Homo sapiens, ... Today, we take down the book next to it on the shelf.
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FTIs, originally developed for cancer, are capable of reversing the dramatic nuclear structure abnormalities that are the hallmark of cells from children with progeria,