Francis Collins Interview (page: 3 / 9) Presidential Medal of Freedom	Print Interview

You weren't exactly one-dimensional as a kid. You had other interests, didn't you?

Francis Collins: I was lucky to grow up in a home that had so much music and theater. When I was four years old I took The Wizard of Oz, my favorite book and turned it into a play, which was then produced by the Children's Theater. I got to play the Cowardly Lion, that was the best part. I was very interested in music, so I played the piano, I played the guitar. I sang in the choir at the local church. I didn't learn any theology, but I learned a lot of music. There were many things I was exposed to that I enjoyed, but none of them grabbed me the way science did, once I discovered it, to throw myself into with this kind of intensity.

I went off to college at 16, which was a positive and a negative. I loved being in college, but I was making decisions about my future when I wasn't all that mature. I stuck with this idea that I wasn't interested in life science. I was only interested in physical science, and that's all I did in college. I took every course in chemistry and physics and math that I could, and not a thing in biology.

When I graduated, I did the natural thing, and went off to get a Ph.D. in physical chemistry. For the first year and a half I loved that, it was exciting and stimulating, but I had this uneasy feeling that I'd been a little narrow in my choices of what to pursue. I ended up taking a course in biochemistry, and talking to some of the other graduate students who were working in this thing that was breaking wide open, called recombinant DNA. I was totally captivated, in a way that I'd never been before.

That was exhilarating, because it was so exciting, but it was also terribly distressing, because I'd I was already a second year graduate student when I discovered I was going the wrong way. I was going to have to change and move in another direction. I think lots of people have that experience. The good news was, that's probably a really good thing to go through in the long run. The question was, what should I do at that point? Should I stop what I was doing?

Why do you think that was a good thing to go through?

Francis Collins: When I look back on it now, I can see that all the things I learned in college and in graduate school in physical chemistry are enormously helpful to me as I approach this job now of being Director of the Human Genome Project. That taught me scientific rigor. People who go into biology and medicine I think really are well served to dig deeply into the physical sciences, before they get totally focused on life science. The principles are so important. The insistence on a rigorous analysis of a situation, where you don't settle for sloppy data if you don't have to, is a really useful training, and I cherish that. Even what I did as a graduate student, which was quantum mechanics, is not something I think about anymore. The intellectual process of developing those skills I think was useful in preparing for something else.
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So I was kind of in a crisis. Here I was, already had a kid who was a couple of years old, and I was facing the idea of starting over again, and what to do. And I was pretty shaken up about whether research was the right thing for me or not. So I considered many options, and stayed up many nights wondering which was right. And finally decided, even though it had not been a childhood dream at all, that medicine was a really interesting option for me. That it would allow me to learn about the life sciences and see if there was something there that really grabbed my fancy in the way of research. But if that didn't happen, I knew I loved working with people. I knew I had this urge to try to do something for other human beings, an urge that I hadn't been able to experience quite in the way I wanted to in the physical sciences. And if I just ended up being a doc out in the hills somewhere, that would be okay too.
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You can see how fragmentary this logic was. Yet somehow things worked out. I went to medical school at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, a wonderful place to find yourself.

In that first few months as a medical student I remember a day just as clear as if it was yesterday, where a pediatrician came to talk to us, and he brought with him a couple of patients who had genetic diseases. And it was so powerful to see the consequences of a small change in this wonderful molecule called DNA. Just one letter out of place causing a disease like sickle cell anemia, which was one of the individuals that he brought, or galacticemia, a newborn baby that he brought to class. And that, maybe because it also appealed to the mathematical part of me that liked the precision of DNA and its coding capacity -- it's a digital molecule after all -- made it so clear at that moment, that day, that's what I want to do.
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It took a long time, so I'm sympathetic with young people who find themselves surrounded by others who seem to have zeroed in exactly on what they want to do, and yet they're not so sure themselves whether they've found their dream. I encourage people to take their time. I found my dream a little early I think. It was a good dream, but there was a better dream for me that I had to develop, with some changes in the plan. I think that change has served me very well.

I now think I'm the luckiest guy in science. I have a chance to stand at the helm of a project that I honestly believe is the most significant undertaking that we have mounted so far in an organized way in all of science. I believe that reading our blueprints, cataloguing our own instruction book, will be judged by history as more significant than even splitting the atom or going to the moon. This is an adventure into ourselves. To figure out, what are the instructions that allow us as human beings to carry out all of our biological attributes? I think all of history, and the history of biology and medicine, will be divided by this stunning achievement. Of what we knew before we knew the human genome sequence, and what we were able to do after that. And for me, this kid from the small farm in Virginia, to have a chance to oversee that is just an astounding thing.
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I could never have planned this, never have dreamed it. It just gradually came about.

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