Physician-geneticist Francis Collins, who had led the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) for 12 years under three presidents, will step down by the end of this year, the agency announced this morning. (Politico and The Washington Post broke the news last night.)
Appointed by then-President Barack Obama in 2009, Collins took the helm of NIH after leading the completion of the human genome project in 2003 as director of NIH’s genome institute. He brought a firm hand to his position, launching “big science” projects in neuroscience, cancer, and precision medicine and a new center focused on translating basic discoveries into treatments.
With folksy charm that disguised his political savvy, the guitar playing, motorcycle-riding scientist helped convince Congress to expand NIH’s budget after a decade of stagnation. It has grown from $30 billion to $41.3 billion during his tenure. Former President Donald Trump’s decision to keep Collins on came as a relief to a biomedical research community fearful of whom Trump might choose as director.
Despite qualms from some scientists that his background as an evangelical, born-again Christian would influence his decisions, Collins has supported studies using human embryonic stem cells and fetal tissue—although the latter line of research faced restrictions under Trump. Collins headed NIH efforts to combat sexual harassment and boost the number of Black scientists who won the agency’s research grants, with mixed results. And he has led NIH through a controversial probe of hundreds of scientists, mostly of Chinese descent, who allegedly failed to report foreign funding.
Earlier this year, incoming President Joe Biden kept Collins as the country was grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic. He has overseen NIH’s role in helping Moderna develop its messenger RNA vaccine for SARS-CoV-2, provided backing for coronavirus diagnostics and treatments, and spoken out about the need for people in the United States to wear masks and get vaccinated. Along with Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Collins has also defended NIH against claims, including from some congressional members, that NIH funded “gain-of-function” research on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China that led to a lab escape of SARS-CoV-2 and sparked the pandemic. At the same, he faced criticism for terminating a grant to a U.S. research organization that included work at the Wuhan lab.
In recent months, Collins has helped convince the White House to steer a new, goal-oriented health research agency proposed by Biden, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, to NIH instead of creating it as a standalone agency.
“He’s had multifaceted successes. … He’s always probing to do bigger and better things,” Fauci told Science in a profile of Collins in August 2019. Michael Eisen, a University of California, Berkeley, evolutionary biologist and eLife editor-in-chief, added, “He is trying to do the right thing for the institution. You also appreciate that he’s probably a bulwark against worse things for science.”
Collins “has made immense contributions to biomedicine,” tweeted physician Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, after hearing of the planned resignation. “I am saddened to see him stepping down, want to express the deepest appreciation for decades of leadership.”
Collins plans to return to his lab at the National Human Genome Research Institute when he steps down later this year, according to NIH.
This story will be updated.
Source: Science Mag