Latest Francis Collins Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• C.S. Lewis had a big influence on me in this spiritual realm - this sort of sense of longing. A longing for a knowledge that is just outside of our reach, a knowledge for a spiritual connection.

  Francis Collins

  Spiritual, Connections, Influence

  Source: www.achievement.org

• If God made the natural laws, why could he not violate them when it was a particularly significant moment for him to do so? And if you accept the idea that Christ was also divine, which I do, then his Resurrection is not in itself a great logical leap.

  Francis Collins

  Ideas, Law, Resurrection

  Source: inters.org

• But full sequencing? No. Very hard to interpret. At some point probably we'll all have that opportunity but most of what's there will be stuff that we don't know what to say much about. So it's a great research tool, but for clinical purposes to advise somebody to practice better health maintenance, it's not necessarily gonna be a big one for a while.

  Francis Collins

  Opportunity, Practice, Tools

  Source: www.politico.com

• [The tests agreed] that I was at higher risk than the average person for Type 2 diabetes, which is what my lab works on. In fact, some of the things they were testing for were variants that we had discovered.

  Francis Collins

  Average, Type 2 Diabetes, Risk

  Source: www.politico.com

• I had the analysis of a million or so SNPs [single nucleotide polymorphisms] just to see what was there. That's partly because I was writing a book about DNA and personalized medicine and I thought it would be a little bit disingenuous to talk about what could be done without actually having the experiment done on yourself.

  Francis Collins

  Book, Writing, Dna

  Source: www.politico.com

• A lot of science doesn't require big "ns" but if you're trying to understand something about human health and you're looking at interventions that are not going to be either killing you or making you live forever - they're going to have some tweaking on the outcome - you need big numbers or you don't have enough power.

  Francis Collins

  Numbers, Forever, Trying

  Source: www.politico.com

• When a drug comes out [that's broadly prescribed] there are going to start to be a lot of people on it [in a million person cohort] and you might get therefore an early signal of something unexpected that hadn't come through in the clinical trials. And I'm sure [drug companies] would love it if, in fact, FDA, recognizing that, would say, OK, maybe you don't have to do your trial with 30,000 people because we're going to find out shortly after registration because we'll have a lot of people taking the drug and we'll be able to see what happened using PMI.

  Francis Collins

  Fda, People, Drug

  Source: www.politico.com

• A lot of people think PMI is the genome project 2.0. No. This is about all the influences on disease - genetics is in there, but the environment is in there as well, health choices, behaviors, all the factors that are important, otherwise we're not doing what we promised we would do - which is in a holistic way look at how people stay healthy or how do they fall ill.

  Francis Collins

  Fall, Thinking, People

  Source: www.politico.com

• It's not like you're closing the old doors and that investigators working away in a laboratories on a unique hypothesis are no longer needed. My gosh, they are indeed. But this becomes a real engine for hypothesis generation and even for proof if you have interventions that you can carry out in this kind of large scale and conduct them in a rigorous way. I guess, yeah, it's different. But it's different in a good way.

  Francis Collins

  Real, Unique, Doors

  Source: www.politico.com

• What does it take to get people interested, what does it take to get people engaged, what does it take to get them to give a biospecimen? What does it take to get people like Jim [Ostell] to get interested and engaged, versus someone like my mother?

  Francis Collins

  Mother, People, Giving

  Source: www.politico.com

• My daughter is a practicing physician so believe me I get a lot of the frustration from her. You get it from patients. For me personally, when I ask my doctor to send me my record, what I get is a scanned PDF of his hard copy! This is not good. It would be hopeless to work with a million people if you had to do this on paper, and one of the reasons this is the right time for this is because of the existence of EHRs.

  Francis Collins

  Daughter, Believe, Frustration

  Source: www.politico.com

• The blooming of a flower is, in my mind, not a miracle. It's something that we can understand on the basis of molecular biology these days.

  Francis Collins

  Flower, Miracle, Mind

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I think God appreciates that we appreciate his creation.

  Francis Collins

  Thinking, Appreciate, Creation

  Source: www.pbs.org

• Prayer is, for me, not an opportunity to ask God to do stuff for me. Prayer is an opportunity to open myself, to try and understand his will, and oftentimes it's a prayer of thanksgiving, and sometimes it's a prayer of supplication, and sometimes it is just worship.

  Francis Collins

  Prayer, Opportunity, Trying

  Source: www.pbs.org

• What wakes me up at night is this next generation and what's happening to them. And they're invariably excited about the science that they're doing, but invariably anxious about where there's a future.

  Francis Collins

  Night, Generations, Next

  Source: www.pbs.org