Quotes by Francis Collins

About Francis Collins:

Francis Sellers Collins is 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 Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

I'm always feeling like I'm lacking wisdom. This reassurance that one can ask God for that and it will happen is certainly reassuring to me.

Francis Collins

God gave us free will, and we may choose to exercise it in ways that end up hurting other people.

Francis Collins

If God is real, and I believe he is, then he is outside of nature. He is, therefore, not limited by the laws of nature in the way that we are.

Francis Collins

For me, in my Christian belief, prayer is not an opportunity to manipulate God into doing what you want him to. Prayer is an opportunity to have a conversation with God to try to get in tune with what his will is.

Francis Collins

I don't have a problem with the concept that miracles might occasionally occur at moments of great significance, where there is a message being transmitted to us by God Almighty. But as a scientist, I set my standards for miracles very high.

Francis Collins

God is an awesome mathematician and physicist.

Francis Collins

When does life begin? When does the soul enter? That's a religious question. Science is not going to be able to help with that.

Francis Collins

I became an atheist because, as a graduate student studying quantum physics, life seemed to be reducible to second-order differential equations. Mathematics, chemistry and physics had it all. And I didn't see any need to go beyond that.

Francis Collins

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.

Francis Collins

It's interesting when you read the life of Christ how much of his time he spent healing the sick. There must have been a reason for that - he was modelling for us what it is we are intended to do by following his path.

Francis Collins

If I'm walking down the riverbank, and a man is drowning, even if I don't know how to swim very well, I feel this urge that the right thing to do is to try to save that person. Evolution would tell me exactly the opposite: preserve your DNA. Who care...

Francis Collins

One must dig deeply into opposing points of view in order to know whether your own position remains defensible. Iron sharpens iron.

Francis Collins

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 h...

Francis Collins

So much of what we are currently seeing as far as human suffering and misery comes from diseases that should have been preventable but were not.

Francis Collins

For delightfully quirky descriptions of bizarre neurological syndromes that teach us a lot about how the brain works, there is no match for Oliver Sacks.

Francis Collins

The shelves of many evangelicals are full of books that point out the flaws in evolution, discuss it only as a theory, and almost imply that there's a conspiracy here to avoid the fact that evolution is actually flawed. All of those books, unfortunat...

Francis Collins

Research is so unpredictable. There are periods when nothing works and all your experiments are a disaster and all your hypotheses are wrong.

Francis Collins

Cancer is a disease of the genome. And that's what happens. You make mistakes in a cell somewhere in your body that causes it to start to grow when it should've stopped, and that's cancer. And those mistakes are mistakes of DNA.

Francis Collins

As a scientist, you're not supposed to make decisions without the data.

Francis Collins

Genes are effectively one-dimensional. If you write down the sequence of A, C, G and T, that's kind of what you need to know about that gene. But proteins are three-dimensional. They have to be because we are three-dimensional, and we're made of thos...

Francis Collins

A technological advance of a major sort almost always is overestimated in the short run for its consequences - and underestimated in the long run.

Francis Collins

Author Bio

  • NameFrancis Collins
  • DescriptionGeneticist; Director of the National Institutes of Health
  • BornApril 14, 1950
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionGeneticist
  • AwardsPresidential Medal Of Freedom; Princess Of Asturias Award - Technical And Scientific Research; Arthur S. Flemming Award