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He grew up on a 95-acre farm that had no plumbing. Son of a drama professor father and a playwright mother, he wrote and directed a script for The Wizard of Oz when he was 7. But he chose to become a chemist, not a dramaturge. At 23, he completed a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Yale University. After realizing that he'd like to focus on something more human-oriented than quantum mechanics (his emphasis at Yale), he moved on to medical school at the University of North Carolina, where he encountered the field of medical genetics. The promise of genetics to alleviate human suffering got hold of him for good.

Before the employees at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) began to recognize the Honda Nighthawk 750 motorcycle and its 6-foot-4 driver on the campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, Dr. Francis Collins made a name for himself as one of the scientists who discovered the genetic misspellings that cause cystic fibrosis, neurofibromatosis, and Huntington's disease. He became NHGRI's director in 1993. Last February, the publicly sponsored NHGRI (and the private company Celera Genomics) published a working draft of the human genome sequence.

Where do science and religion meet?

Scientists are now busy perfecting that genome draft, studying human genetic variation, and sequencing the genomes of the mouse and the rat. The main question that nags them is how the genome works, but they're having to answer ethical questions as well. A professing Christian, Collins talked "genethics" with Agnieszka Tennant, Christianity Today's assistant editor.

I think of God as the greatest scientist. We human scientists have an opportunity to understand the elegance and wisdom of God's creation in a way that is truly exhilarating. When a scientist discovers something that no human knew before, but God did—that is both an occasion for scientific excitement and, for a believer, also an occasion for worship. It makes me sad that we have slipped into a polarized stance between science and religion that implies that a thinking human being could not believe in the value of both. There is no rational basis for that polarization. I find it completely comfortable to be both a rigorous scientist, who demands to see the data before accepting anybody's conclusions about the natural world, and also a believer whose life is profoundly influenced by the relationship I have with God. Science is our most powerful tool for studying the natural world, but science doesn't necessarily help us so much in trying to understand God; that's where faith comes in.

Have you ever had doubts about the morality of the Human Genome Project?

No. I think the genome project is a way of accumulating knowledge, and knowledge does not have moral value. Knowledge is neither good nor evil; it's just knowledge. It's information. The application that we make of that knowledge takes on a moral character.

In that regard, I have felt a profound sense of concern and responsibility that as this knowledge accumulates, we set in place guidelines that will maximize its benefits and minimize the inappropriate uses—actions that would be morally repugnant or would frankly damage people by using the information against them. Those possibilities are out there as they have always been for any new development.

There's never been a revolution in science that didn't have a potential dark side. But we've done something different here. Since the beginning of the genome project, we've devoted 5 percent of the effort to funding research on those ethical, legal, and social issues. And that has brought into these considerations a whole host of social scientists, lawyers, ethicists, and theologians. So we're in a much better position, I think, this time to avoid the bad outcomes because we've been thinking about it preventively.

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October 1 2001, Vol. 45, No. 12