Francis Collins on 'The Language of God'

DATE March 29, 2007 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Renowned geneticist and former atheist Francis Collins
explains his belief in God and why his scientific research deepens
his faith rather than challenges it
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

When trying to comprehend the universe and our place in it, do you turn to
science, religion, both? Yesterday we heard from evolutionary biologist
Richard Dawkins, an atheist who finds science incompatible with a belief in
God.

Today, we hear from Francis Collins, a renowned geneticist who gave up atheism
about 30 years ago when he was 27 and became an evangelical Christian.
Collins headed the human genome project which in the year 2000 completed the
mapping of the human genome which includes all the DNA of our species. He's
currently director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the
National Institutes of Health. Earlier in his career, Collins and his team of
researchers identified the genes for Huntington's disease, cystic fibrosis and
a form of adult leukemia. In his book,"The Language of God," Collins explains
why he believes in God and why his scientific research deepens his faith
rather than challenges it.

Francis Collins, welcome to FRESH AIR.

Some people think there's an inherent contradiction between being a scientist,
which is an empirical pursuit that looks for quantifiable evidence, and being
a person a faith because faith relies on faith. So as opposed to scientific,
empirical, quantifiable evidence, you obviously don't find those two things in
conflict. Why not?

Mr. FRANCIS COLLINS: There does seem to be a general understanding out there
that somehow there ought to be a conflict between the scientific and the
spiritual world views. But I don't find it to be the case. There are
different ways of seeking answers to important questions. Science tries to
understand how nature works and uses the tools to uncover exactly how atoms
and molecules and life itself is put together, and it is the reliable way to
understand those questions about nature. But science is unable to answer
other critical questions like `Why am I here? What's the meaning of life? Is
there a God? What happens after we die?' Are those not also incredibly
important questions, maybe the most important questions. So why would one
want to limit one's self to just one part of this great human adventure and to
trying to seek answers?

Science and spirit have different tools, they seek different kinds of answers
to different kinds of questions. But for me, they're entirely complimentary.

GROSS: When you look at genetic material and when you were mapping the human
genome, how did you see the intricacy of the genetic material that you were
analyzing as being related to your belief in God?

Mr. COLLINS: Well, whether you're a believer or not, looking at the
intricacy, the complexity of the human genome, our own DNA instruction book,
has to give you a sense of awe. As you page through letters A, C, T and G,
three billion of them recognizing that this is the instruction book that's
capable somehow of carrying out all of the steps that have to happen for a
human being from a single-celled embryo to a very complex organism, you can't
help but marvel. For someone who's a believer, as 40 percent of scientists
are, it has an added feature. And that is that you're glimpsing God's
creative genius, and in the process of uncovering this instruction book maybe
you're getting just a hint of what God's mind is all about, which is a pretty
amazing thing to contemplate.

GROSS: When President Clinton announced the completion of the human genome
mapping project and you were at his side, the president said, `Today we are
learning the language in which God created life. We are gaining evermore awe
for the complexity and beauty and the wonder of God's most divine and sacred
gift.' And I know you worked somewhat with Clinton's speech writer on that.
And then you said, `We've got the first glimpse of our own instruction book
previously known only to God.'

Did you think that perhaps that even though you and President Clinton are
people of faith that it was maybe inappropriate to bring God into the kind of
public announcement of the human genome projects completion?

Mr. COLLINS: I'm sure there were some who might have thought that didn't
quite fit, but you know in, at least in this country, most people do have a
spiritual side. Most people are believers in some sort of a supernatural
presence called God that is outside of nature and outside of science's ability
to detect. It was a very significant moment that morning in June 2000 where,
for the first time, we announced the uncovering of this amazing instruction
book, a book that you can think of as a book of history, a book of the parts
list, if you will, of the human being, but also a book of medicine with great
promise to do great things to try to understand and treat disease. At a
moment like that, ought we not to stand back and be a little bit more than
mechanical in our thinking? And I think it was, in fact, that same sense of
awe that we all felt that made it seem appropriate to reflect upon this in a
larger sense beyond just what science had taught us about 3.1 billion letters
of the code into something more significant about what it means to be human
and what, in fact, we humans have been searching for for all of history in
terms of whether there's something bigger than us that we might now just have
caught a glimpse of.

GROSS: When you say that the human genome is our instruction manual, what do
you mean?

Mr. COLLINS: I think it's a pretty good metaphor. DNA is this information
molecule. It's a particularly simple one in a certain way in that it only has
four letters in its alphabet. There are actually four chemical bases, but
it's the order of those letters, A, C, G and T that carries out all the
instructions that we as human beings and every other organism too have to do.
And it's--can be written out in a linear fashion. If you printed it out on
regular font size and regular thickness of paper and piled the pages on top of
each other, it would be as high as the Washington Monument. And you have all
that information inside each cell of your body. So it's a very large book,
but you think of it as a book. And I think you're probably on the right
track. And a misspelling somewhere in that book could cause you to fall ill
with some problem. And your book and somebody else's book are not going to be
identical, but they're going to be 99.9 percent the same because that's how
similar we humans are to each other. And I guess you could say we're still
beginning readers. We're trying to figure out how to make sense of these 3.1
billion letters in our book in order to begin to apply it more effectively for
medical purposes.

GROSS: When you look at the genetic similarities between human beings and
certain animals, which connections surprise you the most?

Mr. COLLINS: Well, it is pretty amazing when you can see the similarities in
animals that we think of ourselves as being very far away from, even all the
way down to yeast that we use to bake bread or make beer or bacteria. You can
find stretches of DNA where the similarity, looking at the letters, A, C, G
and T, it clearly indicates that these are related to each other and that they
were descended from a common ancestor. So the startling ability of DNA
information to draw these connections between organisms, which turns out to be
vastly more powerful than the fossil record, I think took all of our breath
away. Once you really have such a large amount of the information, you can
begin to see those connections and with incredible detail.

GROSS: Now yesterday on our show Richard Dawkins made the case that science
and God are not very compatible because science is something that is based on
empirical evidence. Science is based on evidence. And religion is based on
faith and for most people faith in a supernatural being. So how do you
reconcile the empiricism, the evidence that science requires with the faith
and sometimes supernatural belief of religion?

Mr. COLLINS: Well, a scripture in Hebrews says "Faith is the substance of
things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." Evidence, interesting,
right there in the definition. I think this is a common misconception that
faith is something you arrive at purely by emotion and not something where, in
fact, one can assemble evidences that point in the direction of God's
existence and make that more plausible than the denial of his existence. At
least that's what I learned in my 20s.

GROSS: But what evidence would you put in that category?

Mr. COLLINS: I would certainly point to this knowledge of right and wrong
that we humans uniquely have, which asks us to behave in certain ways that
sometimes are an absolute scandal to evolution. Because evolution only cares
about propagating your DNA. What's that all about? And it seems like a sign
post. And, of course, the evidence is about the amazing fine tuning of the
universe which seems to have been put there for some purpose so that we could
exist as beings of complex chemistry. Those seem to be crying out for an
explanation. They're not proofs. Don't get me wrong. But a scientist who
says, well, science is sufficient to disprove God because we haven't caught
him in our microscopes or our other means of measurements, is committing a
logical fallacy if God has any meaning. God is outside of nature, at least in
part. Science is only really valid in investigating nature. So science is
essentially forced to remain silent on the subject of whether God exists or
not. And that is sometimes forgotten, I think, by the very strong atheistic
viewpoints put forward by some scientists, particularly those working in the
field of evolution.

There's a wonderful parable that Arthur Eddington, the physicist, tells about
a man who set out to determine what were all the creatures living in the
bottom of the sea. And he had all these nets and the one--the net they used
the most had a mesh size of three inches. And he went down there and he
scooped up all of these amazing creatures, then he gave a big seminar about
what he had found. And at the end of his seminar, he said, `and one thing I
never expected, there are no creatures in the bottom of the sea that are
smaller than three inches.'

Well, when science sets about to catch God, science is using a net that really
doesn't have that capability. So if nothing is discovered, it's rather
meaningless to say that science has managed to comment. Science really can't
comment. If you're going to find the evidence for the existence of God, and
if you're going to become a believer, science can perhaps help you a little
bit in terms of certain pointers. But the real decision has to come from
other perspectives, the spiritual ones. And I think for me, having had this
experience now over 30 years of having the scientific and the spiritual world
view coexisting in my daily experience, it is a wonderfully complimentary way
to live one's life. And it answers questions and gives one comfort. And I
wish it was more broadly shared.

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Francis Collins. He is the
director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, and he led the human
genome project from 1993 until 2003 when it completed mapping and sequencing
human DNA. He's also written a book called "The Language of God: A Scientist
Presents Evidence for Belief."

Has mapping the human genome bolstered your view that--of evolution?

Mr. COLLINS: Absolutely. And this is one of the reasons I wrote this book
called "The Language of God," was to try to put forward what for me is a very
comfortable and happy synthesis of being both a believer in God and also one
who studies DNA and sees within it the absolutely incontrovertible evidence
that Darwin's theory of evolution was correct in terms of a common descent of
all living things from a common ancestor.

There's been much disagreement, of course, about this, and great anxieties
have been expended on the question of whether this is a correct theory, and
particularly whether it can be compatible with interpretations of the Bible.
From my perspective, God gave us the ability to look at the details of his
creation. He gave us the ability with intelligence and with the instruments
that the human mind has managed to put together to read out not only the
letters of our own DNA booklet, but also that of many other organisms
including our closest relatives, the chimpanzee.

When you look at that information, and you see the precise similarities
between our own DNA and that of other species, and particularly when you look
at the details, not just the general similarity, which might after all be
considered as use of common themes and multiple acts of special creation, you
can't help but come to the conclusion that there is in fact a common ancestor
of all living organisms on this planet, including ourselves. I have no
trouble with that as a believer who also looks to the Bible for answers to
important questions. I don't think Genesis One was intended as a scientific
text book. I think it was intended to teach us something about who God is and
who we are in relationship to Him. And just as St. Augustine in 400 AD
studying Genesis One and Two was left puzzled about exactly what was being
described there. I think we all, if we're honest, have to be a bit puzzled,
too. And, therefore, when you put together what we see in that description of
creation with what God has given us the chance to learn through science,
there's really no conflict. It was all his plan. He just carried it out
using the tools of evolution.

GROSS: Is that what you mean when you use the term "theistic evolution" to
describe your belief?

Mr. COLLINS: Most scientists who are biologists, who are also believers,
have come to this same kind of synthesis often without knowing what name to
put on it. I arrived at this same kind of conclusion after becoming a
believer in my 20s and trying to figure out how that fit together with the
science I was learning of genetics. It also suddenly made sense. Well, sure,
if God had the intention of creating life, this wonderful diversity of life
that we see all around us on this planet and ourselves, special creatures with
whom he could have fellowship, in whom he would imbue the soul and the
knowledge of good and evil, and the ability to practice free will, who are we
to say that evolution was a way we wouldn't have chosen. It's an incredibly
elegant way to achieve this.

GROSS: My guest is Francis Collins who directs the National Human Genome
Research Institute. His memoir is called "The Language of God."

Yesterday we heard from Richard Dawkins, a scientist and atheist. You'll be
able to hear both of these interviews on our Web site, fresh.npr.org. We'll
talk more with Francis Collins after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: Let's get back to our interview with geneticist Francis Collins. He
headed the Human Genome Project and has written a memoir called "The Language
of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief."

You've urged your fellow Christian evangelicals to not put Christians in the
position of having to reject either religion or science, you know. Because
for some Christian evangelicals evolution is completely incompatible with
Genesis. Therefore, evolution should not be taught in the schools. What kind
of direct encounters have you had with Christians who are opposed to the
teaching of evolution?

Mr. COLLINS: Well, my e-mail address is fairly easy to find. After
publishing this book called "The Language of God," which really does try to
put forward a synthesis between science and faith, that argues that a literal
interpretation of Genesis One and Two is almost unsustainable when you look at
the scientific evidence that's been accumulated from cosmology and geology and
physics and chemistry and biology. Yeah, I get responses. Most of the
responses I have gotten have actually been very encouraging. Lots of people
writing in to say, you know, I've been really troubled by what appears to be a
big battle going on between science and faith, and they seem to be asking me
to choose and they both seem to have a lot to offer and I'm so glad that
somebody is standing up and saying, you know, these are compatible. You don't
have to make a choice. You do need to be thoughtful about narrow
interpretations of either one of these world views that are perhaps not
required by the facts, but which if attached to very tightly may seem to
exclude the other.

I have to say some of the harshest e-mails I have received have been from
evangelical Christians who are deeply concerned about this particular
position. And, of course, I understand their sincerity. They have been, in
many instances, told by their pastors or their parents or their schools that
if you really start to accept the idea that evolution might be true, the end
of that particular intellectual adventure is going to be the loss of your
faith. And they don't want to lose their faith. Their faith is incredibly
important to them, as mine is to me. And this specter of that kind of outcome
is deeply distressing, and so they feel they must, almost as a badge of their
true belief, resist any implications that evolution could be true.

What a sad and unfortunate situation, particularly for young people who are
caught in the midst of this battle between world views. I get many e-mails
from those folks who are wrestling with what the real truth is. Many of them
feeling that they're going to have to make a choice, and some of them do and
some of them just decide to walk away from both science and faith because they
can't see how they could really adhere to either one of these shrill extreme
perspectives that are being thrust upon them.

I wish we could basically step back from this kind of tense situation. And
it's not just the people on the religious side that are contributing to it,
some of my colleagues who are staunch atheists, I think, are creating at least
as much trouble by saying that science rules out faith. But if we could stand
back and say what can you really say from these perspectives about the other
point of view? You would quickly begin to see that there's a great deal of
compatibility.

GROSS: You say in your book that a literal reading of Genesis would lead to
the complete collapse of the science of physics, chemistry, cosmology, geology
and biology. What do you mean?

Mr. COLLINS: Well, if you look at the evidence that comes to us from things
like the rate at which galaxies are receding or the radioactive dating of
rocks or the study of DNA and the relativeness of living beings, there is no
way you can backtrack the origins of all this to a period 6,000 years ago,
which is what an absolute, literal reading of Genesis would require. You just
can't tweak around the edges of the consequences of those scientific
investigations to get to 6,000 years instead of 13.7 billion. You just can't
do it.

When it comes to the evangelical Christians, obviously Genesis One and Two is
a serious issue for them. I would just point out the story of creation in the
first two chapters of the Bible, it's actually two different stories. If you
look at what's in Genesis One and then what's in Genesis Two, there are two
descriptions of how humans came to be. And they're not entirely consistent
with each other, which might be a tip-off that one should not assume that
every single word there is intended to be a literal historic description.

GROSS: Francis Collins is the director of the National Human Genome Research
Institute at the National Institutes of Health and head of the Human Genome
Project. His new book is called "The Language of God." He'll be back in the
second half of the show.

I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR.

I'm Terry Gross, back with Francis Collins, a scientist who makes the case for
a belief in God in his memoir, "The Language of God." Collins headed the Human
Genome Project which mapped the DNA of our species. He's now the director of
the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of
Health. He gave up atheism about 30 years ago to become an evangelical
Christian.

You write in your book that people will assume that your belief, your
Christian belief, must have come about by rigorous religious upbringing deeply
instilled by family and culture, and thus inescapable in later life. But you
say, `That's not really my story.' Your story is pretty fascinating.

Your parents met in graduate school at Yale in 1931, and then they moved to an
experimental community in West Virginia where they worked with Eleanor
Roosevelt. Tell us something about this community and the work that they were
doing.

Mr. COLLINS: Well, this was a fascinating chapter in their many chaptered
life. The community was called Archer Dale. You can still go there. There's
a little museum that will tell the story of what happened. This was during
the Depression, intensely difficult time for miners in West Virginia. And so
the Roosevelts, as an experimental community primarily led by Eleanor, put
together this opportunity for miners to have a plot of land and a simple home
that they would help build and basically try to make themselves sufficient.
But they had to be trained in many things, including how to grow crops and
harvest them, but also how to carry out certain skills like printing.

And my father, as a teacher, went there to help run the school which was both
a school for the kids and a school for the adults. And in the process, being
somebody with a mind that was open to many things, my father, a fairly
accomplished violinist, fell in love with the traditional music of the
mountains of West Virginia and became a folk song collector, and no longer a
violinist but a fiddle player. This went on for two or three amazing years
with many wonderful stories coming out of that. And then it got a little too
hot politically. And somebody in Washington said, `Oh, that sounds like that
might be a little bit too close to socialism,' and suddenly the community was
no longer allowed to be supported and my parents moved on to the next chapter,
and the chapter after that. And they had many other interesting experiences,
kind of doing the 60s thing before it was the 60s.

GROSS: Yeah, like 30 years before. When you were growing up, your family
had--your parents had a farm in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. I think a
95-acre farm, no running water. What was their vision when you were growing
up of what their life and your life should be?

Mr. COLLINS: My parents were completely captivated by learning new things
and being engaged in community efforts, particularly in theater and in music.
My father became a drama professor, my mother a playwright. They organized a
summer theater in the grove of oak trees up above our farmhouse, and that is
now in its 55th consecutive season as a summer theater where many people turn
out every year to see the productions.

So I was surrounded by all kinds of fascinating people who had expertise in
these areas' artistic endeavors. And I was taught at home by my mother who
was not convinced that the local schools would do a good job of keeping her
four boys interested in the process of learning. And she wanted to be sure
that they caught that kind of fever of the excitement of learning about new
things. And she was incredibly good at that.

GROSS: So you were homeschooled. Did she teach you at all about religion?

Mr. COLLINS: No. I learned many exciting things about language, about
mathematics, a bit about science, not a lot, certainly about art and music and
theater. But religion, as far as I can recall, really just didn't come up.
It's not that it was in some way considered as a topic that was unfortunate or
had to be avoided, it just didn't come up. It didn't seem very relevant.

GROSS: You know, in some ways I'd say your parents probably raised you in the
spirit of nonconformity because they seem so individualistic and so much in
their kind of like alternative community and, you know, with their own kind of
values a little bit apart from the mainstream of society. Did that give you a
certain like courage to kind of go your own way and be an atheist and then
find faith and be a scientist with faith and not really care what other people
have to say?

Mr. COLLINS: Absolutely. It was a great gift my parents gave me, was the
confidence that if you searched out answers to questions, you could find them,
you could attach yourself to those answers and you could go forward with them
in a sense of having understood something. And that's not a gift that
everybody gets. And, yeah, that did put me in a position, I think, of being
able to embrace truth wherever it came from, even if it didn't seem to be
popular to other people at the time.

GROSS: Now you write that when you were a young man and starting in your
studies of science that reading Einstein reinforced your opinion that God
didn't exist. What changed your mind?

Mr. COLLINS: Well, before I got interested in biology, I was interested in
chemistry and physics. And I actually have a PhD in physical chemistry, and
my project was very much to try to figure out new ways of describing how
matter and energy work using mathematics. And I loved that. And I became
very much of the opinion that anything that really mattered could be written
down as an equation. Second order of differential equations were my favorite.
But this, of course, put me in this mode of being rather reductionist which is
easy to do when you're young and you're excited about what science can do to
describe how things work. And I probably also, for other reasons, found it
convenient not to consider the possibility of God. God might have asked
something of me and I was quite happy not having anything asked of me at that
point. So science around me and the people around me seemed to encourage the
idea that there really wasn't anything except mathematics and chemistry and
physics. It didn't occur to me to ask the question, why does mathematics work
anyway, which is an interesting question. So I slipped into what was a pretty
solid and maybe unfriendly even version of atheism where anybody who mentioned
something about God was likely to encounter a retort from me.

What happened? Well, I changed my course in my professional career, finding
that things were happening in biology that were pretty exciting. We commented
DNA was just getting invented. And I realized I kind of had not fully
appreciated the way in which that kind of science was about to explode. It
had all kinds of opportunities that were going to have real benefits for
humankind, and I wanted to be part of that. So I went to medical school. And
I maintained my atheism for a couple of years in medical school, but then that
third year out there in the hospital wards talking to patients who had
terrible diseases, who were facing death, all of the hypotheticals became much
more real about life and death and questions of God's existence. And I had to
face up to the fact that I had never really considered the evidence of whether
God existed or not. And as a scientist, that was something I should probably
do.

GROSS: So what did you do to set out to find evidence of God's existence?

Mr. COLLINS: Well, I tried to read texts of various faiths to understand
what they stood for, and I had a hard time getting through them. And
ultimately in frustration, I knocked on the door of a Methodist minister who
lived on my street and asked him to please explain to me what it is that
believers believe and why it makes any sense at all. And he smiled and
answered a few questions and then took a book off his shelf and said, `You
might want to read this because this was written by an Oxford scholar who was
an atheist and who was trying to shore up his atheism by making sure that his
arguments were correct and ultimately had a somewhat different outcome. Why
don't you have a look?'

Well, the book was "Mere Christianity" written by C.S. Lewis, the Oxford
scholar best known for his works in Renaissance literature, but also probably
even better known by most people as the author of "The Lion, The Witch and The
Wardrobe" and many amazing books that define the reason that lies behind
faith. Faith is not the opposite of reason I learned. Faith is actually
based quite squarely upon reason. What a revelation that was!

GROSS: How did you change your life once you decided to be a person of faith
and to practice Christianity?

Mr. COLLINS: Well, I was terrified it was going to change my life in all
kinds of ways that I wouldn't know what to do with. I had this sense that,
oh, you know, the next day God is going to call me to Africa or something like
that where I won't be ready, and I won't even want to do it, and I might even
become sort of this person who has very little in the way of a sense of humor.
And all those things that you fear when you've not grown up in this culture
and you're not quite sure what it's like. But, actually, I felt this great
peace. I didn't feel immediately a sense that I needed to change my approach
to science. It seemed like this was a new opportunity to bring these together
in ways I wasn't quite sure how that would work, and ultimately it took quite
a number of years to begin to appreciate that synthesis. I felt a peace about
questions that previously had no answers and things that would have really
bugged me in terms of, well, did I get credit for this or that as a scientist
suddenly didn't seem quite so important anymore. So it was a gradual sense of
realization that I'd come into a new place and that I had this new
relationship with God as an anchor that hadn't been there before.

GROSS: Were your parents alive when you became a Christian?

Mr. COLLINS: Yes. My mother is still alive.

GROSS: What was their reaction?

Mr. COLLINS: They were quite puzzled. They were respectful. They didn't
try to talk me out of it. They made it pretty clear that this was not
something they understood. Ultimately, many years later, my father became a
Christian. He died two years ago. My mother is still trying to decide.

GROSS: Did your father become a Christian because of your example?

Mr. COLLINS: I don't think so. I think he would have arrived there on his
own as a result of many other experiences and people that he talked to and a
maturing of his own sense of what life is all about and what death might be
like. So I can't take credit for it. But it was a source of considerable joy
when I realized that it happened.

GROSS: My guest is Francis Collins, the director of the National Human Genome
Research Institute. His memoir's called "The Language of God: A Scientist
Presents Evidence for Belief."

We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Francis Collins. He's the
director of the National Human Genome Research Institute. He led the Human
Genome Project from 1993 until 2003 when it completed mapping and sequencing
human DNA. He's also written a book called "The Language of God: A Scientist
Presents Evidence for Belief."

We've been talking a lot about religion. Let's talk a little bit more about
science. Now you and your team isolated the genetic material, the genes for
cystic fibrosis, Huntington's disease, neurofibromatosis and a type of adult
leukemia. What do you hope that being able to--that having isolated the genes
for certain inherited diseases will lead to?

Mr. COLLINS: Well, my hope is that this could really transform medicine in
many ways. It would allow us, as we get more and more information about how
each of us is at individual risks for future illness based upon DNA that we've
inherited, to practice better prevention in a fashion that's not
one-size-fits-all, but is actually specific for that person. We clearly need
to put more of our energies into keeping people healthy instead of spending
vast sums of money on people in the ICU with diseases that maybe could have
been prevented earlier. And this notion of using the study of the genome to
do that more effectively is very compelling. But more than that, studying the
genome is also going to tell us really how disease comes about with the
precision that we didn't know before and give us the chance to develop
treatments that are therefore much more targeted towards the fundamental
problem and therefore more likely to work and less likely to have side
effects. So both in terms of diagnostics, in terms of therapeutics, I think
we will see over the course of the next 10 or 15 years a real transformation
of medicine into a very rational individualized approach that's going to have
many benefits in keeping people healthy.

GROSS: One way of trying to reverse inherited diseases is through embryonic
stem cell research. But that is opposed for moral and religious reasons by
some people who think that you're basically taking the genetic material of a
possible--you know, that could form a human being because it's embryonic and
destroying that embryo for scientific purposes. How do you, as a man of faith
and a man of science, figure out where you stand on embryonic stem cell
research?

Mr. COLLINS: It's a very complicated topic. And it's difficult to sum it up
in a few quick sentences. I do think we should take with great seriousness
the moral status of the human being, and that the union of a sperm and egg,
which is how we all got started, is something not to treat lightly at all. At
the same time, when there are hundreds of thousands of frozen embryos already
sitting in freezers and in vitro fertilization clinics with really no prospect
that anything more than a few of those will ever be used for any purpose, it
does seem hard to take a hard ethical stance that utilizing a few of those for
research would be the wrong thing to do. And yet I think that is the stance
that many have taken. I actually think over the course of time this problem
may solve itself because it will be the kind of stem cells that don't come
from the union of sperm and egg that will be most useful. The ones I would
like to have if I was developing Parkinson's disease would be stem cells that
match me perfectly. And so the ability to do this thing called somatic cell
nuclear transfer, where you take one of my skin cells and pass it through the
experience of being bathed in the site of plasma of an egg cell in just such a
way to cause that cell to go back in time and suddenly be capable of making
other types of cells, like neurons, that I might need, is a much more
promising approach in the long term for medical benefit. And carries with it,
in the view of most of it--most of us a much lower sense of moral concern.
Although, unfortunately, I think our language has tangled all of this up, and
all of these things are referred to as embryos even though they're
fundamentally quite different.

GROSS: But the process that you just described, isn't that something that
comes under the larger umbrella of cloning? And don't some people think that
they're automatically against it because the word cloning is attached to it?

Mr. COLLINS: Well, there you have it. The words really have done a lot to
cause this conversation to grind to a halt, heaven's sake. As soon as you say
embryo or cloning, people immediately say, `Well, I'm against that.' Sure, I'm
against the idea of cloning an individual, that is making a reproductive copy
of somebody. We should not do that. There are all kinds of safety reasons,
and there are all kinds of ethical and moral reasons why that ought to be off
the table. But that is not the required outcome at all of this somatic cell
nuclear transfer process. You only get there if you, in a diabolical way,
decide you want to go there by implanting something in the uterus of a
recipient female. That's the part that we ought to say is totally off-limits.
The idea though that you might be able to take someone's skin cell and turn it
into a neuron that they need without in any way going on to this direction of
reproductive cloning seems like something we ought to really talk about
without having such an immediate knee-jerk reaction about, `Oh, no, that's
bad. That's evil. That's something we shouldn't do.' Because if you look at
the details there, it's not clear of what step along that pathway is one that
really creates brand-new ethical dilemmas.

GROSS: And, finally, what are you doing now at the National Human Genome
Research Institute? Like, what--now that you've mapped the human genome, what
research are you doing at the institute?

Mr. COLLINS: Well, now the good stuff is started because in a certain way
that was building a foundation, reading out all those letters to the code.
Now we get to apply it in fascinating and exciting ways to understand how it
is that health or disease come about. And for me as a physician, this is the
part we were waiting for. And so discoveries are happening all around us.
This is going to be the year, for instance, where you're going to see an
absolute outpouring of revelations about hereditary factors that predispose
some people to cancer and others to diabetes and others to Alzheimer's and
others to asthma, and most importantly, ways that we can prevent those things
now that we have a better idea of what the cause is. So this is really what
it was all about. The human genome project was an incredible milestone. It
was an incredible privilege to be at the helm of an effort of that historic
significance which I think people will talk about a thousand years from now.
But in terms of its practical implications for benefiting human health, for
helping people who currently suffer from terrible diseases, this is the most
important part. We're into it now. We have many exciting things just around
the corner.

GROSS: Francis Collins, thank you very much for talking with us.

Mr. COLLINS: It's been a real pleasure talking with you, Terry.

GROSS: Francis Collins is director of the National Human Genome Research
Institute at the National Institutes of Health. His memoir is called "The
Language of God."

Yesterday we heard from scientist Richard Dawkins, who explained why he is an
atheist. You can hear both interviews or download them as podcasts on our Web
site, freshair.npr.org.

This is FRESH AIR.

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Profile: Linguist Geoff Nunberg discusses Time magazine's new look
and changes made to content
TERRY GROSS, host:

As Time magazine reinvents itself for the Internet age, the editors recently
announced they'd be dropping some old features of the magazine's distinctive
writing style. That set our linguist Geoff Nunberg to recall the age when
Time's style was remaking journalism and the English language itself.

Mr. GEOFF NUNBERG: In it's 84th year, Time magazine has just given itself a
makeover with a new look and revamped content. Along the way, the editors
announced that they'll be getting rid of the last vestiges of the involuted
syntax that used to be a stylistic signature of the mag.

"Died, Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd, desperado, of gunshot wounds near East
Liverpool, Ohio."

Actually, it's been a long time since inverted sentences were prominent in
Time's reporting. If people remember that particular tick today, it's mostly
via a famous line from a parody of time that Wolcott Gibbs wrote in 1936.
Backwards ran sentences until reeled the mind. But there was a lot more to
Time's style than that, back when the magazine was transforming journalism
with a new and compelling tone of voice. The style was originally the
creation of Briton Hadden, who cofounded Time with Henry Luce in 1923. The
two were right out of Yale, and the magazine's language was laced with the
airs and affectations of a bright undergraduate. The vocabulary, with a showy
mix of the exotic, the folksy and the contrived, anything that might suggest
an arched detachment from its subject. Time popularized esoteric foreign
words like the Hindi pundit and turned the Japanese-derived tycoon into a
familiar word for a magnate. It adopted the Greek word kudos as a synonym for
praise. Originally, the word meant simply glory. It revived archaic and
dialect words like hustings, hornswoggle, passel and scrivener. And it
contributed a long list of breezy new coinings to the language from early
items like pinko, newshawks, socialite and racketeer to later terms like
Disneyfication, eco-freak and televangelist.

In Time style, people never walked. They sauntered, strode, shambled, ambled
or slouched. And they made their entries, preceded by a retinue of Homeric
epithets, sometimes lined up two or three deep. Gaunt, scraggle-haired
President Eamon De Valera, burly but suave Benito Mussolini, sloe-eyed,
soft-spoken Generalissimo Francisco Franco.

That language was aimed at turning the people Time wrote about into the stock
characters of miniature B-movie melodramas, each with its setup, its angle,
its twist and final kicker. The template rarely varied. People often repeat
the Count de Buffon's remark that `the style is the man,' but at Time, the
style was the mag. It could boast a brilliant stable of writers. It's early
alumni included Steven Vincent Benet, James Agee, John O'Hara and Archibald
MacLeish. But they had to submit to an editorial process that extirpated any
trace of individuality. To Time's critics, that process stood in for the
magazine's pernicious influence on journalism in general.

In 1957 Garry Wills said that Time's mass-produced style was creating a kind
of newspeak by collectivizing language and thought. And Marshall McLuhan said
the Time's style was a language in which nobody could tell the truth. Those
concerns seem remote now. For one thing, Time's politics have softened since
the days when liberal Democrats wouldn't let their magazine cross their
doorstep. Nor does Time have the cultural importance it did in its early
decades. Now, it's just one more publication fighting for its life as its
paper shrivels up from under it. And the magazine has long since abandoned
the flash and brumaggem of its early style, along with its impersonality.
Time has been giving its writers credit for 40 years now. And the pronoun "I"
is no longer a stranger to its pages. When we run across a bit of clever word
play these days, we know who to thank for it.

In a recent review, Richard Corliss described the display of buff male bodies
in "300" as "Homer eroticism." It's a gag that would have done credit to Time
in its heyday, but it reads better with a byline under it than it would have
as a product of an anonymous style machine.

But much of Time's style hasn't so much disappeared as it's been absorbed into
the zero degree communal language of modern journalism. I'm not thinking just
of the punning headers or the descriptive ledes that set the scene, `as a thin
rain fell on Washington last week.' More important, Time shaped the pervasive
tone of modern journalism--knowing, distanced, superior, a little cynical.

In the old days, critics sometimes professed to see an inconsistency between
the cockiness and irreverence of Time's style and its editorial deference to
success and power. One writer described the style as embodying an ethical
schizophrenia. But that got it dead wrong. As Time used them, archness and
irony were devices for accommodating and diminishing the more unpleasant
realities of the world. Edmund Wilson once said that Time's style reduced
human beings to mannequins. It gave the impression, he said, that all the
pursuits, past and present, of the human race are rather an absurd little
scandal about which you might find out some even nastier details if you met
the editors of Time over cocktails.

I don't know that Wilson would be that hard on Time itself today. But you
wonder what he would have had to say about cable news.

GROSS: Geoff Nunberg is a linguist who teaches at the School of Information
at the University of California at Berkeley.

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GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.