Francis Collins, N.I.H. Chief, Faces Issues of Identity and Culture – NYTimes.com

Francis Collins, N.I.H. Chief, Faces Issues of Identity and Culture – NYTimes.com.

Pretty remarkable how Francis Collins manages to straddle both the mainstream and the eccentric in science, as the new head of NIH. I think that his living testament to lack of conflict between science and faith is tremendous for helping mend the unnecessary and artificial rift between the two. At least he’s a scientist’s scientist, unlike Zerhouni, who was a clinician and apparently aloof. I hope he manages a way to extract more funds from Obama to help grow America’s best investment idea (by ROI), by far – R&D. If he fails, science in this country will continue to stagnate, even as fewer graduates seek Ph.Ds and overspecialization plus a shift further and further toward the clinical from basic science threaten to derail cross-disciplinary thinking in solving the greatest problems of the proteome and cell, to say nothing of curing chronic diseases of age and lifestyle.