Top 35 Francis Collins Quotes

I trained initially as a physical chemist, and then, after becoming interested in biology, I went to medical school and learned how to be a physician. So, I’m a physician scientist.

Proponents of intelligent design don’t accept that some of the very complex nanomachines that we have inside ourselves could have come about solely on the basis of natural selection.

The word ‘living’ has so many connotations that I’m almost reluctant to try to define it scientifically because it sounds as if I’m then downgrading all the other significances of that word.

If you are looking for a needle in a haystack, and somebody has already cataloged all the straw in the haystack, when you get to that needle you will recognize it’s different than what was supposed to be there based on all that computerized haystack information that had been predetermined for you.

Many people struggle with losing weight and then regaining it. But there is no convincing evidence that the effort to lose weight actually promotes more weight gain in the long run.

Sometimes you develop a passion for something because of some personal experience.

Successful weight management really means a permanent change in lifestyle – and success in this arena provides that person with a great opportunity to model that behavior for friends and family.

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

I believe God did intend, in giving us intelligence, to give us the opportunity to investigate and appreciate the wonders of His creation. He is not threatened by our scientific adventures.

Growing up, I was vaguely aware of things that went on in church, because I was in the boys’ choir at the local Episcopal church. But I got the clear message that I was supposed to learn music there, and not pay too much attention to the rest of it, and I followed those instructions very carefully.

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

I actually do not believe that there are any collisions between what I believe as a Christian, and what I know and have learned about as a scientist. I think there’s a broad perception that that’s the case, and that’s what scares many scientists away from a serious consideration of faith.

I think there are people who’s lives have been saved because of the study of the genome.

If you are in support of in vitro fertilization, then you have to recognize that human embryos are being created in excess of what can be used safely to reimplant for a pregnancy. So they’re going to end up being discarded.

I’m aware there are certain products that are being advertised – food products – with ‘no chemicals whatsoever.’ Well, that would be pretty hard to arrange, since everything around us is made up of atoms and molecules – chemicals – including ourselves.

I think history would say that medical research has, throughout many changes of parties, remained as one of the shining lights of bipartisan agreement, that people are concerned about health for themselves, for their families, for their constituents.

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.

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

I took care of young adults with cystic fibrosis when I was in my residency training and found this to be a disease that was desperately in need of some explanation.

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.

I’m enormously interested to see where neuroscience can take us in understanding these complexities of the human brain and how it works, but I do think there may be limits in terms of what science can tell us about what does good and evil mean anyway, and what are those concepts about?

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.

The best diet is the one that can be sustained over the long term, combined with other healthful lifestyle behaviors.

A virus is not just DNA; a virus is also packaged up, covered over with a series of proteins in a nice, elegant, well-compacted form.

Faith is reason plus revelation, and the revelation part requires one to think with the spirit as well as with the mind. You have to hear the music, not just read the notes on the page.

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 cares about the guy who’s drowning?

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.

We give our kids vaccinations. That’s a biological enhancement that’s considered not just acceptable but actually admirable.

Nobody gets argued all the way into becoming a believer on the sheer basis of logic and reason. That requires a leap of faith.

Patenting tends to get people’s juices flowing when you put the word ‘gene’ and the word ‘patent’ in the same sentence. And understandably so. This is stuff we’re carrying around – all of us – inside all of our cells. Should somebody be able to lay claim to it?

My own area of expertise is the genetics of human disease. I was fortunate to be part of the team that found the genes for cystic fibrosis, and Huntington’s disease and neurofibromatosis.

What faith has not been used by demagogues as a club over somebody’s head?

It is interesting that the U.S. has this very strong proportion of the population that rejects scientific conclusions about the age of the Earth and about evolutionary relationships between species, including humans.

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.

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.