Francis Collins
FameRank: 5

"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.

Before being appointed director of the NIH, Collins led the Human Genome Project and other genomics research initiatives as director of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), one of the 27 institutes and centers at NIH. Before joining NHGRI, he earned a reputation as a gene hunter at the University of Michigan. He has been elected to the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences, and has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Medal of Science.

Collins also has written a number of books on science, medicine, and spirituality, including the New York Times bestseller, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.

More Francis Collins on Wikipedia.

We've learnt fascinating lessons.

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This is a stunning surprise, rather like finding out that the key to your house also works in the ignition of your car.

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These revelations arrive almost five years early from the original predictions of not having this information until 2005, and here we are. We have the first draft of our own book of life and we've read it from cover to cover, and we've discovered some pretty amazing surprises.

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Four years ago, we took down the book called Homo sapiens, ... Today, we take down the book next to it on the shelf.

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We can peek into evolution's lab notebook and see what went on there.

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As our closest relatives, they (chimpanzees) tell us special things about what it means to be a primate and, ultimately, what it means to be a human at the DNA level.

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FTIs, originally developed for cancer, are capable of reversing the dramatic nuclear structure abnormalities that are the hallmark of cells from children with progeria.

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It's a huge deal. We now have the instruction book of our closest relative.

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Sequencing the chimp genome is a historic achievement that is destined to lead to many more exciting discoveries with implications for human health.

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