Thus, you might think that the scientific world would have celebrated the elevation of Dr. Collins to the NIH. Not so. Harvard's Steven Pinker declared that Collins is "an advocate of profoundly anti-scientific beliefs." Other leading scientists said far worse. Why?
As The New Yorker reports this week, Dr. Collins is "a believing Christian." As writer Peter J. Boyer explains, "The objection to Collins was his faith—or, at least, the ardency of it. Collins is a believing Christian, which places him in the minority among his peers in the National Academy of Science. (Of its members, according to a study, only seven percent believe in God.)"
Putting "believing" in front of "Christian" points directly to the problem. The voices of secular scientism would be much less threatened by an unbelieving Christian — a person who would associate with Christianity, but hold to no distinctive Christian beliefs. Even more striking in Boyer's account is the linkage of "ardency" with "believing Christian." It evidently doesn't take much to be considered ardent these days.
Boyer points to the influence Collins has achieved through his books, speaking, and advocacy, and to his creation of the BioLogos website, designed "to advance his idea of the companionability of reason and faith." Of course, the main preoccupation (or obsession) of the BioLogos site is advocacy for the theory of evolution among Christians.
Francis Collins is headed into a public controversy over the use of human embryos in medical research. As Boyer explains, Collins had crafted a policy that would reverse some limitations placed on such research by the Bush administration. The Bush policy, announced during President Bush's first address to be televised from the Oval Office, limited federally funded research to a specified list of existing stem-cell lines taken from embryos and prevented any funding of research that would destroy further human embryos. Back in 1995, Congress had approved legislation [the Dickey-Wicker amendment] that banned federal involvement in any research that included the destruction of human embryos. Researchers demanded additional stem-cell lines, and some politicians promised that cures and treatments for devastating diseases would be right around the corner.
President Obama modified the Bush policy in 2009, with assistance from Francis Collins. Collins now appears to be a forceful advocate of an aggressive broadening of research using human embryos. "It's time to accelerate human-embryonic-stem-cell research," he said, "not throw on the brakes."
Peter Boyer capably traces the issue and its controversies. Even James Thompson, the University of Wisconsin scientist who pioneered the use of human embryos in this research, saw this clearly. "If human-embryonic-stem-cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough," he said.
Boyer reports that Francis Collins "was personally torn by the ethical questions posed by stem-cell research" before joining the Obama administration. Nevertheless, he is now pushing hard for the expansion of such research. As Boyer explains:
He has long opposed the creation of embryos for the purpose of research. He sees a human embryo as a potential life, though he thinks that it is not possible scientifically to settle precisely when life begins. But Collins also feels it is morally wasteful not to take advantage of the hundreds of thousands of embryos created for in-vitro fertilization that ultimately are disposed of anyway. These embryos are doomed, but they can help aid disease research.
