science · 14 April 1950 · 75 years ago
birth
Born 14 Apr 1950.
Francis Sellers Collins is an American geneticist and physician who became the second director (1993-2008), taking over from James Watson, at the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), an agency of the U.S. government. On 8 Jul 2009, he was nominated by President Obama to be head of the NIH. He was awarded the National Medal of Science at a ceremony at the White House (7 Oct 2009). Collins began his early career with a Ph.D. in physical chemistry, but recognizing the nacent field of molecular biology and genetics, he changed his field, and earned an M.D. (1977). Thereafter, he worked on methods of crossing large stretches of DNA to identify disease genes, for which he later coined the term positional cloning. His research team used it to identify the gene for cystic fibrosis (1989) and for Huntington disease (1993).
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