By PETER J BOYER - NEW YORKER
Added: Sun, 05 Sep 2010 13:09:29 UTC

Thanks to Fritz Vollrath for the link.

When the geneticist Francis Collins was named director of the National Institutes of Health, last summer, he became the public face of American science and the keeper of the world’s deepest biomedical-research-funding purse. He was praised by President Obama and waved through the Senate confirmation process without objection. There also came a peer review of a sort that he’d never experienced, conducted in the press and in Internet science forums. Collins read in the Times that many of his colleagues in the scientific community believed that he suffered from “dementia.” Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard, questioned the appointment on the ground that Collins was “an advocate of profoundly anti-scientific beliefs.” P. Z. Myers, a biologist at the University of Minnesota at Morris, complained, “I don’t want American science to be represented by a clown.”

Collins’s detractors did not question his professional achievements, which long ago secured his place in the first rank of international scientists. As a young researcher at Yale, Collins conceived a method of hastening the laborious process of hunting disease-causing genes by skipping across long stretches of chromosomes until the suspect gene’s neighborhood was located. As an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, in the nineteen-eighties, he and collaborators at the University of Toronto employed this method to find the gene that causes cystic fibrosis and, a year later, the genetic flaw responsible for neurofibromatosis. These breakthroughs brought him fame and, eventually, the job of director of the Human Genome Project, which promised to revolutionize medicine by identifying and mapping all the approximately twenty thousand human genes that code for protein.

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TAGGED: BIOLOGY, MEDICINE, RELIGION, SCIENCE