Just a short note and congratulations to Dr. Francis Collins for being confirmed as director of the National Institutes of Health.
According to the Associated Press, Collins was confirmed by the US Senate yesterday via voice vote (say “aye” or “nay”), so I’d have to say this was an even easier confirmation than Judge Sonia Sotomayor, who took her oath today from Chief Justice Roberts as the first Hispanic justice of the US Supreme Court after a non-event of hearings.
Collins is a familiar face and name at the NIH, having been one of the prime-movers of the human genome project as …read more

Francis Collins, one of the major players who cracked the genetic code, is in final talks for taking the helm of the National Institutes of Health, reports the Bloomberg News.
As director of the National Human Genome Research Institutes (NHGRI) for 15 years, Collins spearheaded efforts to map the human genetic code. With a lot of help from J. Craig Venter at Celera, the project was completed ahead of schedule in 2003, and opened up a plethora of applications and implications for research into our genetic blueprint.
Collins resigned from the NHGRI position last year, in his own words, …read more

  After describing himself as an “unemployed geneticist”, Francis Collins now reveals that he has been “working night and day” with the White House transition for health and human services with Tom Daschle.  Now that that’s over, he is ready to discuss the progress that personalized medicine needs for it to move forward in a responsible way.
Francis Collins, the public face of the human genome research and former director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, spoke to biomedical researchers, biotech execs and policy people at a meeting in Washington DC organized by the Personalized Medicine Coalition.
"If we’re …read more

With the new administration comes a new NIH Director and the name that has been heard most often is none other than Francis Collins, former director of the National Human Genome Research Institute.

While with the NHGRI, Collins led the Human Genome Project that has become the foundation for almost every mapping project in the field. He also paved the way to have genetic data become open source and freely available to the wider scientific community.
So, is Collins the shoo-in to head the bigger National Institute of Health leadership? When asked, all Collins replied was, “No comment.”
What’s your take? Want Collins …read more

This Thursday, March 30, 2006, Dr. Francis Collins of the Human Genome Project will be giving a free public talk at the University of Alaska Anchorage. He promises that it won’t be a lecture just for the “science nerds”.
Here’s an excerpt from an informative telephone interview with Dr. Collins:
Q. The human genome project is difficult to grasp. How do you explain it to people?
A. I think it’s a pretty good metaphor to think of it as an instruction book. It’s a very large instruction. It has 3 billion letters in its instruction set.
If you printed those out …read more