Francis Collins, NIH Director in a dinner discussion with NCBS students, including Aniket Sengupta.  Photo: Vaibhhav Sinha

I was honoured to be among the people who had dinner with Dr. Collins after his talk at NCBS. The students of NCBS, ever-voracious consumers of knowledge kept him busy with their questions till faculty came to his rescue. I managed to steal a few minutes from them for the interview.

With a mug of beer in hand and nibbling a dhosa, Dr.  Collins talked about recent scintillating updates in science, about science education, his passions and finally on religion and God. Here are a few excerpts from that exciting conversation.

AS: The Science and Society programme at NCBS is trying to take science to the common man. You had a music band with your fellow scientists, and the songs often focused on biomedical research.  Could you share the experience with us?

FC: That's good (about the Science and Society programme). Yeah we were guilty (laughs).  Well I grew up playing music.  It seems like a good outlet when things get a little bit too serious. Especially for celebrations it seems like a good idea to incorporate some opportunity for music. And it is also interesting that a lot of scientists were also musicians.

AS: Einstein!

FC: Yeah, well yeah.  Physicists especially. When you look at any world class physicist, almost all of them are either remarkable violin or piano players.  I am neither of those, I am a guitar player.  I have been part of various hip-hop rock-n-roll bands. The idea is that you pick up a familiar song, so that they are more relevant to whatever occasion it happens to be.

Yeah I am guilty! If you have ever been exposed to it, I am sorry!

AS: Research at NCBS is highly interdisciplinary - cell biologists rubbing shoulders with mathematicians and physicists. You did a Masters in chemistry, then a PhD in physical chemistry. Moved to medicine next. Finally you started research in genetics. Does having a different background help or was it an obstacle?

FC: Oh I think that helps but I won't advocate anybody should follow the path I took as it was very long and drawn out;  rather non-linear and inefficient because I was thirty-four by the time I finished my training. And I am not sure I would recommend that as the means of getting into your own independent career.

But I have never regretted having had that experience starting out in physical science, chemistry, mathematics, because biology has become a digital science taking its rightful place alongside physics and chemistry as truly quantitative.  And it would be nice to have that background in other sciences so that one is not intimidated by the need to applying computational approaches to life because that is kind of where we are. Anybody who got into biology thinking that it is just a descriptive science thinking that I won't have to do any mathematics: sorry ! Not gonna work (laughs).

You cannot do biology without computationally really sophisticated approaches whatever the problem you are working on.

AS: Sadly in India, it's either Maths or Biology in high school.

FC: Not so different in the US. And I think oh if I am good at maths, I should do physics and chemistry, if I am not,  I should do biology.  Both of those statements are wrong.

AS: Your child, the human genome, is 10 years old. How has the world changed since 2001? What's on the cards?

FC: I don't know if you can imagine how you did research without access to DNA sequences on the internet. Students in my lab shake their heads and suggest that we didn't do anything before 2003 because it is so difficult to ask a lot of questions without that foundation. It's pretty breathtaking when you consider, it has been only ten years since that draft sequence was published in 2001, in the way genomics has invaded all of the other science that we do. It's transformative whether you are interested in basic cell biology operations, or whether you are designing the next therapeutic, this is so important for whatever you do. I get a little frustrated when the commentators say that, oh you know, the genome project, people said it was going to be the a big deal, it was going to change everything, and still seems like medicine has not been much affected,  like a big disappointment.

I think if they had looked carefully at the facts, in terms of research, everything is totally different, in terms of medical advances everybody should have known that some of it takes a long time: from having very foundational information to having actions that you could put to clinical trials and get approved.  Another ten years and it would be true.

A discussion comes up on traditional medicine with other students and he observes-

FC: NIH has National Centre for Complementary and Alternative Medicine whose entire mission is to seek out these kinds of natural remedies that clearly have long reports based upon centuries of application......I don't know about India, but they have done a lot of Chinese medicines, with mixed results.

AS: You are a faithful Christian, have volunteered for hospitals in Nigerian hospitals, are a proponent of theistic evolution. A lot of people tend to think of science and religion as things that cannot co-exist. How do science and religion get along in your life?

FC: I was an atheist when I was a graduate student.....Then I ended up being a believer four years later. If you are asking a question about nature, science is the way to get that answer. If you conduct it carefully, and have other people replicate it, you can have reliable answers. The 'How' questions about physics, chemistry, biology, about the universe. We can be pretty confident about the method, it works. But then the question is, is that all you are interested in?.......But aren't there some other questions. (Dr. Sumantra Chattarji gets a dhosa for him. He laughs and says).....Let me finish my paragraph ! This is a whole lifetime discussion right? Are there questions that we as humans would like to explore, that science can't help with.  What's the meaning of life? Is there a God? Can science give you an answer, not so much?  If God has meaning at all, then God cannot be identical with nature, otherwise what are we talking about? God has to have some connection with, to use the word, a supernatural component.

And science has to stay out of that otherwise you are taking the wrong approach.  My question is: can you have both a spiritual worldview and a scientific world view in the same person without having your brain explode? I would say yes as long as you know which kind of question you are approaching and haven't made the mistake of making the wrong strategy. If I am trying to figure out if there is a God and he cares about me, science is not going to give me that answer........The most illogical irrational position is that I know there is no God. How can you say that confidently, when what you know is a small fraction of what is knowable and if God happens to exists outside your little circle, you have to admit it that you made a big mistake? I think one can be an agnostic. You can't be an atheist and really defend that on logical ground.

AS: How do you know there aren't twenty gods and they all care about us?

FC: Could be. First you have to open the door of possibility to any god. That's a big step, took me about a year. Having opened that door what kind of god would fit most clearly the evidence we have around us......I feel compelled by one feature of humans that I can't explain by evolution: altruism. The calling that we have to be willing to sacrifice ourselves for even people we do not know......a humanity that we all should aspire to, and evolution goes 'What! Are you nuts? You are going to be propagating your DNA'. You are expected to actually compete with other people.

AS: This can be explained by exaptations.(Richard Dawkins, and a famous paper by Gould and Lewontin that argues against the strictly adaptationist view are alluded to by students)

FC: I know Dawkins, I have tea with Dawkins whenever I am in Oxford. One time I said, "Hey Richard, these arguments you make about atheism, which one bothers you?"  Richard said, "You know, that one about radical altruism. That's a problem but I am not going to say that to you."

And then the faculty and his colleagues finally arrived to rescue him and he went on to appreciate the Bharatnatyam performance.