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Dr. Francis Collins is the former Director of the National Institutes of Health and led the Human Genome Project to its successful completion in 2003. In his leadership, public speaking, and popular writing, including his bestselling book, The Language of God, Collins has demonstrated how religious faith can motivate and inspire rigorous scientific research. He was awarded the Templeton Prize in 2020. His newest book is entitled The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust. Francis joins the podcast to share his experience mapping the human genome, his journey directing the NIH, and how his life has been shaped by both scientific and spiritual exploration.

Tom: Hi Francis, welcome to the show.

Francis: Hey, I am glad to join you today.

Tom: To start us off, for our listeners that don’t know you already, can you tell me about where you grew up and what you loved to do as a child?

Francis: Huh! I grew up on a small farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. it was,a bit austere ’cause there was no indoor plumbing and there was a fair amount of farm work to do. but my father was a college professor and my mother was a playwright. So, there was a lot of intellectual activity in my house as well, particularly around the arts and theater. And I love music and started to teach myself music on our pump organ about age four. And that’s been a source of joy for me ever since. But I just love the mix of people and ideas. that landed in our farmhouse on almost any given evening with people coming by with something to share.

Tom: Tell me about, how did you fall in love with science?

Francis: Yeah, it seems a little unlikely, doesn’t it? I was taught at home by my parents until the sixth grade, and they taught me the joy of discovering something new. And most of it though, was about literature and history and music and the arts, science, not so much, but I went to public school finally, And it was a 10th grade class in chemistry, where the professor in the very first day just absolutely lit a fire for me. By explaining that science was really a detective story, that you have tools that you can use to try to discover how things work. And if you do them carefully and repeat them a few times, you can actually make inferences about really exciting things about nature. And I was hooked. I hooked so much that I figured since it was a chemistry professor, I must be destined to be a chemist, and followed that route through college and on to graduate school in physical chemistry before realizing that life science might be interesting too, and then making a quick detour into medical school. This was not a linear pathway, but I learned stuff all the way along the way.

Tom: Tell me a little bit about that pivot from the focus on chemistry to the, emphasis on medicine.

Francis: I had kind of narrowed my horizons a bit prematurely, Life science seemed a little messy when I first got exposed to it in high school. So I figured, no, not for me, I’ll stick to chemistry and physics and math. But I found out that actually life is about chemistry too. The most amazing chemical that I could possibly imagine is DNA, the hereditary material of all living organisms, including us. And it also satisfied the mathematical part of me that DNA is this molecule that’s in our DNA. digital in the way in which it conveys information from generation to generation. all of the things I loved about science seemed to be represented in this remarkable molecular biology that I was just learning about already well into a PhD in physical chemistry. and as long as I was also feeling this urge to want to work on science in a way that had a direct connection to benefiting humanity, which was a little harder with quantum mechanics, I figured I’d just make the entire leap. And off I went to the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, who for some reason decided to let me in with that story.

Tom: Were there any particular people or episodes where you felt like, I am ready to make this leap to go into medical school, after the initial grad school studies?

Francis: I think I had a couple of professors. where I was getting my PhD at Yale, who were working on the molecular biology of DNA and talking to them and particularly to their students. It sounded like they were having a really good time. Recombinant DNA was being invented right then. You could actually think about manipulating DNA in ways that might allow you to do things like make insulin, which ultimately not too long after that actually happened.

But I was still pretty unsure whether I’d made the right choice. Remember, I’m the guy who didn’t like things that were messy. Well, the human body is complicated and you might even say messy. And I didn’t like to memorize stuff. And Oh my gosh, in medical school, you have to memorize a lot of things. But what did it for me, just a couple months into that first year, was a professor who came to class to teach us about human genetics. Now I thought, okay, this is DNA, I’m going to like this. But I liked it even more because He brought patients to class.

It wasn’t this lecture, with somebody writing on the blackboard It was, let me introduce you to this young man with sickle cell anemia and have him tell you his story about what it’s like to live with this condition that we now know is caused by a single letter from a patient. of the DNA instruction book being misspelled. What should have been an A is a T and this is what the result is. That was just breathtaking. And he brought a little girl with Down syndrome to class and he brought very newborn baby with an inborn error of metabolism where one of those pathways that’s supposed to help you metabolize all of what you’re eating wasn’t quite working.

Tom: And each one of those. Just like it happened yesterday. I can see those moments and I can feel my sense of excitement growing. This is it. This is what I really want to do.that’s some great pedagogy,bringing real people in real life into the classroom. So, it sounds very effective in your case. I want to turn our attention now to the topic of your new book, The Road to Wisdom. And , I can think of a lot of ways to start a conversation about wisdom, but you open up with an episode that I had never heard before, that very early in your research career, you were embarking on a research project for many months, that spectacularly and utterly failed. So much so, that you considered Resigning or walking away from your research career. can you tell me that episode?

Francis: Yeah, so fast forward from my getting excited about medical genetics as a medical student, then I go through four years of medicine training, and then three years as a resident, and then it’s finally time to learn the research part of it. I have a Ph. D., so people assume I know what I’m doing, but my Ph.

1. in quantum mechanics is not particularly helpful when I’m suddenly plunged into a lab and given a project that I’m supposed to pursue, surrounded by other incredibly experienced, highly productive postdoctoral fellows. And here’s this guy, Collins. who isn’t quite sure how to turn on the autoclave. So it was a rough start. And I had a mentor who was both the smartest guy I’ve ever known and one of the worst communicators. So a lot of the time I really wasn’t quite sure what he was suggesting that I should do.

Finally got started on a project which did seem really exciting this was a new way of studying DNA and large pieces. Which at the time was pretty hard to do. And if it worked, everybody was gonna want to use this vector that I was working on. So I was like imagining the way in which this would play out. I would get a paper in a prominent journal. People would be writing to me saying, Oh, teach me how to do this.

There were some fits and starts, But ultimately, I got to the point where there was the definitive experiment, This was like six, nine months after I started. The experiment took a whole week, and then the day came to reveal the results, and it was a complete and utter disaster. It was unsalvageable. The whole premise of the experiment turned out to be flawed. I was utterly devastated. It was a failure of experiment, but it felt like a failure of me.

it was hard to admit that to the other people around me. I admit in the book, I spent some time in the men’s room sitting in the stall crying because I was so destroyed by this. And I went the next day, to tell my mentor that I had failed and that I was strongly considering leaving. And I said the same to my department chair.

And interestingly, both of them sort of laughed it off and said, Oh, you’ll learn from this. This happened to me too. They all had their stories of failure. And I realized, That actually is a pretty significant and important part of science, the failure part, because it reminds you that science isn’t going to give you the answer you want, just because you want it.

My department chair told me his spectacular failure and said, It was that that made him the successful scientist that he was the next time around.

I was like, oh boy, okay, I guess I don’t want to be a failure. I even looked at my, Christian background. Cause by then I was a serious Christian and looked at all the people in the old and new Testament who had failed and how they rose up from that. Not necessarily to be wild successes, but to learn from that. Okay, that’s something I should try to do too.

Tom: yeah, it’s interesting that you and your mentor looked at the same episode And reacted to it very differently like the framing Made such a big difference

Francis: It’s hard, you know, when you’re starting out, your projects become so intensely part of who you are. in my lab at NIH. I have a bunch of, junior researchers and they are in that same mindset.

and, just talked to one of them today who had a project that has failed and just seemed so despondent about it. And so I had to tell him my story. So that he would recognize he’s going to learn from this too. It’s going to be okay.

Tom: right. So You Big experiments failed. You moved on to the next one. Did you self consciously feel or approach your next big research project differently or with a different attitude?

Francis: Yes. I wasn’t going to make the same mistake of just assuming that hopefulness is going to lead to success. If you’re going to do a scientific experiment, you better think of all the ways that your hypothesis might be wrong and your experiments might be flawed before you just plunge in and say, okay, it’ll probably work. That is not going to serve you. Well, I already learned that.

So it was a totally different project. This was one focused on sickle cell disease. So it’s getting me closer to a medical application, and I like that too. But I had to do a lot of deep looking at the background information of what materials I would have available. There were some family DNA samples that nobody had looked at that sounded like they might be interesting. Needed to be sure those samples were still intact. They were something I could work with. And then come up with a hypothesis that if I was right, it made a pretty big difference in our understanding of how these genes for hemoglobin were regulated. If I was wrong, I would still learn something that would be useful to somebody. I

Tom: Great.

Francis: I want to turn to the topic of courage. We usually associate it with. warfare or sports or perhaps battling illness. But in your new book, you talk about how courage relates to scientific research. Can you explain that connection? Cause it wasn’t apparent to me from the outset. Sure,

is courage and taking on a really hard project and being willing to accept the fact that you may fail and that will not add to your stature. part of it is, taking the kind of strategy that science is not just, An academic exercise, it’s actually an effort to try to help somebody.

And that may mean, taking yourself outta your comfort zone if you’re a basic scientist, and try to figure out how do you actually translate that into some clinical action. And certainly when COD came along, a time where I had a lot of responsibility as the NIH director. It took the courage of pulling teams together of people who maybe didn’t really see that that was going to be the right answer and weren’t that comfortable with each other.

And trying to make the case that with people dying all around us, we had to do everything possible with bold ideas that might fail for therapeutics, for vaccines. for diagnostics, and then also to have the courage, to speak to the public about what you know and admit what you don’t know, cause that doesn’t always come quite as easily.

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“After the break…”

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So, as your career progressed, you were approached, in the early 1990s by the National Institutes of Health to lead the Human Genome Project, which sounds like just an enormous undertaking, a major investment, a lot of people, and an uncertain outcome. I can imagine it had, high amounts of risk. Can you tell me what was in your mind and how did you feel when you were approached with that opportunity? And as you deliberated, how you would respond to that request?

Francis: Well, I didn’t expect it. that’s for sure. The Genome Project had just gotten started in 1990. I was a big fan of it. Jim Watson, as in Watson and Crick, was the first leader. But he got into a bit of a tussle, with his boss, the head of the NIH, because Watson was famous for pretty much saying whatever came to mind, and sometimes it was pretty insulting. And before long, he was gone,

and the Genome Project was just a baby in the crib, and we were all pretty worried, this is maybe not going to go well without a leader, and then my phone rings. And they’re saying, we want you to apply. And I said, no. That’s not me. I’m here at the University of Michigan. I’m running a research lab that’s going pretty well. I’m teaching medical students, which I enjoy. I’m taking care of patients. This is what I’m supposed to do. Find somebody else.

Well, they kept calling, and I kept saying no, and eventually I find myself in the office of the NIH director who’s given me the hard sell, and I’m prepared to say no again. And then the strangest thing happened.

She gets through a big paragraph about this is the greatest job in the world, leading the Human Genome Project, this is historic. And she stops in the middle of the sentence and she said, You know, Frances, I don’t think I’m getting through to you. She said, I’m just having this image right now. That it’s quite some time from now and I’m in an assisted living home and I’m coming down the hallway with my walker And I look up ahead and I see you Francis and you’re coming towards me with your walk And you look at me and you say damn it I should have taken that job and it was the dumbest thing anybody ever said to me in a job interview and it completely destroyed me because she got exactly what was nagging at me with all of these refusals to consider this.

I might really be passing up the most amazing job in life science in the whole century because it wasn’t a convenient time and it wasn’t the kind of idea that I’d had about myself and it meant I’d have to be a federal employee and that didn’t sound good. All those things were scaring me off. What would I say 30 or 40 years later if I realized I passed up what might have been the most phenomenal scientific experience anybody could have.

And I called her the next day and said, I’m in.

Tom: Wow. She pressed the right button.

Francis: I use that when I’m recruiting people now that I think are like, oh, that’s a big job. I don’t know if it’s the right time for me. So I give that same story and it’s worked a few times.

Tom: looking back on it, we, think of the Human Genome Project as a, unparalleled success. It got done ahead of schedule, under budget. It achieved the hopes and aspirations that were set out. But that’s hindsight. During the process of itself, all the time and labor and people involved, and with your responsibility how did you feel and, What kind of thoughts go through your head when you’re, overseeing this multi year project with, high stakes?

Francis: Well, it was a learning experience and I’m sure I made plenty of mistakes there as well. I’ve never run anything bigger than my research

lab. And now in this role, it was my job to manage the work of about 2400 scientists in six countries, all of whom needed to really be working together with common agreement about what success would look like and what the quality standards of the data had to be. and an agreement that if some group fell behind, another group would need to step in and that would be okay. It was a huge challenge scientifically, but also just in terms of group management and science sociology. I think what helped me a lot was recognizing the incredible talent of the people that I got to work with and trying to unleash them in every way that I could. To basically use those talents to do things that I might not have actually thought about as ways to accelerate the progress and also to do what I could to be sure that everybody involved in this shared the same sense of historic vision that we were pursuing, that even if you had a bad day or a bad week or a bad month, You are part of something that people are going to talk about in a thousand years. That you helped read out the very first copy of our own instruction book.

Tom: well, I imagine the successful completion of that project is, in itself was immensely satisfying, But I want to ask you, now we’ve got the hindsight of 20 years since that announcement was made, what has the knowledge of the human genome led to in terms of improving medicine for the better?

Francis: A lot of things, but yet more to come. Certainly anybody who is doing the research part of trying to understand human biology. can’t imagine how anything was possible before we had the human genome sequence. I mean, talk to a graduate student today and say,suppose what you were doing right now did not allow you to have access to that information.

And they say it would be impossible. So it’s totally transformed our research approaches, but in terms of clinical applications, Certainly cancer has been changed to a completely new disease by the fact that we know cancer is a disease of the genome. It happens because of misspellings in DNA and it is now possible, in fact desirable, in fact maybe it should be standard of care. If you get a cancer, you want that cancer to have its DNA analyzed to see what’s driving those good cells to go bad, because that’s going to be your best information about then which intervention, which therapy to try that’s most likely to be appropriate for you. This is getting rid of one size fits all chemotherapy and going into something that’s much more precision oncology. that has saved a lot of lives. And also a lot of toxicity because it’s possible to give people something that’s going to really go to the cancer and not so much wreck of the rest of your body. That’s one place.

Certainly the ability to make rapid diagnoses of newborn kids, where, you know, something isn’t quite right and you don’t know what to do now, sequence the genome and about 40 percent of the time you get an answer. And a fair percent of that time, it says, do this right now and you’re going to help the outcome be a whole lot better. That’s pretty much becoming the way that most really good hospitals who have a newborn ICU figure things out that they couldn’t before.

And then a lot of other things coming along, the ability to make individual risks about future illness, to try to be more precise about our health care and our disease prevention instead of doing one size fits all there. Your genome tells you a lot about that. And things like polygenic risk scores are beginning to be more and more useful in giving the healthy person a better idea about how to stay healthy. Stay healthy.

And then I would say therapeutically, one of the areas that I’m most passionate about are these genetic rare diseases where something goes wrong because of a misspelling. We know so much about that. Now we’ve discovered the cause of about 7, 000 of those rare diseases that were just descriptions and now they’re molecular explanations. And for more and more of those with gene therapy and something called CRISPR, the gene editing ability. We’re not just able to diagnose them, we’re able to cure them.

Sickle cell disease. It’s curable. that is an astounding thing for me to say, because I never dreamed back in the day when I was working on that as a trainee, that in my lifetime, we would figure out the right tools, to do gene therapy, to cure that first molecular disease, sickle cell disease. And there it is.

Tom: I’ve got question about that. So we’re composed of something like, a trillion cells. And there are basically copies of each other. We identify there is some sort of, misspelling leads to something really devastating, like, sickle cell anemia or some other things. we’ve got CRISPR.

It’s this editing tool. I’m thinking of it like a word processor. I just kind of go in, delete, add some words,I can imagine that in my mind for. changing one cell, but how do you change a trillion cells?

Francis: Ah, great question. You need a delivery system that can take that editing apparatus and get it to the cells that most need to be fixed. And for most diseases, it’s not like that mutation is causing a problem in all parts of your body.

Take sickle cell disease. It’s the blood cells that you need to fix. So right now, the way that’s done is you actually take out bone marrow, you cure the bone marrow, and then you put it back. And that person doesn’t have sickle cell.

My lab works on a very rare form of premature aging called progeria. But the main problem for kids with that disease is cardiovascular.

So we are, I think, within a couple years of trying to cure that with gene editing, using a delivery system, something called AAV, that’s particularly good at getting to those tissues. And the idea is a single infusion of that editing system targeted by this AAV vector. You should be able, to get a substantial benefit, for this disease.

so you recounted a number of great success of and I imagine Expectations were and will be very high moving forward. Where have been some of the expectations that have not been realized. And perhaps knowing genome sequences doesn’t yield the kinds of results, that you’re hoping for.

Well, there are plenty where we’re still on the road. This very day, we’re having a huge meeting about Alzheimer’s disease. We know that there’s a particular spelling of a gene called ApoE, the one called ApoE4, the, that version of ApoE, which places you at about three fold higher risk of Alzheimer’s disease if you have one copy of that.

If you got two copies of that, one from each parent, your risk is about 15 fold elevated. So there’s a very clear, genetic signal. And yet we have not, so far, been able to utilize that information To help those people who are at high risk. That’s what we’re talking aboutIs it time to try to take CRISPR and bring it to this one?

But that means you’ve got to do it in the brain.

Tom: Mm.

Francis: of the body that are harder to get to and where you have to worry a lot more about unintended consequences. The optimistic part of me, and I think it’s based on pretty good evidence is that we will get there, but it’s hard work and there’s a lot of steps along the way that are unpredictable.

Tom: I want to turn our discussion next to wisdom, which is in the title of your book. Wisdom, I think, seems to be in short supply in our society. What are some of the key ingredients to acquiring and having wisdom?

Francis: Yeah, so first of all, what is wisdom? It’s not just knowledge, although it depends on knowledge, but it adds to that a moral framework, and some understanding, and sophistication in making decisions about what path to take when the answer isn’t entirely clear. Spock is kind of the knowledge guy, Yoda is kind of the wisdom person, if you need kind of a model there.

So it’s complicated, this book was my own effort to try to figure out what are the components that we need to really be on that road to wisdom.

And certainly one of them is truth. I worry that right now truth seems to be a little bit under attack by the fact that we’re so polarized. And so you’ve probably heard people say, well, that might be true for you, but it’s not true for me. And if they were talking about an opinion about a movie, that’s fine. But if it was about whether the formula for water is H2O, that’s not fine. There is a certain category of truth that exists outside of us and doesn’t care how we feel. And that category needs to be honored. Otherwise our society really starts to getting in trouble. So truth is in there.

Science is a means of discovering truth about the natural world. That’s what I learned in 10th grade chemistry. That’s what I’ve been trying to do ever since. Science gets it wrong sometimes, but it’s self correcting. So, for the most part, if science has told you something that has stood up over multiple other people checking it, it’s probably true. And yet distrust in science right now seems to be rising rapidly in a way that’s also not good for us.

And then there’s faith as a means of finding another kind of truth, the transcendental sorts of truths, which for me as a Christian are at least as important, trying to understand such things as why am I here? is there a God? Why is there something instead of nothing? The why questions that Science maybe isn’t so well suited to address, science is more about how, and I think our faith communities are also rattled by the current polarization and having trouble figuring out how they could rightfully be part of the solution.

And all of this then ties in with the fourth issue, which is trust. We really need to be sure we’re not. allowing ourselves to trust sources that really don’t deserve that, that don’t have the appropriate expertise, or maybe are not good for us. And that’s another place where right now with social media, oftentimes making people angry or fearful and you’re tempted to trust something like that when maybe that’s not really true. So trust needs its own sort of revamping.

So the argument in the book is, let’s look at these things, truth, science, faith, and trust. Let’s each of us assess, where we are in our own worldview. Do we have our house in order? And then let’s try to be part of the solution, to bring people back together at a time where there is such divisiveness and oftentimes a lot of mean spirited conversation going on. That’s not who we are.

Yeah. We talked earlier about failure, personal failure, professional failure, and how to respond to it, how is wisdom related to failure?

Oh, it is very much there. I think part of acquiring wisdom is to learn from failures, just like we talked about at the beginning of this conversation. The worst thing you can do with a failure is to just be grumpy about it and say, well, I just want to forget the whole thing. But if you have the opportunity to learn why it happened, you’re adding to your wisdom.

And it’s actually more than just the facts of what went wrong. It’s also this understanding, this adding additional experience and maybe common sense to your own next efforts that otherwise you might not have been well prepared for. I can’t imagine a truly wise person saying they’ve never failed because a lot of what the wise people. Who I look at as having the greatest sense about this are building their explanations of what they know on the basis of those failures.

Tom: So, continuing our conversation about wisdom, for many people, the world’s religious traditions are seen of as a great source of wisdom could you tell me what started your spiritual journey and, also just importantly, how has your perspective on faith changed, in the decades that have followed?

Francis: Well, I was an atheist when I was a graduate student in quantum mechanics. I was what you might call, was a pure materialist, Which is to say, there’s nothing worth talking about or thinking about that can’t be measured scientifically.

And then I went to medical school. And it was harder to sustain that view when you sat at the bedside of people who were dying and imagined yourself in that role and didn’t really quite know what you would do.

And I had a patient who challenged me directly after sharing her faith with me to tell what I believed, and I realized I had absolutely no idea what answer to give. That was really troubling. I’m a guy who’s supposed to consider the evidence and then make a decision, and I’d never looked at the evidence.

and I wrote about this in a book called The Language of God. It was a two year journey that ultimately brought me away from atheism, which turned out to be the least rational of the choices, because it’s an assertion of a universal negative,

towards the idea of a God that was the creator of the universe, because I, Look at all these features of the universe like it’s fine tuning and the fact that these laws all make sense and that had a beginning that we can’t explain but then also This whole concept, which is the foundation of many faiths, that there’s such a thing called good and evil, and I don’t find it satisfying to say that can be completely explained on naturalistic grounds through evolutionary psychologies.

Something important about the concept of good and evil calls out to us, and called out to me, to really begin to take seriously the idea that not only is there a God, Who’s a creator, but a God who cares about us and cares about me.

And after that, I began to realize that I studied various religions, that there was a particular figure that was unique and that seemed really to me to be.  the answer to what I was searching for, and that was Jesus, who was both God and man, and who promised, not only to teach us well, but to help us figure out ways to find forgiveness. So, I became a Christian at age 27. I was pretty naive at the beginning, and a lot of the people around me predicted this would be short lived.

But I will say, I have not encountered in this now 47 years, of Christian belief. A circumstance where I saw there was a really difficult conflict between the scientific and the spiritual worldviews. As long as you’re careful about what question you’re asking, if it’s about how nature works, hey, go with science. If it’s about some larger transcendental questions, the why questions, science may have to take a backseat there and see what faith is. is able to give me as an answer through prayer and through reading the works of many other people who thought very deeply about this. And I find that intensely satisfying.

Mm hmm. Yeah. with the little time we have remaining, I gonna ask you a few more personal questions. we covered your time working on the Human Genome Project,You had another major, opportunity and challenge in your life, which was leading the National Institutes of Health, the ones that had, first asked you to embark on the Human Genome Project.

Tom: You said yes to that offer. led the NIH for 12 years through three different presidential administrations. even imagine the amount of pressure, stress, The stakes being so high and I wonder what both inspired you to take that job because you could have just throttled back You could have said the human genome project was success. I want to live on an island and enjoy my life. You took on perhaps an even harder job And did it for longer than anyone else? Tell me about that what was your interior life and your experience, getting you along those 12 years? Sure.

Francis: going to be the next chapter after I stepped down from the Genome Project leadership. I was restless. I was figuring there’s something else I’m supposed to do, but I don’t know what it is. And then to have this invitation, coming from President Obama, in the spring of 2009 was like, oh my gosh, it is kind of hard to say no, when your country is calling you to something like this.

And it was exciting to contemplate taking what I already had been able to contribute to with this very specific area of the human genome and then try to carry it forward to lots of other things, to cancer, to heart disease, to brain disorders. and to try to figure out how to enhance our global health, imprint, because NIH is a big part of that as well.

So I got excited about it, and I figured if I’m gonna be able to do this, I have to surround myself with the smartest people I can possibly find, and I might have to give them that speech about the walkers that are passing each other in the hallway to convince them to come and join me. But a bunch of them did, and it was super intense, but it was a remarkable experience. opportunity to look across the whole landscape of what’s happening in medical research, since NIH is the biggest supporter in the world of this, and to say, are there some things that could go faster or could be bolder or could pull something from over here with something over there and watch what happens?

And that meant starting a whole new project on the human brain. that meant starting a whole lot of effort on stem cell research. And, uh, Big project on precision medicine called all of us and a bunch of new things on cancer. I mean, all of those were part of what I was able to do. And what’s not to get excited about there.

Yeah, it was exhausting. And I had to be sure I was taking care of myself in other ways. And that meant starting every day in a spiritual way to be ready for the day’s experiences and not letting my spiritual life go stale and taking care of not just my soul, but also my body.

I’m kind of, uh, fanatic about exercise and also having fun with some things like music, which continue to be a source of great joy, or just riding my bike with my wife on the weekend at a time where you really need a chance to get out and breathe the air and feel fully alive again. I would not say I’m a great role model for work life balance, but I tried

Tom: Yeah. Thinking back over your career, both the human genome project and directing the NIH, fraught with risk, peril, uncertainty. it is not career for the faint of heart. I kind of wonder hypothetically, if you’ve been afraid to make mistakes, how might your life played out differently?

Francis: very differently. Very differently. I’m glad we came back to that because if I had let that first failure convince me that it was just not a good idea to take any future risk, because it was painful. It was kind of pain. You did not want to volunteer for it. I would have presumably chosen a path of. much more obvious applications.

Maybe I would have given up research and decided, well, I’m just going to be a practicing doc and that could be very rewarding, but I would probably not have had the same amazing experiences that I have had in this role. So the counseling I got, from my research mentor, my department chair and my pastor that this kind of failure is actually a really good thing because it will help you to learn from it and then the next time you have a chance to take a risk.

Do so, but with better lenses about exactly what you might do to set it up so that it’s less likely to be a complete flop.

I I’ve got a one wrap up question here for you.

Tom: What makes you hopeful about the present about the future?

Francis: Well, I am hopeful because I have a lot of confidence in humanity to figure out ways to do those things that are most noble about us. even people who are feeling pretty stressed by our current circumstance. Figure out ways to make an opportunity to give to others, and that just lifts them out of whatever it was that was making you feel kind of bleak.

It’s really easy, if you focus too heavily on all of the things that are wrong in your life and around you. to have a hard time pulling yourself out of that. So, figure out, okay, there’s other people out there who are having a worse time. Reach out to them. figure out who, in the community needs some help.

my wife does a lot of cooking, for a homeless shelter. And, Gives of herself and get so much back in terms of story. She hears and people who are willing to express their gratitude a favorite one right now of mine is people who have incredible medical bills that they can’t pay.

if you’re part of a group, figure out how you could help with that. It is so rewarding to figure out that you’ve done something for somebody that you didn’t have to, that was a pure step of altruism. And I know it sounds like do gooders, but it’ll do good for you.

Turn off the social media. Get out of the community. Join up with a group that’s trying to make the world a better place. It’ll help you a lot.

Well, thank you, Francis, for joining me today. Talking to you makes me more hopeful about the present and the future.

glad to be with you. It was a nice conversation. I hope if people read this book, they will also feel, that this is a chance, for our country, our nation, our world, to find itself into a better place

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