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" A technological advance of a major sort almost always is overestimated in the short run for its consequences - and underestimated in the long run. "

Francis Collins

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" The brain is the most complicated organ in the universe. We have learned a lot about other human organs. We know how the heart pumps and how the kidney does what it does. To a certain degree, we have read the letters of the human genome. But the brain has 100 billion neurons. Each one of those has about 10,000 connections. "

Francis Collins

" So much of what we are currently seeing as far as human suffering and misery comes from diseases that should have been preventable but were not. "

Francis Collins

" Faith is reason plus revelation, and the revelation part requires one to think with the spirit as well as with the mind. You have to hear the music, not just read the notes on the page. "

Francis Collins

" The shelves of many evangelicals are full of books that point out the flaws in evolution, discuss it only as a theory, and almost imply that there's a conspiracy here to avoid the fact that evolution is actually flawed. All of those books, unfortunately, are based upon conclusions that no reasonable biologist would now accept. "

Francis Collins

" I believe in the literal rising of the body of Christ. It's the cornerstone of my Christian faith. "

Francis Collins

" When does life begin? When does the soul enter? That's a religious question. Science is not going to be able to help with that. "

Francis Collins

" I don't have a problem with the concept that miracles might occasionally occur at moments of great significance, where there is a message being transmitted to us by God Almighty. But as a scientist, I set my standards for miracles very high. "

Francis Collins

" I'm a serious Christian. I take my faith seriously. I try to practice it every day of the week, not just on Sunday. "

Francis Collins

" I actually do not believe that there are any collisions between what I believe as a Christian, and what I know and have learned about as a scientist. I think there's a broad perception that that's the case, and that's what scares many scientists away from a serious consideration of faith. "

Francis Collins

" Science's domain is the natural. If you want to understand the natural world and be sure you're not misleading yourself, science is the way to do it. "

Francis Collins

" Cancer is a disease of the genome. And that's what happens. You make mistakes in a cell somewhere in your body that causes it to start to grow when it should've stopped, and that's cancer. And those mistakes are mistakes of DNA. "

Francis Collins

" As a Christian, but also as a scientist responsible for overseeing the Human Genome Project, one of my concerns has been the limits on applications of our understanding of the genome. Should there be limits? I think there should. I think the public has expressed their concern about ways this information might be misused. "

Francis Collins

" I'm a pretty informal guy. I ride a Harley. "

Francis Collins

" For me, in my Christian belief, prayer is not an opportunity to manipulate God into doing what you want him to. Prayer is an opportunity to have a conversation with God to try to get in tune with what his will is. "

Francis Collins

" Genes are effectively one-dimensional. If you write down the sequence of A, C, G and T, that's kind of what you need to know about that gene. But proteins are three-dimensional. They have to be because we are three-dimensional, and we're made of those proteins. Otherwise we'd all sort of be linear, unimaginably weird creatures. "

Francis Collins

" If I'm walking down the riverbank, and a man is drowning, even if I don't know how to swim very well, I feel this urge that the right thing to do is to try to save that person. Evolution would tell me exactly the opposite: preserve your DNA. Who cares about the guy who's drowning? "

Francis Collins

" The word 'living' has so many connotations that I'm almost reluctant to try to define it scientifically because it sounds as if I'm then downgrading all the other significances of that word. "

Francis Collins

" I finished up my graduate degree in quantum mechanics, but underwent a bit of a personal crisis, recognizing that I didn't want to do that for the rest of my life. It was too abstract, too far removed from human concerns. "

Francis Collins

" I've never heard God speak out loud to me. That's not an experience I have had. "

Francis Collins

" For delightfully quirky descriptions of bizarre neurological syndromes that teach us a lot about how the brain works, there is no match for Oliver Sacks. "

Francis Collins

" Scientists must venture outside their comfort zones to show the public how cool - and how important - their work really is. "

Francis Collins

" I became an atheist because, as a graduate student studying quantum physics, life seemed to be reducible to second-order differential equations. Mathematics, chemistry and physics had it all. And I didn't see any need to go beyond that. "

Francis Collins

" One must dig deeply into opposing points of view in order to know whether your own position remains defensible. Iron sharpens iron. "

Francis Collins

" Many people struggle with losing weight and then regaining it. But there is no convincing evidence that the effort to lose weight actually promotes more weight gain in the long run. "

Francis Collins

" It's interesting when you read the life of Christ how much of his time he spent healing the sick. There must have been a reason for that - he was modelling for us what it is we are intended to do by following his path. "

Francis Collins

" Growing up, I was vaguely aware of things that went on in church, because I was in the boys' choir at the local Episcopal church. But I got the clear message that I was supposed to learn music there, and not pay too much attention to the rest of it, and I followed those instructions very carefully. "

Francis Collins

" I believe God did intend, in giving us intelligence, to give us the opportunity to investigate and appreciate the wonders of His creation. He is not threatened by our scientific adventures. "

Francis Collins

" People who are in a position of finding out that they're at risk for some illness, whether it's breast cancer, or heart disease, are afraid to get that information - even though it might be useful to them - because of fears that they'll lose their health insurance or their job. "

Francis Collins

" I took care of young adults with cystic fibrosis when I was in my residency training and found this to be a disease that was desperately in need of some explanation. "

Francis Collins

" A virus is not just DNA; a virus is also packaged up, covered over with a series of proteins in a nice, elegant, well-compacted form. "

Francis Collins