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" 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. "

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" Nobody gets argued all the way into becoming a believer on the sheer basis of logic and reason. That requires a leap of faith. "

Francis Collins

Reason

Faith

Nobody

" 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. "

" 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. "

" We give our kids vaccinations. That's a biological enhancement that's considered not just acceptable but actually admirable. "

" 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

Evolution

Flaws

" 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. "

" A cardinal principle that we must not stray from - no exceptions - is that your genetic information is your business in terms of who sees it. Nobody should be gaining access to that information without your explicit permission, and nobody should be requiring you to take a genetic test unless you decide that that's what you want to do. "

" 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

DNA

Nice

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

" If you are looking for a needle in a haystack, and somebody has already cataloged all the straw in the haystack, when you get to that needle you will recognize it's different than what was supposed to be there based on all that computerized haystack information that had been predetermined for you. "

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

" 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

Brain

Teach

" 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. "

" 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

God

Prayer

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" God is an awesome mathematician and physicist. "

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

" I think history would say that medical research has, throughout many changes of parties, remained as one of the shining lights of bipartisan agreement, that people are concerned about health for themselves, for their families, for their constituents. "

" 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. "

" God gave us free will, and we may choose to exercise it in ways that end up hurting other people. "

" Proponents of intelligent design don't accept that some of the very complex nanomachines that we have inside ourselves could have come about solely on the basis of natural selection. "

" 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. "

" The best diet is the one that can be sustained over the long term, combined with other healthful lifestyle behaviors. "

" Sometimes you develop a passion for something because of some personal experience. "

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

" Patenting tends to get people's juices flowing when you put the word 'gene' and the word 'patent' in the same sentence. And understandably so. This is stuff we're carrying around - all of us - inside all of our cells. Should somebody be able to lay claim to it? "

" 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. "