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

Francis Collins

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

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

" 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

" 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

" 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? "

Francis Collins

" 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. "

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

" Research is so unpredictable. There are periods when nothing works and all your experiments are a disaster and all your hypotheses are wrong. "

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

" 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

" 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. "

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

" I think there are people who's lives have been saved because of the study of the genome. "

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

" It is interesting that the U.S. has this very strong proportion of the population that rejects scientific conclusions about the age of the Earth and about evolutionary relationships between species, including humans. "

Francis Collins

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

Francis Collins

" What faith has not been used by demagogues as a club over somebody's head? "

Francis Collins

" 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

" 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

" 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 God is real, and I believe he is, then he is outside of nature. He is, therefore, not limited by the laws of nature in the way that we are. "

Francis Collins

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

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

" In my own experience as a physician, I have not seen a miraculous healing, and I don't expect to see one. "

Francis Collins

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

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

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

Francis Collins

" Successful weight management really means a permanent change in lifestyle - and success in this arena provides that person with a great opportunity to model that behavior for friends and family. "

Francis Collins

" 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. "

Francis Collins

" As a scientist, you're not supposed to make decisions without the data. "

Francis Collins