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" What faith has not been used by demagogues as a club over somebody's head? "
Francis Collins
Over
Used
Club
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" I've never heard God speak out loud to me. That's not an experience I have had. "
Francis Collins
God
Speak
Never
" 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
God
Believe
Opportunity
" 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
" 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
Brain
Connections
Human
" One must dig deeply into opposing points of view in order to know whether your own position remains defensible. Iron sharpens iron. "
Francis Collins
Dig
Position
Own
" 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
Help
Soul
Science
" 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
See
Studying
Life
" 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
Us
Teach
" 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
Christian
Understanding
Limits
" We give our kids vaccinations. That's a biological enhancement that's considered not just acceptable but actually admirable. "
Francis Collins
Our
Give
Just
" In my own experience as a physician, I have not seen a miraculous healing, and I don't expect to see one. "
Francis Collins
Physician
Experience
My Own
" God gave us free will, and we may choose to exercise it in ways that end up hurting other people. "
Francis Collins
Choose
People
Free
" Sometimes you develop a passion for something because of some personal experience. "
Francis Collins
Experience
You
Sometimes
" I'm a pretty informal guy. I ride a Harley. "
Francis Collins
Ride
Harley
Informal
" 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
You
Start
Cancer
" 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
Nothing
Disaster
Research
" 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
Health
People
Information
" 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
Always
Long
Consequences
" I'm enormously interested to see where neuroscience can take us in understanding these complexities of the human brain and how it works, but I do think there may be limits in terms of what science can tell us about what does good and evil mean anyway, and what are those concepts about? "
Francis Collins
Good
See
Science
" 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
Change
Opportunity
Family
" 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
Believe
Way
Nature
" 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
Weird
Down
Kind
" 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
Rest
Want
My Life
" 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
Care
Training
Young
" 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
History
Think
People
" Scientists must venture outside their comfort zones to show the public how cool - and how important - their work really is. "
Francis Collins
Important
Work
Outside
" 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
Struggle
Run
Effort
" 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
Me
God
Prayer
" If you are in support of in vitro fertilization, then you have to recognize that human embryos are being created in excess of what can be used safely to reimplant for a pregnancy. So they're going to end up being discarded. "
Francis Collins
Support
You
Going
" 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
Living
Word
Try