Dr. Francis Collins Led the NIH. Now, He Fears for the Future of Science

Stand Up For Science Rally Held In D.C.

Dr. Francis Collins led the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world’s largest funder of biomedical research, under three presidents—including Trump during his first term. He left that post in 2021 and retired from his career in government in March 2025.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Collins shared with TIME why actions taken by the Trump Administration have made him deeply concerned about the future of scientific research in the U.S., and what he hopes new leadership and the public will do to combat it.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

How are you doing?

It’s hard to answer that question in a simple way in the midst of everything that’s going on now. Here I am as a private citizen trying to figure out what my next calling should be.

Let’s start with your decision to step down as director of NIH in 2021.

I had served by then three different presidents—Obama, Trump, and Biden—over the course of 12 years, which was a new record for a presidentially appointed NIH director. It always seemed to me that it’s good to have leadership refreshed on a regular basis for organizations that have a very complex and important mission [like NIH}. So, it did seem to me that it would be a good thing for me to step away and let the president pick another leader going forward.

I stayed on longer than I probably otherwise would have because of COVID and the desire to have continuity during the worst pandemic in more than a century, with all the things that needed to happen with medical research. But by late 2021, while COVID was far from over, the organization of the response efforts for vaccines and therapeutics and diagnostics were in a stable place, and I thought it would be fair to step away and let a new person arrive.

You recently spoke at a rally in Washington, D.C., organized by Stand Up For Science. Why did you feel it was important to speak there?

I’ve been increasingly concerned about the polarization of our society, and that goes back even before COVID. But COVID brought it out in a particularly troubling way, where information that might have been lifesaving, such as the use of the vaccines, did not always land with people who had already been influenced by lots of other misinformation, or even disinformation, coming from social media, cable news, and sometimes politicians. So when I stepped down as NIH director, I began the effort to try to put together a book called The Road to Wisdom. It focuses particularly on the topic of truth: that there really is such a thing as objective truth. A society that decides truth is just how you feel about it, and that alternative facts are okay, is heading into a very dangerous place. And it feels like that’s sort of where we are.

Now, we see that kind of attitude spilling over into people’s response in general to institutions, and certainly to science. It worries me greatly now, seeing how that has played out in the last couple of months, in terms of drastic actions that are being taken against the federal support of science, with cuts in the [research support NIH provides], with firings of thousands of scientists including more than a thousand at NIH without really much consideration of what the consequences would be.

I felt I needed to be part of speaking out about why this is, for the average American, not a good idea. I was particularly compelled by the Stand Up for Science effort since it was organized by students. They had the courage, and also the deep concern about whether their futures are now in jeopardy. They are deeply troubled about whether that opportunity might be slipping away on the basis of all the changes that are being put forward. And some of those students are even wondering if they need to leave this country to go to another place to be able to live out their dreams. That’s just an unprecedented kind of circumstance that seemed to require some reaction.

You received a lot of criticism for your role in the government’s response to COVID-19, particularly NIH’s support of research on the SARS-CoV-2 virus that some maintain contributed to the virus being created in a lab. How do you respond to that?

The idea that NIH’s funding of research on bat viruses in China led directly to COVID is simply not supported by the facts. Yes, NIH was interested in whether there might be viruses emerging in Chinese bats, because that’s how MERS and SARS got started. But the bat coronaviruses that were studied by NIH contract research were far away from SARS-CoV-2 in their genome sequences—about the same level of similarity as a cow and a human.

The possibility that SARS-CoV-2 might have been created from scratch in a lab was initially considered quite seriously by the virus experts, but they ultimately concluded this is simply not consistent with its genome sequence.

There continues to be speculation, however, that the naturally occurring virus might have been secretly under study in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and somehow escaped. There is no concrete evidence to support this, but the Chinese government has stonewalled efforts to examine lab notebooks or other materials that might shed light on what really happened. So this “lab leak” possibility has to be considered—but the simplest synthesis of the current data is that a naturally occurring virus spread from bats to an intermediate host, possibly a raccoon dog, and then infected humans in the west corner of the Huanan market, where wild animals were being butchered.

Unfortunately this topic of COVID origins has become a contentious and hyperpartisan issue, leading to further polarization of our divided country and to scapegoating and threatening of scientists. I would urge interested people to look closely at the actual facts.

You headed NIH during President Trump’s first term. What differences do you see between that administration’s management of science and this administration’s policies?

The second administration arrived with a very detailed plan already in hand, and they proceeded to implement that plan in a breathtakingly rapid series of policies and Executive Orders. In just two months, more dramatic changes have been made in science and medical research than anybody can remember. The first Trump administration had some of these same ideas, but there was more time for discussion, and more time to consider what the consequences might be. This time, the policies, including cutting funding and firing scientists, are being implemented very quickly, unfortunately without sufficient consideration of the harms that are being done. Medical research institutions across the country are in crisis.

How concerned are you about the future of the NIH and the health of scientific research more broadly?

I am quite concerned. If you’re an American who cares about health for yourself and for your family, and if you also care about our chances to give young people an opportunity to do amazing things in their scientific careers, and if you care about giving young people a chance at a scientific career, and if you care about how science and technology have been the main support of the U.S. economy since World War II, then taking a hammer to this amazing life-saving enterprise should concern you.

What is the danger of shrinking the NIH budget?

[The pace of scientific progress] has profoundly slowed down already. Will it be recoverable with some adjustments, and maybe some rollbacks of the worst of the sledgehammer blows that have been struck so far?

The approach to cure rare diseases with gene therapies is something that I have been very involved in. We’re talking about 7,000 diseases that are now potentially on the pathway toward a genetic cure, especially using the CRISPR [gene editing] approach. My own lab is working on this approach for progeria [a rare genetic condition that causes children to age prematurely]. It is interesting and troubling to look at the reaction to what’s happened in just the last two months; a lot of the young scientists who were potentially interested in that field now aren’t quite so sure.

Read More: The Power and Potential of Gene Tuning

In China, the approach of CRISPR-based gene editing therapy for rare diseases has been identified as one of their highest priorities, and they are now already at the point of starting to run more clinical trials than the U.S. For those people who maybe are less impressed by the human impact of a slowdown in medical research, we also ought to think about what this means economically for the future of our nation, particularly with our most important competitor, China. Are we handing them leadership in an area, namely medical research, where the U.S. has led the world for decades? Is that really a good idea?

Is there anything that young scientists, or the public, can do to continue supporting government funding of science?

Students don’t have a lot of power and they’re aware of that. What they can do, and what they did in organizing Stand Up for Science, is to try to communicate their perspective, their sense of alarm, their recognition that something serious is happening to the country…and their willingness to identify voices that maybe can be even more powerful than their own, like those of patients.

I’ve been calling for a “science communication core,” where we enlist all of the science majors in colleges and universities, all of the high-school science teachers, all of the members of scientific societies, and give them the assignment to be communicators of what science is and what it can accomplish in a realistic, community-based way. We have a long way to go to actually convince a lot of Americans about just how important science is for our future.

There is an erosion of trust in science and in scientists, who traditionally have been held in high esteem and respected for their expertise. Do you see that trend continuing? And how concerning is that for attracting the next generation of scientists?

I’m very worried about that. Every survey that’s been done shows a significant drop in public trust of scientists. Some of that, I have to admit, relates to the circumstances that happened during COVID. I’ve been very public about my concerns that our communication strategy had flaws in terms of trying to share information with people about what to do to protect yourself against the virus.

I wish every time those recommendations had been made, there would have been a preamble saying, “There’s a lot we don’t know about the virus—we are trying to learn as fast as we can, but we’re missing pieces—big ones. That means what we tell you today about a mask or about social distancing or vaccines or therapeutics might turn out to be wrong in another month or two when we have more data. Don’t be surprised if that’s the case. But please don’t imagine that we’re trying to jerk you around. We are doing the best we can with very imperfect data at a time of crisis.”

We didn’t say that often enough. So when recommendations were made, people assumed that those were rock-solid, and then, when they had to change those a month or two later—when you found out, for instance, that asymptomatic people were likely to be spreaders of the virus—then people thought, “These people don’t know what they’re talking about.” And so we lost confidence along the way.

I will apologize for some of the things that we as scientists didn’t do. I wish some of the people on the side, who were distributing malevolent information that was known not to be true about the pandemic, would apologize for their role. Where are the apologies for that behavior?

One of the biggest critics of the government’s COVID-19 response is Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the new NIH director. Is there any validity to his criticisms, outlined in the Great Barrington Declaration, that the data on COVID-19 cases were skewed toward the more serious ones, and that otherwise healthy people should have been allowed to go about their daily lives because they could more easily overcome COVID-19 if they did get infected?

The Great Barrington Declaration was released in October 2020, before we had vaccines or even knew that they would work. The document suggested that it would be better to let people who were not senior citizens go about their daily life without restrictions. That would help the economy and the educational system. Many more people would get infected, but this would assist the development of herd immunity.

This would have been an interesting topic for a scientific discussion, but it was put forward as a policy document and presented to the Secretary of Health and Human Services the day after it was released. Any opportunity for scientific discussion was skipped, and the proposal seemed to be on the path toward a potential major policy change as the pandemic was raging. That was alarming to many of us.

Almost every single public health organization published highly critical statements—the Secretary General of the World Health Organization and the scientific leadership in the U.K. also strongly objected. We know that about 30% of the people who died of COVID were under 65, so there would likely have been significantly increased casualties. Furthermore, it was never clear how you would sequester the older people so that somehow they were not exposed to the virus; people tend to live in families, after all. So the proposed plan seemed both impractical and dangerous.

What advice do you have for Dr. Bhattacharya as he succeeds you at NIH?

Pull NIH out of any kind of partisan situation. Traditionally, over all these decades, [NIH] has been supported by both parties in both chambers with enthusiasm for what it can do for health and for saving lives. Right now, almost everything seems to be partisan. So if Dr. Bhattacharya can help return to that non-political status, that would be a really good thing.

Mix politics and science, you get politics. You kind of lose everything else. And that’s unfortunately a little bit where things are right now.

And then surround yourself with people who are as smart as they can be, and who are fearless in their willingness to tell you their opinions even if it might not be something you want to hear. The best thing a leader can do is to give permission to the people around them to say, “You’re about to do the wrong thing.” It wasn’t always easy to hear that, but it was important to have that permission granted.

And take advantage of the brain trust that you have access to as the NIH director. Use that connectivity. As somebody once said, “My own brain is limited, so I have to borrow all the brains I can from other people in order to make the boldest decision.”

You’ve said that you now fear for your own safety. But you’ve historically been a big user of public transportation in D.C. Has that changed?

You do feel like you’ve got to watch around yourself a little more carefully. Because it’s not incredibly unusual to have someone—as happened right before the beginning of the Stand Up for Science event—come forward very aggressively with statements that were quite threatening and quite wrong in terms of their assumptions about COVID and whatever role I played.

It does make you feel unsafe. I haven’t yet reached the point…of having 24-hour security guards. And I hope I don’t have to. That’s incredibly disruptive of one’s life and I couldn’t possibly afford it anyway. But it does give me concern. I can’t let that be a reason to go hide under my desk. That’s just not an appropriate response. But some of the messages are frightening and certainly very hurtful.

You’ve also talked about your faith and how you’ve found ways to integrate your faith and spirituality with your career in science. How has your faith helped you in recent months?

Actually, the [messages] that I find hardest to read are written to me by fellow Christians. I’m very open about my Christian faith. It’s the rock I stand on. It’s who I am. It’s who I have been since I converted to Christianity at age 27. If I’m lost in a circumstance and don’t know what to do, I’m likely to go to prayer or to the Bible to try to seek out some kind of insight or some path towards wisdom. And yet I will get emails from people who say, “You are a fake Christian. You can’t possibly be really a follower of Jesus if you have done the following. If you had any Christian credibility at all, you would confess your sins and tell everybody that you repent of your evilness.” And some of them say I should just basically be in jail and maybe executed. These are coming from Christians who have been caught up in our terribly divided, polarized society where you mix politics and Christianity, and you get politics.

It’s been really helpful to have that anchor [of faith]. I don’t have to explain to God what it’s like to go through a difficult time. I don’t need to explain to Jesus what suffering feels like. If you look at the wall [next to my desk], there are various printouts of scriptures or quotes that have been particularly encouraging to me when I needed to be reminded. So Psalm 46—God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Okay, we got trouble. So thank you, God, for being my refuge and strength.

You can get your context a little upside-down without having that anchor to faith and to what is good and holy and true, what we’re all called to do. And that reassures you that even though it feels like there’s a lot of headwinds, you’re doing what you’re supposed to do to try to stand up for principles that are long-lasting about faith and family and freedom and goodness and love and beauty and truth. Especially truth.

What do you hope the legacy of your time at NIH will be?

I hope they will see this as a period where big, bold ideas got surfaced, deeply discussed by experts in multiple venues, and then formulated into actual initiatives that could benefit not just the people doing the work, but lots of other people.

The genome project was like that. Maybe that’s how I learned how important that could be. But the BRAIN initiative certainly followed that, and the All of Us project, which is now up to 800,000 Americans who are our partners in this effort to really figure out how genetics and environment and health behaviors all work together to see whether somebody is going to stay healthy or develop a chronic illness, and what we could do to prevent that. Its benefits are going to be significant because the data is accessible to all researchers who can begin to sift through and make those discoveries.

I’m deeply troubled that both of those projects have had severe budget cuts, including just in the last week. The All of Us project’s budget is down now to less than 30% of what it had been two years ago. It makes it almost untenable for the project to keep doing much more than just caretaking. And this is just at the time where this was going great and having so many new ideas emerging. I hope that’s another thing a new NIH director will look at and figure out a way to assist with, because the promise of that still mostly lies ahead.

You’re also a musician and like to rewrite lyrics to popular songs. Any recent ones to share?

I started to try to write a new anthem for Stand Up for Science. I figured that every protest group needs a song so that people can gather together and sing it. It didn’t quite come together.

So instead, I rewrote the words to a familiar folk song, “All the Good People,” and that’s what I sang at the Lincoln Memorial. I do believe strongly that music has the potential to bring people together when all else has failed. My wife and I are planning a music party in another couple of months where we will invite to our house as many people as we can fit, which might be about 50, and we’ll try to carefully choose people on opposite sides of political issues and then see if by singing together over an evening something might happen.