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When I discover something about the human genome, I experience a sense of awe at the mystery of life, and say to myself, 'Wow, only God knew before.' It is a profoundly beautiful and moving sensation, which helps me appreciate God and makes science even more rewarding for me.

Francis Collins

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Francis Collins
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: April 14
Author
Chemist
Geneticist
Physician
Physicist
Virginia
United States
Francis S. Collins
Francis S Collins
F. S. Collins
F S Collins
Francis Sellers Collins
Helping
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Rewarding
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Mystery
Profoundly
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Something
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Sense
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More quotes by Francis Collins

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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
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By investigating God's majestic and awesome creation, science can actually be a means of worship.
Francis Collins
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A lot of science doesn't require big ns but if you're trying to understand something about human health and you're looking at interventions that are not going to be either killing you or making you live forever - they're going to have some tweaking on the outcome - you need big numbers or you don't have enough power.
Francis Collins
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As our closest relatives, they (chimpanzees) tell us special things about what it means to be a primate and, ultimately, what it means to be a human at the DNA level.
Francis Collins
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The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. He can be worshipped in the cathedral or in the laboratory. His creation is majestic, awesome, intricate, and beautiful.
Francis Collins
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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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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
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God gave us free will, and we may choose to exercise it in ways that end up hurting other people.
Francis Collins
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God is an awesome mathematician and physicist.
Francis Collins
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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
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We give our kids vaccinations. That's a biological enhancement that's considered not just acceptable but actually admirable.
Francis Collins
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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
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I had the analysis of a million or so SNPs [single nucleotide polymorphisms] just to see what was there. That's partly because I was writing a book about DNA and personalized medicine and I thought it would be a little bit disingenuous to talk about what could be done without actually having the experiment done on yourself.
Francis Collins
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I'm a pretty informal guy. I ride a Harley.
Francis Collins
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C.S. Lewis had a big influence on me in this spiritual realm - this sort of sense of longing. A longing for a knowledge that is just outside of our reach, a knowledge for a spiritual connection.
Francis Collins
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[Decoding the human genome sequence] is the most significant undertaking that we have mounted so far in an organized way in all of science. I believe that reading our blueprints, cataloguing our own instruction book, will be judged by history as more significant than even splitting the atom or going to the moon.
Francis Collins
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If God made the natural laws, why could he not violate them when it was a particularly significant moment for him to do so? And if you accept the idea that Christ was also divine, which I do, then his Resurrection is not in itself a great logical leap.
Francis Collins
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All illnesses have some heredity contribution. It's been said that genetics loads the gun and environment pulls the trigger.
Francis Collins
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I've never heard God speak out loud to me. That's not an experience I have had.
Francis Collins
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Are we using science in ways that it wasn't intended to, in which case we should be a little careful, or are we using faith in ways that faith wasn't really designed for? There are certain questions that are better answered by one approach than the other, and if you start mixing that up, then you end up in ... conflict.
Francis Collins