“THIS is not the apocalypse,” says Dr Francis Collins, the eminent geneticist who is perhaps the best-known Christian scientist of his generation. He is seeking to offer reassurance that last week’s presidential election result is not the end of the world — or at least not the end of the United States.
He is speaking a day after Donald Trump’s election victory. Dr Collins served as director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) during three presidencies, including Mr Trump’s, and knows at first hand what the tycoon is like.
He also knows how the culture wars and disinformation on social media have divided families and communities. His new book, The Road to Wisdom, which has prompted this conversation, is a plea to Americans to come back together, rediscover common ground, and reject political falsehoods for truths found in science and faith.
“Well, [the election] certainly documented that, if there was any sense that, perhaps, America was beginning to come back together a bit, that has not happened,” Dr Collins reflects. Some of those he knows are triumphant about Mr Trump’s victory, while others are “incredibly distressed”, fearing that his return could “spell the end of our democracy”.
The geneticist, who helped to discover the origins of cystic fibrosis, sickle-cell anaemia, and other diseases, before leading an international race to map the entire human genome, is a sober and thoughtful man. His criticism of the President-elect is carefully worded and mild-mannered, but unmissable.
Mr Trump’s approach has not been obscured or hidden during the campaign, Dr Collins says. “It does not sound exactly like the Sermon on the Mount in terms of the way in which he speaks about such things as immigrants.” But, for the next four years, he fears, half of the US will egg on the incoming President as he rails against minorities and whips up fear, while the other half will reflexively oppose everything that he does. “We’re headed into a very difficult four-year period. It was going to be difficult all along, but it’s certainly not any better now.”
ALL the more reason, he suggests, to attend to the message of The Road to Wisdom, published last month. “We’ve got to talk to each other much more than we have done so if we’re ever going to find our way out of this mess.”
The origins of his book lie in the Covid pandemic. As the head of the NIH, Dr Collins was responsible for co-ordinating much of the public-health response to the crisis in the US. He led breakneck-speed projects to develop both vaccines and treatments for the new virus throughout 2020 and 2021, advising President Trump and others in the White House on their response to the pandemic.
As teams of researchers worked frantically to develop vaccines, Dr Collins hoped that these would be at least 50 per cent effective — maybe even 70 per cent, if the scientists were lucky. In fact, as he writes in The Road To Wisdom, the revolutionary mRNA vaccines turned out to be 95 per cent effective at preventing illness, and almost 100 per cent at preventing death from Covid. He could not hold back tears of relief and joy at the news.
“Future historians will judge the development of mRNA vaccines for Covid in record time as one of the greatest medical achievements in human history,” Dr Collins writes. Current estimates are that more than three million lives were saved in the US alone.
And yet some 50 million Americans refused to have the free vaccines, spooked by conspiracy theories and misinformation, angered at government overreach, and doubting the reality of the threat posed by the virus. “These are good, honourable people, but they’ve been whip-sawed by all kinds of other sources that were not reliable,” Dr Collins laments.
One of the most potent pools of vaccine resistance came from his own constituency: white Evangelical Christians. “People of faith were particularly hit hard by misinformation, even being told by some of their leaders they should avoid vaccination since this might be the biblical ‘mark of the beast’,” Dr Collins writes in The Road to Wisdom.
One study concluded that because of this hostility to the vaccines, some 230,000 Americans died unnecessarily between June 2021 and April 2022: the equivalent of four packed passenger jets crashing every single day for ten months.
Even this restrained and serious scientist was stunned. “That just shocks me to this day to consider that that was possible in what is a very advanced society, technologically. And yet something as simple as looking at the data and trying to decide what to do about it was not something that we turned out to be very good at.”
POLARISATION and entrenched social divisions did not begin in 2020. Dr Collins says that they were something that he was concerned about for years, before taking up his post as NIH director under President Barack Obama. But he had hoped — naïvely, in hindsight — that an all-consuming crisis, such as a pandemic, would help Americans to reunite. In fact, the opposite happened.
“The pandemic seemed to worsen things,” he says. “The polarisation led to more likelihood of people not just disagreeing with each other, but imagining the people who didn’t agree with you were probably evil.” Watching this unfold at the precise time that every citizen had to make decisions based on “truth and trust”, not “misinformation and animosity”, was terrifying, Dr Collins recalls.
ALAMYDr Collins speaks at a conference on donating plasma at the American Red Cross National Headquarters in Washington in 2020
As he led the work on the vaccines, he remembers hoping that their eventual arrival could be a tipping point. “I thought maybe that if we got the vaccine, then everything would start to fall back into place.” Here would be proof that science, reality, and truth could still work. But the US declined to unite around the vaccines, which, instead, became the subject of angry argument. Fifty million of his fellow citizens refused to be vaccinated.
Divisions that had been festering for years now spilled over into what was already a terrible public health crisis. “The culture wars were literally killing people,” Dr Collins concludes in his book. “We are in serious trouble.”
“I AM angry,” he says, but not at those who declined the vaccines. “I’m angry at the ones who made a lot of money by peddling things that were useless, and also spreading all kinds of doubts about whether the vaccines were safe. A lot of people died and . . . yeah, it’s hard not to be angry.”
Dr Collins is also angry at himself, for not better communicating the science and getting through to Americans who still harboured doubts or questions. “But mostly I’m just sad. I’m just broken-hearted that this was possible. And I’m particularly sad as it relates to people of faith.”
Christians, who should have been driven by their faith to “stand up for truth” and stop politics getting into a public-health debate, were caught up in the culture war more than their secular neighbours. “I am deeply disappointed that many faith leaders have allowed lies to spread, and failed to call believers back to truth, grace, and love,” he writes.
But why? Why were believers among the most vaccine-resistant and some of the fiercest partisans during the bitter arguments over masks and lockdowns? Dr Collins points to conservative churches’ long tradition of suspecting science, since the ructions over evolution and Genesis more than a century ago.
The conviction that religion and science must be in conflict was something that Dr Collins felt himself when, in his twenties, he first began to explore Christianity, just as his own career in genetic research was taking off. But he was gradually drawn in, through encounters with Christian patients and friends, to consider the teachings of Jesus more seriously. And, despite warnings from colleagues, he is yet to find an irreconcilable conflict between his scientific career and his faith.
In The Road to Wisdom, he writes: “I seem to have lived out the predictions of a quote attributed to the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Werner Heisenberg, the author of the famous uncertainty principle: ‘The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.’”
The geneticist holds to the position taken by Francis Bacon, the 16th-century English philosopher: “God gave us two books: the book of God’s words, the Bible, which I read most days, and the book of God’s works, which is creation, which we also get to read, especially as scientists. And I read that most days too. And if they’re both God’s books, it seems like they probably are pretty much coherent.”
The part played by Dr Collins, first in leading the high-profile Human Genome Project in the 1990s, and then becoming director of the NIH, means that he has become the foremost proponent in the US of the view that Evangelicalism and science can coexist. In books and speeches, he has reiterated that his job is about “exploring God’s creation”, his laboratory is a cathedral, and his work “a form of worship”.
But, he concedes reluctantly, few have been persuaded out of their instinctive hostility by his decades of public advocacy for science. The fervour of the evolution-versus-creationism debate may have lessened since the early 2000s, but the reality of human-instigated climate change (which Dr Collins defends in his book on both scientific and theological grounds) is something whose denial has become a shibboleth for many other Evangelicals. And any progress in eroding an anti-science outlook was quickly lost during the Covid wars.
“I think, for Christians, particularly conservative Christians, there was this echo of ‘Maybe scientists are all really atheists that are trying to tear down my faith,’ and so when they say that vaccine is safe, I’m not so sure about that,” he reflects. “That was in there, and it probably played a significant role.”
COVID thrust Dr Collins further into the public spotlight; so now he is the weary recipient of abusive emails from people furious about the part that he played in shepherding the vaccine programmes. But “the most mean-spirited” messages, he says, invariably come from his fellow Christians, who insist that he cannot be a true believer.
Real-life confrontations have occurred, too. The right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones live-streamed himself confronting Dr Collins in an airport, accusing him of being responsible for more deaths than Hitler. “I’ve had threats, one of them from a Christian that resulted in somebody going to prison because they were so serious,” he says. “Threats of doing harm, not just to me, but to my wife and my daughters. This is who we are. Where have we lost our way?”
In the face of this, the scientist admits in The Road to Wisdom that he longed to retreat to his lab and his research (he stood down as NIH director at the end of 2021). But helping his spiritual mentor, the Presbyterian pastor and author Tim Keller, through his pancreatic cancer at an NIH hospital where he was receiving experimental treatment, changed things.
Pexels/Gustavo FringFifty million Americans refused to have the Covid vaccine
Mr Keller, to whom the book is dedicated, urged his friend to write something that might help to bring the US back to truth, science, reasonable faith, and trust again. Shortly afterwards, while praying, Dr Collins says he heard a remarkably clear message from God: “Don’t waste your time. You may not have much left.” Despite the pioneering treatment, Mr Keller (who is almost exactly the same age as Dr Collins) died a few months later.
And so The Road to Wisdom emerged a few years later. The book is a plea for civility, respect, empathy, but most of all for truth. For too long, it argues, Americans have succumbed to the temptation to put their political beliefs and affiliations above the truth, the geneticist writes. “But something deeper in our culture is wrong. This is an attempt to unwarp us and help recover what matters most.”
He recounts tales from his scientific career of setbacks and failures, of colleagues who faked results to try and get to the top. He recommends humility and frank admissions of mistakes as an antidote to mistrust and grievances: “A powerful solvent to melt walls of resentment.”
He laments the effect of social media as an amplifier of extremism, for encouraging people to lapse into filter bubbles, and for accelerating the decline of institutions that once held the ring, including churches.
There are lessons for the Church here, Dr Collins believes. It has failed in spiritual formation, to prepare believers for tough times. The goal is not to be “the meanest SOB” around, but, instead, to love neighbours and enemies alike. He is critical of how many church services seem like performances rather than spaces for spiritual growth. “Somebody said, ‘Yeah, I went to a church service and it was OK. We had a rock concert, and then we had a TED talk, and then we went home.’”
But he is sympathetic to pastors, too, many of whom, he argued, were “intimidated” into silence on these issues, or feared fostering schisms in their congregations if they tried to address disagreement over masks or lockdowns.
DR COLLINS is adamant this is not just a problem for the Right. The Left has at times embraced a post-modern rejection of absolute truth, while the Right is mired in denials of reality such as climate change when they become politically inconvenient.
The US is no longer anchored to facts, evidence, reason, and knowledge, he writes. But this is dangerous: “If we are serious about travelling down the road to wisdom, we have a lot of lessons to learn. This will not be the last pandemic.”
Without naming him, Dr Collins homes in on Mr Trump as the acme of this trend: “A former US president was documented to tell 30,573 lies in four years, repeating claims that had been definitively shown to be false — as if truth doesn’t really matter anyway as long as political goals are achieved. But much of America shrugged.”
Not only has much of the US shrugged: it has now offered Mr Trump another four years in the White House. Dr Collins worries about what state the US will be in by the end of a second Trump presidency. “It’s pretty hard right now to imagine where we’ll be. . . He’s such a polarising figure. He did speak about unity, and I would hope that perhaps he could emphasise a bit more of the coming together, but that hasn’t been in the past his strong suit.”
One of the few times when Dr Collins leaves behind his considered and eirenic tone in The Road to Wisdom is when he recalls an infamous pandemic-era press conference. Rambling in response to a briefing about how everyday bleach could kill coronavirus on household surfaces, Mr Trump bizarrely suggested injecting disinfectants into the body to treat Covid infections.
“Mixed messages from the White House, including a truly outrageous recommendation from the commander-in-chief about injecting bleach to treat Covid-19, did not help,” Dr Collins writes. “As a physician and the NIH director at that time, I was totally focused on trying to advance the science of both vaccines and therapeutics. Yet I was increasingly aware that the public was becoming frustrated and distrustful of the actions that we were pursuing.”
But Dr Collins insists, in our conversation, that he has no regrets about accepting Mr Trump’s offer to stay on as NIH director in 2016. It was a brilliant opportunity to continue to steer US medical research, which should not intersect with politics anyway, he says. Of course, when Covid broke out, politics became inextricably entangled with the NIH’s work, but Dr Collins says that he felt that “this is where I am supposed to be, and I should stick it out and try to do the best I can.”
Pexels/Ketut Subiyanto“The pandemic seemed to worsen things,” Dr Collins says
Reportedly, Mr Trump is now considering appointing the anti-vaxxer and alternative-health champion Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, as a “health czar” in his new administration. Mr Kennedy has suggested that his first act would be to remove fluoride from public water supplies, which, he says, causes health problems. He has also repeated long-discredited theories that vaccines can cause autism.
Dr Collins, who criticises Mr Kennedy by name in The Road to Wisdom, says that for Mr Kennedy to play any part in Mr Trump’s health team would alarm him greatly. “He’s not a scientist; he has not shown his ability to sift through information in an objective fashion.” His anti-vaccine campaigning, entirely unsupported by any evidence, has led to many Americans’ questioning whether to have their children vaccinated. “If we end up with an epidemic of measles in this country — which we still could — children will die as a result of that, and he is one of the leading voices that’s causing parents to wonder whether this is something they want for their kids.”
SOMEHOW, however, despite it all, the scientist remains hopeful. “I believe that God is still in heaven and watching over this, and has plans that we don’t know about,” he says. Yes, there is little sign of Americans’ overcoming their deep divisions any time soon, but the “exhausted majority” in the middle of the two extremes could still decide to pull the nation back from the brink.
“There is nothing more un-American than hating fellow Americans,” he writes. “We are still people who care about each other. We know about loving your neighbour, and we’re going to live that out. We can bring this back to the place of human flourishing, where we all really want to be.” Things might be bad, but it is still, after all, not the apocalypse.