June 27, 2000

READING THE BOOK OF LIFE

Francis Collins: An Adroit Director of an Unwieldy Team

By NICHOLAS WADE

	Rebecca Cooney for The New York Times
	Dr. Francis S. Collins, at a genome conference in New York last month.
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rancis Sellers Collins, an articulate medical geneticist, directs the National Human Genome Research Institute, a part of the National Institutes of Health, and is the most visible public spokesman for the human genome project.

Born in Staunton, Va., on April 14, 1950, Dr. Collins was trained as a physical chemist at the University of Virginia and at Yale. But later in his career he adopted two important new interests: medical genetics and Christianity, a faith he discusses with more ease than many scientists. The genome project has filled him with awe, he has said, as it revealed something only God knew before.

After obtaining an M.D. at the University of North Carolina, he and colleagues discovered the genes causing cystic fibrosis, neurofibromatosis and Huntington's disease.

In 1993 he succeeded Dr. James D. Watson as director of the National Institutes of Health's part of the human genome project. He has skillfully managed the unwieldy alliance that he inherited.

Dr. Collins's office finances the academic centers involved in the Human Genome Project, notably those of Washington University in St. Louis, the Whitehead Institute in Boston, and the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.

But a rival government agency, the Department of Energy, has a piece of the action, and Dr. Collins has also had to coordinate policy with the Wellcome Trust of London, which finances one-third of the genome and has not hesitated to lobby for its own positions.

Once the Celera Corporation appeared on the scene, critics said that an assortment of academic centers was ill-suited to the industrial-scale task of decoding the genome. But Dr. Collins has overseen a vigorous response to the Celera challenge. He focused resources on his three most successful centers and squashed a bid by the Department of Energy to collaborate with Celera.

He coordinated his far-flung team in two groups: the G5 inner circle, which included the three leading N.I.H. centers, the Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute and the Sanger Center in England; and the G16 group, which included centers from Germany to China.

Large-scale sequencing of DNA is a new art that the consortium learned by doing it.

Dr. Collins persuaded the centers to cooperate in an effort to sequence 90 percent of the human genome by this month.

By achieving that goal on schedule, he has assured that public consortium deserves a large share of the credit.

"It was my role to serve as project manager and identify areas of difficulty, and mostly that is what I've done for the last year," he said last week.