Yearning for Wisdom with Dr. Francis Collins (Part 1 of 2)

Can science, beauty, and faith converge in our quest for truth? Joining us to discuss this topic is Dr. Francis Collins: a pioneer physician-scientist who led the Human Genome Project and has been director of the National Institutes of Health during the tenures of three U.S. presidents. Dr. Collins shares insights from his impressive career: from the discovery of genes linked to many diseases to addressing public health challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic and his efforts to bring harmony between science and faith. We will also discuss the intersection of beauty and science, public health leadership, and the critical task of bridging societal divides in our polarized times. Dr. Collins’s latest book, The Road to Wisdom, deals with the relationship between truth, science, faith, and trust.

In this first part of our conversation, we talk about:

• The transformative power of science
• Why Francis wrote The Road to Wisdom
• How politics has led to misinformation
• The importance of trust in institutions despite failures
• The search for truth in science amidst uncertainty

To learn more about Dr. Francis Collins's work, you can find him at: 

Website: https://biologos.org/?campaign=539861
Twitter: https://x.com/BioLogosOrg
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/biologosorg/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/biologosorg

This episode is sponsored by:
John Templeton Foundation (https://www.templeton.org/)
Templeton Religion Trust (https://templetonreligiontrust.org/)

Transcript

(preview)

Francis: When we first discovered the cause of cystic fibrosis after a five-year really difficult search before there were the kinds of technologies and resources to be able to make this feasible, there it was on a rainy night in New Haven when I was at a meeting with my collaborator and we looked at the data coming off the fax machine that our labs had just generated in Ann Arbor and Toronto. And there it was. Part of me wanted to cry, and part of me wanted to cheer. Part of me just felt profound significance of the moment. And to have something this simple be the cause of such a really dreadful disease and the sense that we had now crossed into a territory where we knew that and might be able to do something about it, that was a moment. It had a lot of components, but beauty was certainly one of them.

(intro)

Brandon: I'm Brandon Vaidyanathan, and this is Beauty at Work — the podcast that seeks to expand our understanding of beauty, what it is, how it works, and why it matters for the work we do. This season of the podcast is sponsored by John Templeton Foundation and Templeton Religion Trust.

What does it mean to yearn for wisdom in a world divided by mistrust and misinformation? Can we find truth in the midst of such challenges? Can science, beauty, and faith co-exist in the quest for truth? Today we're going to dive into these questions and more with Dr. Francis Collins, a renowned physician-scientist who discovered the genes associated with cystic fibrosis and several other illnesses, and went on to lead the Human Genome Project and served as the Director of the National Institutes of Health under three U.S. presidents. Francis is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Medal of Science, and the Templeton Prize. His latest book is The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust. In our conversation, we explore the role of beauty in science, the challenges of public health leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic and the power of building bridges, whether through reconciling faith and science or fostering dialogue through groups like Braver Angels. Let's get started.

(interview)

Brandon: Francis, thank you for joining us. It's such a pleasure to talk to you today.

Francis: Brandon, I'm glad to be your guest and to talk about beauty.

Brandon: Yeah, well, let's start, actually, by talking about beauty. I usually ask my guests to share a story about a profound encounter with beauty from their childhoods that remains with them till today. I wonder if anything came to your mind when I sent you that question.

Francis: I thought about it and, yeah, there were instances. I'll tell you about one. They all had for me to do with music as a source of beauty that catches me by surprise, lifts me up of myself in a way that I can't quite explain. But I will remember, as a child growing up on a farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, with pretty limited means, my parents were intellectually full of activities and interests in music and theater but not necessarily good at financials. So, for us, the Christmas season was always pretty scaled back. It had to be. But a certain Christmas Eve always had a certain series of events attached to it. One would be going with my father and my brother, walking across the forest that was up above our farmhouse to a neighboring stand of trees that we were allowed to survey and cut one for our Christmas tree and bring that back and set it up in our living room. Never did it before Christmas Eve. Then I would have made all sorts of ornaments for the Christmas tree, the usual popcorn and cranberries on strings and some of those chains that you make out of construction paper that's different colors. But then, there would be this moment where it was time to start putting those decorations on. By then, it would be just twilight getting dark. My father would always put on the record player, which really was a record player at that point, the Messiah.

Brandon: Oh, wow.

Francis: And it was familiar every Christmas because that was part of the tradition. But this particular time, there was one part of it that just caught me by complete surprise because it was so exquisitely beautiful. It was that aria for He Shall Feed His Flock Like a Shepherd. It comes from Isaiah. I had no spiritual or religious background, so I didn't recognize where the words were coming from. But it certainly was a sweet image of feeding the flock. Then the second part of that aria where the mezzo-soprano steps aside and the soprano comes forward and the whole thing moves up considerably is now from the New Testament. It's from Matthew, chapter 11. “Come unto me all you who are burdened and heavy laden and I will give you rest.” And, you know, being a seven-year-old probably didn't seem like heavy burden. But maybe at times, it did to me. That was like, "Whoa, those words. What is that about?" The combination of those words and the exquisite music or handle just left me with this sense of beauty. But it was an aching kind of beauty. It wasn't like, "Oh, hooray. This is like fireworks and yippee." This was more like, "I feel like I'm longing for something, but I don't know what it is."

Brandon: Did that mean anything to you? I mean, as you were navigating your childhood years, your teenage years, did that sort of surface in any way at all, or wasn't it until much later?

Francis: I was pretty good at suppressing because I was Imagining myself more and more getting into a scientific frame of mind. And this was not an experience that scientifically I could explain, or understand, or even think about. But then I would get caught again, usually, by a musical moment to feel somehow transported.

Brandon: Well, there are many who might be moved by such experiences and decide to become artists. You were growing up in a more literary, humanistic household. How did you gravitate towards science?

Francis: It might not have been the obvious. I certainly loved music and started playing keyboards at age four or five. Then I picked up guitar somewhat after that. But it never felt to me like that was a calling, as what I was going to spend my whole life on. It was something to enjoy. Science came into my foreground as a tenth grader in a public school in the form of a chemistry class taught by an extremely gifted teacher who helped me to see that science was a detective story. It was like, you're going to explore nature. Nature works in predictable ways, but we're not all that good always at understanding them. This is how you understand them. You design experiments. Sometimes they work, and sometimes they don't. But ultimately, you're finding out something that nobody knew before. And I was like, "Okay. That's what I want to do."

Brandon: Yeah, solving puzzles, the detective work, that's exactly — yeah, we've heard that among a number of people who we've interviewed, scientists we've talked to. There's also another thread I want to pick up on very briefly. You mentioned in your book that your parents worked with Eleanor Roosevelt. I wonder if some of your public service work has been inspired by that in any way.

Francis: It may have, although they ultimately were pretty disheartened by the way it turned out. Having just finished their own graduate school training at Yale, they signed up to be part of this experimental community in West Virginia called Arthurdale. Eleanor Roosevelt was really the main supporter of this model to try to help the coal miners who were in the depths of the Depression, to get back on their feet by teaching them some new skills, by providing them with a plot of land and sort of a Sears, Roebuck home you could build yourself and a lot of abilities to begin to grow their own food. My dad was the assistant headmaster of the school, teaching adults as well as children things that they might benefit from. He and my mom were totally into this. Eleanor Roosevelt would get in her own car by herself, drive from the White House over terrible roads to West Virginia, to spend the weekend fairly regularly with this group to cheer them up. And so that was inspiring. It was like this moment of feeling like, okay, this is maybe going to really help these people. But then some people came to FDR and said, "Do you realize what your wife is doing out there? This sounds to us awfully close to communism." He realized the risks, and he shut it down. My parents were incredibly disillusioned about that and basically counseled me as I was growing up. "Whatever you do, don't ever work for the federal government." Well, it didn't quite work out that way.

Brandon: Well, let's talk about that trajectory. So before that, before starting in — I mean, you started out in chemistry and quantum physics and then eventually — tell us about that trajectory. Because it's such an unusual pathway to start with physics and chemistry and then move into genetics.

Francis: It's very odd, isn't it? I got excited about science at that chemistry class and I made the assumption, therefore, that I should be a chemist. I think a lot of people at my age at that point have that same feeling. Like, "Oh, here's something I'm excited about learning. That must be what I'm supposed to do." Well, let's keep your horizons a little more open maybe, which I didn't. So I went to college. I studied chemistry and physics and math because they were all kind of tied together, and I stayed away from life science. That was much too messy. It is, by the way. But just to say, it's also really interesting. I wasn't ready for that kind of complexity. So I went off and got a PhD in physical chemistry, basically studying quantum mechanics. But along the way, I recognized there was a chemical that I had studied that was really interesting. It was called DNA. It was the stuff that actually functions as an instruction book for all living things, including us. I began to realize what I'm doing with my quantum mechanics equations and computer programs is kind of interesting from day to day, but I'm not sure it's something I want to do for the rest of my life. This other thing is really calling me. I had to struggle then about what to do with that realization. Just sort of shift and do a postdoc in a life science lab. But I wanted to keep all the options open. After having been so narrow, I wanted to be really wide. So I decided, well, I'll just go to medical school. I could study the science, but I could also study the medicine part and maybe even figure out how they could fit together.

Brandon: Well, that's so unusual. I mean, we've talked to — again, one of the things we find with scientists we talked to is that many of them find very different sort of aesthetic aspects to the work they're doing that are primary motivators. And so a lot of physicists love the symmetry and the simplicity. Then biologists are much more drawn to complexity and actually don't like the simplification. That becomes, we find in some interdisciplinary collaborations, a bit of an obstacle, where the aesthetic criteria are so different. And so for someone to switch from those fields, it's almost like you have to value different forms of beauty. I don't know if that rings true.

Francis: It does, Brandon. I'm not sure I quite thought about it that way. But yeah, as somebody studying quantum mechanics, I was struck by the beauty of the mathematics. Hψ̂=Eψ, the Hamiltonian, and the way in which that all describes exquisitely in the form of a second-order differential equation how matter and energy work, and Maxwell's equations about electromagnetism. Simple, beautiful. So how did I jump from that into something as messy as human biology? I think the link was DNA because it was still simple in a way. I mean, it's structured as beautiful double helix. This idea that the information necessary to create a human being from a single cell could somehow be encoded in this script, which is not infinite in size. It's big, but it's not infinite. That with three billion letters of this code, you could build a brain and all the other parts of a human. That still is both awesome and beautiful. And so I can't look at that script without having that reaction over and over again. So maybe that helped me because that was, at least on the surface of it, simple and elegant. Almost like an equation. But what it led to was complex and elegant, and they were both beautiful.

Brandon: As you moved on in your career, you moved into more leadership roles, both with the Human Genome Project and then at NIH. And as you moved away from bench science, did you find yourself encountering other forms of beauty in working with people and with teams and large collaborations? Is there a different kind of beauty there in science?

Francis: There is. Even before getting to that, I found there was beauty in the clinical practice of medicine. I invested myself pretty heavily in learning how to be a physician and spending time at the bedside of people who were struggling with very difficult issues and being put in this position of intimacy with people, that normally would not happen with someone you had only just met that afternoon, who maybe now is talking about the most important considerations in their life — sometimes including their faith right there in front of you. That was a beautiful example of how people can really reach out and touch each other. I loved that experience, although it had that same kind of aching component to it, a feeling inadequate somehow to be able to really fill the needs of many of those people who are in a very needy state. Then certainly, moving more into the scientific arena, starting with my own lab, which was maybe a small group of 8 or 10 people. But then turning that into the genome project, which was 2,400 people in six countries, quite a bit of a scale-up. That also had its moments of joyful relationships and a beauty to what it looks like to have a team like that, of people with diverse backgrounds, different languages, different skills all attached to the same historical of being able to read out for the first time this instruction book for human life, which nobody could say was unimportant.

Brandon: Are there moments that stand out to you of profound beauty in your professional life in the last few decades?

Francis: I think scientific discovery itself is a beautiful thing. I've had a few occasions where that happened to me, and I could see something that nobody had known before. But it was a glimpse of God's mind so that made it much more significant than if it was just a detective story of a scientific adventure. When we first discovered the cause of cystic fibrosis after a five-year really difficult search before there were the kinds of technologies and resources to be able to make this feasible, there it was on a rainy night in New Haven when I was at a meeting with my collaborator. We looked at the data coming off the fax machine that our labs had just generated in Ann Arbor and Toronto, and there it was. Part of me wanted to cry, and part of me wanted to cheer. Part of me just felt profound significance at the moment. And to have something this simple be the cause of such a really dreadful disease and the sense that we had now crossed into a territory where we knew that and might be able to do something about it, that was a moment. It had a lot of components, but beauty was certainly one of them.

Brandon: In your book, I was moved by just the stories of people whose lives had been changed by the medications that were developed as a result of this discovery. To be able to see what modern science can do and how it can transform life, that's really profound. Let's start talking about your book The Road to Wisdom, which is such a delightful read. I'm really glad you wrote this. Could you tell us about why you set out to write it, and why is wisdom the central concept there?

Francis: Well, I didn't really want to write it. I got to the point where I couldn't help myself. I had a lot of encouragement from others, particularly the Reverend Tim Keller to whom the book is devoted, who I got to spend a lot of time with in his last couple of years as he was suffering from pancreatic cancer. I've had the privilege, Brandon, of being in the public eye as a physician-scientist, leading projects like the Human Genome and leading the NIH under three different presidents, and feeling the excitement of what science was bringing forward in terms of advances to alleviate suffering and improve people's ability to live a full and happy life, not being struck down early by disease. And yet, I could see our society, despite all of that promise, was becoming more and more torn apart by other issues that were spilling over into their acceptance of science. That was true of faith communities, just as much as secular communities.

When COVID came along, what should have been a moment to bring everybody together — because we had a really serious shared enemy of virus called SARS‑CoV‑2 that was threatening our very survival — it didn't quite work. Maybe for a little while, it sort of seemed like, okay, we're all in this together. But it didn't last very long. Then it began to become again a source of bickering and disagreements about what was the right decision. Then a flood of misinformation that did great harm to our ability to get along with each other and even cost people their lives when it came to misinformation about the vaccine, which was the most amazing achievement of science at that point in just 11 months. But which, in the United States, some 50 million people decided not to take advantage of. And the saddest of all statistics is that, that led rather directly to the deaths in the U.S. of about 234,000 people, who were good, honorable people flooded with this kind of information that made them doubt whether the vaccine was safe or whether it would work and chose to pass up the opportunity to take advantage of that. Then COVID came along. How could that have happened?

Looking at that as a scientist and a person of faith, I was astounded that in such a technologically-advanced country — we think of ourselves in that regard — this kind of confusion could have been so rampant, and led not just to some unfortunate disagreements but actually loss of life. Our culture war had actually started to kill people. And I couldn't stay silent about that. Ultimately, I began to think about writing this book. After I stepped down as the NIH director, I got pulled into the White House unexpectedly at that point for about a year as the president's science advisor. Then finally, after finishing that phase, it felt like I've got to do something. And Tim Keller, again, kept pushing on me. "Francis, you have to do this." So blame him if you don't like the book.

Brandon: You say also it's predominantly white evangelicals, your tribe, as it were, who were the main opponents of the vaccine and so on, right?

Francis: They were particularly prominent. They were certainly not the only ones. It was actually, in many instances, it seemed like the main determinant of one's attitude about a scientific achievement, namely a vaccine, was your political party. When you start mixing politics and science, nothing good is going to happen. In this instance, it led to the conclusion by a lot of people that they shouldn't trust science because some particular political message made them doubt it.

Brandon: Even before the pandemic, there's some research I'd done with my mentor and your friend, Elaine Howard Ecklund, on people's attitudes towards science. We'd found that, for instance, among climate change, it was very clear that among more conservatives, it was seen as or interpreted as a propaganda by Al Gore. I mean, this was the way in which a lot of the signs around climate change was seen as sort of politically fueled. And so that kind of suspicion has been in the air for growing, I suppose, for the last few decades. But it certainly precipitated in a horrible way during the pandemic.

Francis: Yes, and it's reflective of the way in which we have become divided about almost everything. Distrust in every institution has been steadily increasing. Maybe some of that being earned by institutional bad behavior, but much of it is just manufactured. Based on this overall epidemic of cynicism, that seems to be part of daily discourse, especially if it comes to any kind of an organization that sounds like it might be not actually doing things in your best interest. We are dangerously close to being paranoid about a lot of institutional activities when society can't exist without such institutions as a way in which we establish our constitution of knowledge, as Jonathan Rauch calls it, that we can depend upon and then build upon to move forward and try to improve human flourishing. Without institutions, it's just chaos.

Brandon: Yeah, and that's a really critical point. I realized many people feel that they've been betrayed by institutions, whether it's through corruption, or ineptitude, or other forms of perceived betrayal. But to reject these institutions as a result is not a wise strategy. I mean, you yourself had, you know, I was struck to read about your botched — it was a nasal septum surgery. Could you share that? Because that would drive a lot of people to say, I have no more trust in a medical establishment, much less become a physician.

Francis: Yeah, the chapter I wrote about trust sort of asked everybody to think about occasions where you put trust in a person or an institution and when it worked and when it didn't work. Thinking about my own experiences where it didn't work, I had a really badly deviated septum that was causing me a lot of sinus infections. I was a resident in internal medicine at University of North Carolina. I figured, okay, it's time to get this fixed. I went to the chairman of the department thinking, "Well, he's got the most experience." He was an incredibly, intellectually gifted surgeon. But manually, he was way past the prime. I couldn't get my mind around why that would be an issue, even though I was getting some warning signs from some of his younger colleagues. So I went under his knife and came out worse than before. I guess I will never breathe through my nose. So that was the case of badly placed trust, where I didn't really think about his surgical competence. I just thought about his academic competence.

Brandon: It's helpful that you lay out those different criteria for trust and the discernment process that we have to undergo as a society. Well, let's talk about those different themes. Maybe we'll come back to trust. Let's talk about truth because that's such a contested issue these days. One of the things we found, which I found quite surprising when I talked to the scientists. We interviewed some. We surveyed some 3,500 scientists in four countries. We interviewed more than 200 of them, and we talked to them about whether they saw science as being in the business of, was science about the quest for truth? What is science about? We were surprised to hear most of them say, "No, we don't think science is about truth." They felt very reticent to embrace the term truth. And it was in part — now this was during 2021 — they felt that what had happened was that the public expected there to be a more, truth as a sort of dogmatic and fallible sort of thing. When scientists changed their minds, they were getting criticized. And so they said, "Well, we shouldn't talk about truth. Maybe we should talk about understanding and convey the idea that everything we come up with is potentially subject to revision. It's fallible." And so it was interesting to hear a lot of hedging around that concept. You offer some distinctions that might be helpful to our scientists to say, well, wait, don't throw out the concept altogether. Could you respond to that a little bit? What might you say to some of these scientists who read it and say, "I don't think we're about truth anymore"?

Francis: Yeah, I would certainly not want to say that. But I also hear what they're saying about the dangers of putting forward a tentative conclusion as if that's the final answer, and then people wonder what happened when it had to change. We had to do some of that with COVID as well. It was a great example of how science works in real time. But it wasn't necessarily seen that way. I think it's really helpful to distinguish what kind of claim someone is making. If it's a truth claim, wait a minute. What level of truth are we discussing? In the book, I kind of have this series of concentric circles that has helped me to think about that in a given situation. The innermost circle, which is a truth that basically would have to be the way it is in any universe, is mathematics. Two plus two is going to be four. I don't think we can change that just because we don't like the answer. It won't help you on the math test to say, "Well, that's not true for me." The next circle out, which is where a lot of science tries to land, is in this area of established facts. Here is something that has been scientifically explored. It has been re-tested by others. It has been confirmed over and over again. The earth is really not flat. It's round, or it's sort of slightly elliptical. That's a fact. It's not okay in that situation to say, "Well, that's not true for me." Sorry flat earthers. But this is something that we can all kind of hang on to. It's really important for society not to give up on those once they're established. There's a lot of history facts in there as well. A man really did walk on the moon in 1969. And for people who try to say, "Well, that was just a fraudulent made-up thing," sorry, you have to have extremely compelling evidence to take a fact in that zone and decide it's not a fact anymore. We've gotten careless about that. Almost any historical thing is now under question. Did 9 /11 really happen? All of those kinds of conspiracies find their way in and are grabbed onto by a lot more people than I would have thought a decade ago would be taken in.

Then the next circle out — maybe this is what the scientists are talking about that you described — is this uncertain area where we have data. It looks like this is probably right, but we're not quite sure yet. We need to do some more work. We haven't elected it yet to move inward to that next circle of established facts. But that's what science is all about. We're going to make hypothesis. We're going to test them. We're going to look at the data, and we're going to compare things with our colleagues, and we're going to get peer review involved. And only when we really reach that magic moment where everybody can see, "Yes, this really is truth," then it is truth. It really is. We shouldn't be shy in saying that. Science did discover truth. That's what science is able of doing about nature. Then we can be, okay, confident that we move that particular finding into a place where we can call it truth. But we got to be careful when things haven't quite made it there. Once in a while, something in that circle of established facts, something comes up and like, well, classical mechanics was an established fact. It still works really well in daily experience. But there was quantum, and so we have to have a little asterisk there saying, in certain kinds of situations, you probably can't just be confident that Newton's laws are going to work for you. Then the outermost circle is just opinion. We spend a lot of our time arguing about things that are opinions, which is fine. That doesn't threaten the order of things, as long as we're clear that my opinion doesn't mean that you're wrong if you don't agree with it. But whenever we get into one of these truth arguments or a claim is made, stop for a minute and say, "Wait a minute. Which circle are we in?" If it's an opinion, fine. We can argue about it. You don't have to be wrong, and I don't have to be wrong. It's an opinion. But if we're in established facts, then let's look at the evidence. And if one of us is making a point that doesn't fit with the evidence, then we may have to give up our position. I might have to say, "I don't like that fact." But it's still a fact. Facts don't care how you feel.

Brandon: Yeah, that's really helpful. I think a lot of category are in the ways in which people respond to things. I think you also lay out Bernice's nature of lies, the variety of untruths that we embrace, which some people might embrace as truth out of sheer ignorance. But then there are things like delusions and even bullsh*t, which, you know. I'm curious to know, why do you think we embrace that? Is it a disregard for truth, or is it a valorization of some other criterion like power or status? I'm curious to know what you think is behind the rejection of truth for the sake of some other goal.

Francis: Yeah, it is hard to sort that out. Because I think all of us, in our own personal relationships or within our family, we do value truth. My daughters, when they were growing up, knew there was one thing that would get me more upset than anything. It was if they told me a lie, that that was just not something that could be let go. That was going to require a conversation. Maybe even a little bit of a pointed finger and a discussion about, okay, how did that happen? And why could we make sure that doesn't happen the next time, even if you're tempted to do so? It didn't always work, but it was a pretty profound principle. I think a lot of families have that same set of guidelines. You don't lie to your family members just to get out of trouble. But I don't know. In societal terms, it feels to me like we have kind of allowed more and more of that kind of misinformation or frankly disinformation, intentional lies, to go by without being challenged. Certainly, in politics, where politics has become so performative, there doesn't seem to be a consequence for saying something that's demonstrably false. It's just like, oh, well, you know, it's politics. That maybe has infected other parts of our society along the way. The bullsh*t one, which is one of those areas of lies that philosophers have even written about, it is more what you do in marketing, where you basically put forward a whole host of claims about something that the person putting for the claims knows it probably isn't true, but they don't care. That's almost worse because you don't care than somebody who's really got an agenda, and they set up a plan to distort something. At least, they had a plan. This is just like, it doesn't matter. And we get numbed, I'm afraid, by some of that when it's so much around us. And sad to say, I think social media has turned into a really bad influence in that space. If you look at an awful lot of what's going on social media, most people will agree, well, that's probably not true. But it's still out there, and it even spreads rapidly when it makes you angry or fearful. There's data to support that. You know this, Brandon. If somebody had put out something that's not true but it makes people mad or fearful, it spreads ten times faster than a reassuring fact that's actually true.

Brandon: Now it is quite frightening, and the ways in which this can be used to manipulate people is quite scary.

(outro)

Brandon: All right, everybody. That's a great place to stop the first half of our conversation. Join us next week for part two, where Francis talks about how in hindsight, the public health leadership might have handled the COVID-19 pandemic differently. His wrote to the Christian faith, what he has learned through his work with organizations like braver angels about listening to people who disagree with him and how to practically work to rebuild trust in our polarized times.