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

This episode is the second part of my conversation with 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 second part of our conversation, we talk about:

• The transformative power of faith in science
• The power of beauty to evoke spiritual longing
• Building bridges through healthy conflict
• The need for faith communities in creation care
• The pursuit of truth amidst uncertainty and misinformation

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: It's hard to identify an issue right now in American society where we aren't polarized, a lot of it driven by politics. I needed to understand that. And so I did get engaged with Braver Angels, which has its mission to bring together people on opposite sides of a contentious issue. Maybe it's gun control, or maybe it's immigration, or maybe it's public health response to COVID. That's where I often got engaged. You really have to listen to the other side of that issue. Not just plan your snappy response but listen to understand so well that you can say back to that person, "Here's what I heard you say. Tell me if that's right." This is like marriage counseling for our country, I think. And I learned a lot.

(intro)

Brandon: This is the second half of my conversation with Francis Collins on yearning for wisdom. In the first half of our conversation, we talked about the role of beauty in science and the role of truth in science and in society. And in this episode, Francis is going to discuss the ways in which public health leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic might have been handled differently. His road to the Christian faith, what he's learned through his work with organizations like Braver Angels about listening to people who disagree with him and how to practically rebuild trust in our polarized times. Let's get started.

(interview)

Brandon: Let's talk about science as the other big theme. We talked a little bit about it. Well, I asked you a little bit about COVID, and you talked about the way in which the pandemic was handled. Science communication, in particular, during the pandemic is one area where you say, "I have to point the finger at myself and my other colleagues as well. Their communication was not always as clear and helpful as it needed to be." If you could go back in time, and with the Wisdom of Hindsight changed how the NIH handled the pandemic, what would you all do differently? Knowing the way that things unfolded, what do you think could have been done differently?

Francis: I was one of several folks who were shoved in front of cameras on a regular basis to try to tell the public what we thought would be the best way to protect yourself, especially during 2020. There was so much happening on a day-by-day basis that most of the time we were doing the best we could, but we were not that confident that we had the whole story. I wish we had said that more often. I wish every recommendation to the public would have started out with, "Look. This is an evolving situation. We don't have all the data we need. We're going to tell you the best recommendation we can come up with right now based on what we do know. But it might have to change in another couple of weeks or a month. Don't be surprised if that happens." We didn't usually say that. I'm just sort of anxious to try to get people to take action so I was like, "Now hear this. This is the thing you should do for yourself right now." I think that did not help. At one point, you're saying you don't need a mask. Then a month and a half later, you're saying you need a mask. There were good scientific reasons for that, as we began to learn that asymptomatic people could be spreading virus like crazy. So masks were going to be important. But that didn't necessarily come across, and we lost confidence along the way. So I wish we'd done a better job of that.

I wish we'd figured out a way to have the science communication more distributed. It did come across as there was this sort of limited set of talking heads. They're people that you and your community somewhere in the heartland don't know, have never met. They seem like they're a little bit on the elite side of the spectrum. So after a while, you start to wonder, should I trust these people? If we had a better way — maybe this is what we need for science communication but it hasn't happened yet — on distributing the information through recognized local sources, giving the materials to all of the docs, all of the high school science teachers, all of the folks who are in a position to be able to share truth about what's happening instead of having it so limited, maybe people would have been more willing to listen and to accept what was being put forward. But that would be a big task. You almost need a science communication corps – not a peace corps but a science communication corps — that would be empowered to do this in a responsible professional way to cut the facts right but were seen as part of the community.

Brandon: Yeah, I suppose the challenge is doing that in real time, where it's fast enough to have the impact but also the challenges with the kind of back and forth that happens within the scientific community, with the peer review process and the disagreements. So it becomes hard to imagine how that would happen. While we were doing our research, we were wondering whether one of the big takeaways from our project and what the public could learn from scientists could be not so much the beauty of scientific facts but the beauty of understanding and the intellectual humility that goes into the scientific process, right, and the ability to value truth and to change one's mind when the evidence is presented. Then we had some pushback from a colleague who had run some citizen science experiments. What he had found was this. They had done a couple of different groups of people. In one group, you have citizens working with scientists on an established experiment — they run this experiment various times. They knew what to expect — and another group where the scientists didn't actually know what they were going to find. It turned out, at the end of the study, that the group where the public had actually, members of the public were discovering something new with the scientists trusted the scientists less than the group in which the scientists were the established experts. That was a sort of frightening prospect for him. Because he's like, "Oh, I thought the people would value scientists who are in it with us, changing their minds, et cetera." So we're wondering whether maybe, you know, is that just a short-term thing, or is it just in the context of a pandemic? Do we really need certainty when there's a lot of uncertainty in the environment? Are we looking for high priests to give us dogma and comfort us more than truth?

Francis: Yeah, that's a really interesting observation. I would guess it is, especially when you're in a crisis and people are fearful about their very survival, that you want certainty. And to say that, "Okay. We don't know the answer and we're going to have to work to figure it out through science," is not the way a lot of people would want to think this is playing out. That probably played out in terms of the dynamic we were talking about a minute ago. Even if we had said, "You know, this is the best we can do. But here's what you should do today," people would still want to believe that that's certain and they can count on it. But we could have been, I think, more effective in having that kind of a conversation about the importance of uncertainty instead of dismissing it.

Brandon: Would you have any recommendations for, you know. As you say, there will no doubt be a future pandemic. I mean, what should we do the next time in case something starts to emerge? Would you have any advice for future leaders?

Francis: Yeah, I do think we need to have this community-based network. We've started that in 2020 with something called CEAL, the Community Engagement Alliance, which took a lot of the information about vaccines and distributed that to various community leaders in a way that they had access to the stuff that was science and evidence-based but could then reach out to their communities as trusted authorities to be able to share that. I was really worried, for instance, that the African-American community was going to be particularly skeptical of vaccines given that their history of being well-treated by medical research, given Tuskegee and other things has not been great and the healthcare system is still full of plenty of disparities. And by activating this kind of a community system, that turned out actually to go pretty well. The vaccine trials were very nicely engaged in by people of color. And when you look at what happened with vaccines once they were available, people of color did better than a lot of white evangelicals did, even though they might've had reasons to be suspicious based on history. But a lot of that was because of having a community voice there to say, "It's not just those people in Washington or Atlanta that are telling you what's true. We're telling you too."

Brandon: Yeah, and it seemed like faith leaders had a big role to play. Faith communities were sites of distributing vaccines as well, and of administering.

Francis: Yeah, they were.

Brandon: Politically, though, it seems like that's one of the biggest challenges. In a network like that to ensure that it's sufficiently diverse politically and getting buy-in across the different parties, the culture war seems like maybe one of the more pressing obstacles.

Francis: It is, and it can't be underestimated in terms of how important it is. To take that into account, I spent a lot of Saturday mornings in 2020 with the teams that were doing the vaccine trial enrollment. Because their default was to try to enroll as many people as they could in a short period of time, because that's how we're going to find out if the vaccine worked. In the first few weeks, it was pretty much 95% white people. That was not going to be the way in which we could really assess whether the vaccine is going to work for everybody. So that meant having really creative ideas about how exactly to do that outreach. Because we haven't been that good at that when it came to offering people the chance to take part in clinical research. We learned a lot of new things, that I'm glad to say can now be utilized in other situations. But it was tough going at first.

Brandon: I want to come back to some aspects of this, which, you know, what you've learned also from your critics through Braver Angels and your conversations with Wilk especially in just a moment. But I want to ask a little bit about faith because that's the other key theme in your book. You grew up in a household, as you said, that wasn't particularly religious. But in your late 20s, you had a powerful moment where faith became salient to you. Could you say a little bit about how that happened?

Francis: I entered medical school as an atheist. I sustained that for the first couple of years, which is mostly book reading and lecture listening. But then they are in the hospital. Sitting at the bedside of people who are facing probably fatal conditions that we aren't going to be able to rescue them from. You have to think in that circumstance, how would I handle this? And so I began to wonder. Had I kind of skipped over the phase of really thinking deeply about religion, about whether God exists? But I tried not to think about it too much because it made me uncomfortable. I actually had a patient — I had one moment that's just absolutely locked in my mind. It's a moment in time — who shared her faith with me as she was in the last stages of dying of heart disease and then turned to look at me directly and said, "Doctor, I've shared my faith with you, but you haven't said anything. What do you believe?" Anybody listening to this, imagine being asked that question right now. "What do you believe?" Would you have a nice, crisp answer? I sure didn't. I stammered. I guess I don't really know. I heard the words come out of my mouth. Like, wow, that's a pretty terrible admission for somebody who thinks he's got his mind all tuned to what matters. You've totally avoided the most important question you've ever been asked. That's not good. That started me down a path, Brandon, that went over a couple of years. I'm trying to understand whether there was any evidence out there to believe in God. What do you know? Some of it came out of science. Like, there's a big bang. Oh, wait a minute. Nature didn't create itself. How did that happen? The universe is beautiful, and it's organized around mathematics that are also beautiful. And for this fine-tuning thing that makes the whole thing work to be interesting, sure seems like an intelligence behind all of this.

Then there's this thing called good and evil, which I hadn't really thought about. I couldn't figure out how to explain that on a purely materialistic basis, that morality thing which seemed to point to a creator who wasn't just interested in matter and energy but was also interested in me. And after a long struggle over those two years initially trying to strengthen my atheism and ultimately realizing now what to do, I also came to know the person of Jesus and realized that that solved for me another problem of recognizing that God was holy and that I was not. I needed some way to be able to approach God. That's what Jesus represented for me. That he also was a man but he also knew what God was all about because he was God. He died on the cross. He died for me. And that of all the world's religions — I studied a lot of them — just sort of jumped out at me. It's something. I can't ignore this. So I became a follower of Jesus. I was 27, and I have had that as the rock that I could stand on when the storms are crashing around me, and they have sometimes, and know that this is not something that I have to be fearful of going away or turning into something different. It's the foundation of everything that matters.

Brandon: Beautiful. You talk about C.S. Lewis being a big influence for you, as he was for me. I want to quote where you say he opened you to those rare moments often inspired by the beauty of music or nature. "When I had a glimpse of something profound, a sense of longing I could not name, a piercing ache, it was somehow more satisfying than any earthly happiness but gone too soon. I recognized those in myself." Our theme for this season of the podcast is yearning, and you've voiced this profound core yearning. Could you say a little bit more about that and what that means for your faith's journey?

Francis: Yeah, this is one of those things that is hard to put into words accurately, this moment of longing. Again, what Lewis calls joy. Although, that gets used in lots of other ways. But this piercing ache, it is what it feels like that is both incredibly sweet. But also, there's something about it that makes you feel so much like you're longing. Like you're made for something different than what most of your experience is all about. This is a glimpse of that. And I do take that, as Lewis did, as one of those signposts to maybe what we're really made for and what we eventually will be able to experience. Oftentimes, those experiences do happen in a moment of beauty. That can happen to be in nature. That moment when I realized I could no longer be resisting the idea of becoming a Christian was on a hike in the northwest of the United States, in the Cascade Mountains. On a beautiful fall day, it came around a corner. To my surprise, I encountered this very high up, frozen waterfall, and it just changed me. Again, that sort of moment of where it's a sudden intake of your breath like, uh. Then you have to, for a moment, figure out, why did that hit me so hard? Well, I want it to hit me hard. I want it to last, but I know it won't. But that was the moment for me. That very specific image that said there is so much more to what life is and to who you are, Francis, than the materialistic view that you have spent most of your 27 years on. Open yourself up. Don't be afraid.

Brandon: Has the practice of science ever generated those moments for you?

Francis: It has. I think science can also have a form of beauty which is visual. As somebody who studies life science, there are things that we are able to do with images that are exquisite. My lab work is on diabetes. One of the things we've learned how to do, which is turning out to be really very revealing, is to study somebody who has diabetes. What we really want to do is to understand what's happening with the cells in their body, the pancreas, that make insulin. You can't biopsy those. That's not allowed, and that would be very bad for somebody. But you can take a skin cell, and you can turn it into a stem cell from that person. And then if you do everything right, over 32 days, adding just the right cocktail of growth factors, you can turn that stem cell into an insulin-secreting beta cell just like you'd have in the pancreas. In fact, you can even make a whole pancreatic islet that you can look at under the microscope. So it has both the cells that make insulin and the ones that make glucagon. It looks remarkably like what that person has. But you're looking at it under the microscope in your laboratory because of this magic. That's a moment of beauty. And it just, yeah, the first time I saw one of those — because it took a while to set this up appropriately stained with the right fluorescent antibodies. It's in multiple colors — I just had to stop and have a jaw dropping moment of, "This is amazing that this is possible to do." That is clearly opening up a whole new window of understanding diabetes but also a window into the beauty of science.

Brandon: Yeah, amazing. Francis, you're a bridge builder. You created BioLogos, which is this organization that integrates faith and science. Then also, you've been working with Braver Angels to help rebuild trust in society. Could you say a little bit about what led you to your work with both these organizations?

Francis: Well, with BioLogos, my own realization that science and faith could co-exist happily in my own experience after that conversion at age 27, I found I, was not encountering all the ways in which people said your head will explode. That I was having a wonderful time seeing how science could be a form of worship. It was uncovering things about God's creation, giving us a glimpse of God's mind. I was not encountering places where I thought what I could read in scripture and what I could learn in a laboratory were in conflict. Sometimes I could see how we would assume that by a certain interpretation of one or the other, but it wasn't too hard to figure out how to put them together in a fashion that wasn't just like okay. It was actually complementary. It was harmonious. I wrote this book called The Language of God to try to explain that view, because it didn't seem as if it was being talked about very much. Even though I knew a fair amount of scientists who had that same view, they were nervous about speaking about it. And after the book came out, I got deluged with all kinds of follow-up emails from people who had seen the book and had other questions and wanted to have the conversation go on. That was the motivation to start BioLogos, this wonderful foundation that has grown over the course now over the last 15 years, to have a couple million people who regularly tap into its resources and who engage in this gracious dialogue about how rigorous science and Christian faith have a lot to say to each other. There's a whole lot of resources there for people listening who want to see what some of those conversations look like at biologos.org. There were meetings, and they have a curriculum for high school students that also brings together faith and rigorous science in a way that sometimes people were having trouble finding resources for. So that's just been a joy.

I'm now a senior fellow at BioLogos. I had to step away from it for 12 years when I was the NIH director, because you aren't allowed to have any other activities outside of that job. But now I have a little bit more of a chance to come alongside and cheer for what they're doing. So yeah, maybe that helped, having that experience of seeing that sometimes when there's a conflict, it's because we haven't listened to each other. We haven't really understood each other's perspectives. I think because I live in both the science and the Christian faith world, I do understand the perspectives. And it's been very reassuring that when we thought there were conflicts, they can generally be resolved. But now here we are with what's happened in our society, especially in the U.S., with all the contentiousness about what's happened with public health and about everything else for that matter. It's hard to identify an issue right now in American society where we aren't polarized, a lot of it driven by politics. I needed to understand that. And so I did get engaged with Braver Angels, which has its mission to bring together people on opposite sides of a contentious issue. Maybe it's gun control, or maybe it's immigration, or maybe it's public health response to COVID. That's where I often got engaged. You really have to listen to the other side of that issue. Not just plan your snappy response but listen to understand so well that you can say back to that person, "Here's what I heard you say. Tell me if that's right." This is like marriage counseling for our country, I think.

And I learned a lot. So for COVID, I learned from Wilk Wilkinson. He's my alter ego in this because he's very much on the conservative side. He runs a trucking company in Minnesota. A lot of the public health recommendations really seemed tone deaf for what his community was going through. Nobody was asking them. "Well, wait a minute, what's your situation? Does it make sense for you to have to close your businesses when you haven't seen a case yet?" He had all the good points there. Well, he had some positions that I think are wrong. I have some that he thinks are wrong. But we're good friends now. We kind of enjoy the banter. We enjoy going to get a beer together, and we both share this idea that this is what we should do more of and build those bridges. The book, really the last chapter of it, is all about that. How can we individually start to bring our society back together again? Don't count on the politicians to do it. They're more polarized than the people are. I'm afraid the media isn't helping much either. Certainly, social media isn't. So how's it going to work? It's got to be from each of us. We, the people, maybe have the solution in our own hands, but we've got to act on it.

Brandon: You make a good distinction between healthy conflict and high conflict. Do you have recommendations for how do we rebuild trust through healthy conflict?

Francis: Indeed. Healthy conflict is where you don't expect that everybody is going to agree on the point because that's not how we are. I would hope, if we're talking about an established fact to come back to our circles of truth, that we could agree on those. But anything that's sort of in that zone of uncertainty, okay, let's listen to each other. Let's figure out, why does that person have such a different view? They're not evil. They have a different perspective based on their own sources of information, on their life experience. Learn from that. Listen to that. Maybe my view isn't as solid as I thought it was either. But the goal can't be to convince the other person they're wrong. That does not work. It's going to be to understand the other person's perspective and then reflect on your own. That's what Braver Angels has done. I've spent a lot of time with them, and it's given me a chance in some instances to talk about the ways in which I think I have failed in various aspects of the COVID response. I think that's the way you start. As each of us both understands the other position and then begins to admit maybe ours wasn't so perfect, then you could really start to see people coming together. Unfortunately, in our media-driven society right now, people are reluctant to admit any kind of failure because there's a piling on — has this happened to me — of media saying, "Oh, there. You see. He's saying what he should have said all along. Actually, there are a lot of other things that he did wrong, and he should have talked about those too." So it has to be somewhat symmetric, yeah.

Brandon: Yeah, nothing will be satisfactory. Right? So that's the challenge. Well, let's close with perhaps, any advice you might have for our listeners who are still sort of trying to figure out how to move forward in a context in which we're becoming increasingly polarized? Maybe you suggest ways to develop mental immunity that might be helpful for us to start implementing in our own lives as we move ahead.

Francis: Yeah, so I even suggest a pledge in this book that people might consider reading and thinking about whether they would want to sign on to. The pledge is up on the Braver Angels' website. If you just go to your Google search and punch in "Road to Wisdom Pledge," you'll come to it. Because I think it's one thing to talk about this and then go on doing what we were doing before. It's another to say, okay, it's time to take action for each of us. It's time to step away from saying, "Things shouldn't be like this," to saying, "I should be like this." So one of them is the mental immunity, to realize that we're all barraged with information that's coming at us in large volumes from multiple sources. And we've got to be really careful about which of those we should bring onboard into our own portfolio of truth. Because a lot of what you're seeing is not. That means tightening up your own criteria by which you make those judgments about trust. Is this a person with integrity, or do they have competence? I mean, real competence. Do they have humility? Are you being misled by the fact that this is somebody who's part of your own tribe, your own bubble? That doesn't mean that they necessarily know what they're talking about. And are you ignoring information that's coming from another tribe even though it's actually highly qualified and factual? All of that begin to really change your view so that you're not absorbing things that are bad for you or passing them on to other people.

The other part of this, I think, really is to try to step outside of our comfort zones and begin to talk to people who do have a different opinion and not be afraid of that. But do that kind of outreach. Think of somebody that you used to be friends with, and now it's gotten really difficult because of different political views. Just reach out and say, "You know, I'd like to begin to understand why you and I have gone such different directions. The first thing I'd do is to have you tell me your story. I really want to understand. I might ask you some questions, but I'm not going to yell at you. I'm not going to try to convince you that you're wrong and I'm right. I just want to understand." People will likely say yes. Then enlarge that a bit. Not just a one-on-one. Build a group setting where people can start to do this. Join Braver Angels or one of those bridging communities. There's a lot of them out there. And maybe we, the people, can start to turn this around into a society that's just not at each other's throats but instead is jointly interested in flourishing and building a future for our society, for our children and our grandchildren. That's what we all want. But we've kind of lost our momentum. We're not going to get it back unless we all decide it's a priority.

Brandon: Yeah, absolutely. I'll read the pledge at the end. Perhaps our listeners can join in owning and embracing and taking on some agency. Francis, The Road to Wisdom is such a brilliant book. I highly recommend it. Anything else you'd like to direct our viewers and listeners to?

Francis: Well, it's been great talking to you, Brandon. We haven't talked about another big science issue that I know is on your heart and mind also, which is, what's happening to our planet and the need for what faith communities I think maybe could be playing a larger role in. Considering it not just as global warming, which doesn't seem to appeal to people, or even climate change but creation care. God gave us this gift of this beautiful planet, and we're kind of messing it up. It's not something to be hopeless or catastrophic about. There are things we can do. But particularly, if we're worried about our future generations — most of us are — this is not something to dismiss or try to say, "Well, I'm not sure that it's really been proven yet." It's been proven. Look at the data. That's up to all of us then to take whatever roles we can individually, and to insist that our leaders do also to try to mitigate against what otherwise is going to be a lot of harms. A lot of the harms are going to be done to the people who did not create the problem but who are themselves in the most vulnerable place, particularly low-lying areas like Bangladesh. So come on, folks. It's time to stop arguing about whether creation care is necessary. It's necessary. Let's figure how to do it.

Brandon: Yeah, absolutely. Francis, thank you. It's been such an honor and a delight to have you on the show. I wish you the best with all the important work you're doing.

Francis: Well, thanks, Brandon. It's been a delight to talk to you. I'm so glad you're highlighting this theme of beauty. Because as I get older, it seems more and more apparent to me that we underestimate the significance of this in our own lives, and also the way in which it draws us spiritually into a place that otherwise maybe we can't quite find. It's a beautiful place. Beauty should be beautiful, and it is. It's something that I think you're helping us think more deeply about.

Brandon: Well, thank you. Thank you.

(pledge)

Brandon: So here's the pledge that Francis puts forward at the end of the book. Perhaps this is something that we can all embrace and take to heart as we move forward. 

"I pledge that from this day forward, I will seek to be part of the solution to our society’s widespread divisiveness, which is hurting individuals, families, communities, our nation, and our world. I will actively seek out opportunities to engage in dialogue with those who have different views from mine; by respectful listening, I will strive to understand their perspectives better, to identify our shared deeper values, and to build a bridge across the gap that has divided us. When sifting incoming information, I will seek to be a wise consumer. Taking into account my own biases, I will carefully assess the plausibility of the claim as well as the integrity, competence, and humility of the source, in order to decide whether the information is likely to be trustworthy. I will resist the temptation to speak about, write about, or share on social media information that claims to be true but is of uncertain validity. I will bring a generous spirit to all my interpersonal interactions, refusing to ascribe evil intentions to others simply because of different political or societal beliefs. I will be slow to take offense. Loving my neighbor will be my goal." Thank you.

(outro)

Brandon: All right, folks. That's a wrap for this episode. If you enjoyed the episode, please share it with someone who would find it of interest. Also, please subscribe and leave us a review if you haven't already. Thanks, and see you next time.