September 2, 2010 | 8:40 AM |

Collins, A Fervent Christian, At Center Of Stem-Cell Debate

FILED UNDER: Medicine/Science, Politics, ethics, NIH, religion, stem cells

Francis Collins, director of the NIH

There’s a great profile of Francis Collins — director of the National Institutes of Health and true-believing Christian in a sea of atheist scientists — in this week’s New Yorker. Writer Peter Boyer asks the question: How does a man who, while hiking, sees a frozen waterfall formed into three separate parts and takes it to be “a revelation of the Trinitarian truth,” also take on the role of chief cheerleader for embryonic stem-cell research?

The answer, it seems, is that while Collins is “personally torn by ethical questions posed by stem-cell research,” Boyer writes, he “also feels it is morally wasteful not to take advantage of the hundreds of thousands of embryos created for in-vitro fertilization that ultimately are disposed of anyway. These embryos are doomed, but they can help aid disease research.”

About the author

Blogger, CommonHealth Rachel Zimmerman worked as a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal for 10 years, most recently covering health and medicine out of the paper’s Boston bureau. Rachel has also written for The New York Times, the (now-defunct) Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the alternative newspaper Willamette Week, in Portland, Ore., among other publications. Rachel co-wrote a book about birth, published by Bantam/Random House, and spent 2008 as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. Rachel lives in Cambridge with her husband and two daughters. View all posts by Rachel Zimmerman →