As I mentioned in my last post, Francis Collins has announced that he will resign as Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) by the end of 2021. The reverberations of COVID-19 that have led him to that decision contain political elements that I will refrain from addressing. But on a blog that exists to discuss Christianity’s engagement with the culture, ethics are foundational to the discussion. And for that reason, the ethical issues included in Francis Collins’ actions as NIH Director are fair game. In my opinion, Dr. Collins’ stance on these critical issues are far more troubling than his defense of Theistic Evolution.

Director of the NIH

Before the 2006 publication of his book, The Language of God, few Christians knew much about Francis Collins. But the success of the Human Genome Project combined with the wild popularity of the book soon made him a household name. In August 2009, Collins was appointed the 16th Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Those who pay attention to such things — especially Christians who respect modern science — were thrilled to have someone like him in such a high-profile position. Collins was, and is, a committed Christian. And he wasn’t shy about saying so. I greatly respect him for that and I think he’s a good man.

But good men are not exempt from making bad decisions. And his record as Director of the NIH proves that point.

The Origins of COVID-19

When COVID-19 rocked the world in early 2020, Collins’ NIH took the lead in responding to it. Most famously, the Director of an NIH subsidiary, the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), Doctor Anthony Fauci, became part of the national conversation. The public actions of Doctor Fauci have become notoriously political. But regardless of the politics, one thing is clear. The NIH has obfuscated its involvement with its funding of “gain-of-function” research that may have been applicable to the origins of the COVID-19 virus.

Shirking Responsibility

On May 19, 2021 Francis Collins issued a statement insisting that “neither NIH nor NIAID have ever approved any grant that would have supported ‘gain-of-function’ research on coronaviruses that would have increased their transmissibility or lethality for humans.” But five months later, the NIH admitted that, “EcoHealth’s ‘limited experiment’ was testing [whether] spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model.”

An Inconsistent Position

Somewhere between May and October of 2021, the NIH’s story changed. As head of the NIH, Francis Collins needs to explain why that is. The fallout from this is not the stuff of a conspiracy theory. Vanity Fair Magazine’s investigation into this issue found as much:

A months long Vanity Fair investigation, interviews with more than 40 people, and a review of hundreds of pages of U.S. government documents, including internal memos, meeting minutes, and email correspondence, found that conflicts of interest, stemming in part from large government grants supporting controversial virology research, hampered the U.S. investigation into COVID-19’s origin at every step. In one State Department meeting, officials seeking to demand transparency from the Chinese government say they were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s gain-of-function research, because it would bring unwelcome attention to U.S. government funding of it.

Francis Collins had an ethical responsibility to oversee the kind of research his institute was doing. But he also had a fiduciary responsibility to control NIH funding of outside projects. He seems to have dropped the ball on both. And, if it is true that NIH funding may have indirectly contributed to the pandemic, Collins needs to take responsibility for that.

These are the most recent ethical red flags that have been raised against Dr. Collins at the NIH. But they’re not the only ones. 

A Telling Statement

There are other deep ethical concerns with research projects Dr. Collins has overseen in his time at NIH. And, in my opinion, all of them can be traced back to a single sentence in his book. On page 249 of The Language of God, Collins engages the reader in a discussion of embryonic stem cell research (ESCR). During that discussion he admits that “deriving stem cells from an embryo generally results in the destruction of the embryo.” The word “generally” in that sentence is suspect. I am unaware of any method of extracting stem cells from an embryo that does not result in its destruction. But in the same paragraph, Collins also states that …

An embryo formed by the union of a human sperm and egg is a potential human life (emphasis mine).

That statement is unequivocally false.

The Science of Life

An embryo is not a potential human life. It is an actual human life. It is distinct from its mother and father. It’s small and still developing. But it’s growing. It’s alive. And it is exactly what and where it should be at that stage of its development. This is not a religious idea or a personal opinion. It’s a scientific fact.

And Francis Collins knows it.

He is a trained physician. So, he is familiar with what any doctor learns from an embryology textbook …

“Human life begins at fertilization, the process during which a male gamete or sperm (spermatozoa) unites with a female gamete or oocyte (ovum) to form a single cell called a zygote. This highly specialized, totipotent cell marked the beginning of each of us as a unique individual … A zygote is the beginning of a new human being.”

– Keith L. Moore, The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology

Francis Collins’ ignores this fact. And his position that an embryo is only a potential human being has given him the philosophical and ethical latitude to use human embryos as research projects. The NIH has done just that under his leadership.

The Consequences of Corrupted Bioethics

Soon after his confirmation as NIH Director, “Collins noted that setting up a new human embryonic stem cell registry was a high priority. In 2010, he fought against an attempt (Sherley vs. Sebelius, U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals) to stop federal taxpayer funding of embryonic stem-cell research, including filing a declaration in the case in support of federal funding (Case 1:09-cv-01575-RCL Document 48-2 Filed 08/31/10).” This led to repeated experimentation using embryonic stem cells. One such research program grafted scalp and back skin from aborted fetuses onto mice. Researchers obtained the fetal tissue from the Magee Women’s Hospital of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC). The study used tissue from fetuses aborted there at gestational ages between 18 and 20 weeks.

Bioethical Euphemisms

Collins also supported research using somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). SCNT is a process wherein the DNA-containing nucleus of “somatic cell” (a body cell other than that of an egg or sperm) is removed from one cell. At the same time, the nucleus of a different egg cell is removed and discarded. The nucleus of the somatic cell is then inserted into the enucleated egg cell and stimulated to grow and develop. This sounds innocuous enough. But think about what I just described.

These researchers are inserting the DNA of one organism to grow and develop cells in the egg of another organism. Does that sound familiar? It should. Most of us refer to that kind of process as “cloning” … because that’s exactly what it is. The problem with this is that it is illegal to clone a human embryo and allow the clone to fully develop. But if you destroy the newly formed embryo for medical research it’s called therapeutic cloning. And therapeutic cloning is perfectly OK.

In other words, Francis Collins is a proponent of human cloning … as long as you kill any embryos you produce in the process.

Finally, in August of 2021, Francis Collins’ NIH funded a $2.7 Million project to support human fetal organ harvesting at the University of Pittsburgh. In this case, the goal was for the University to become a fetal “tissue hub.” Researchers collected more than 300 samples from fetuses that ranged in gestational age from 6 to 42 weeks.

Remember, premature babies have survived outside the womb as early as 21-weeks.

Troubling Repercussions

The obfuscation involved with embryonic stem cell research has been going on for decades. You can read my synopsis of the history of political manipulations involved in it here: Christian Research Journal: “Stem Cell Obfuscation.” Sadly, it doesn’t have to be this way. Adult stem cells have proven to be much more effective at producing successful therapies than embryonic cells. And there are methods of manipulating adult stem cells to achieve those results that avoid the ethical concerns discussed above.

But what is most distressing about all this is that Francis Collins knows these things. As a Christian at the head of the world’s premier medical research organization, he could have been a champion of the kind of ethical research that honored and protected the value of every living human being. Instead, he chose expediency over ethics by pursuing cultural acceptance and power. The most high-profile Christian scientist in America encouraged and funded policies and programs that not only undermined Christian values, but were also based on the demonstrably unscientific falsehood that a human embryo is not a human being.

Francis Collins’ legacy is living proof that good people and bad ideas are never mutually exclusive.