Francis Collins

“So much of what we are currently seeing as far as human suffering and misery comes from diseases that should have been preventable but were not.”

“Proponents of intelligent design don't accept that some of the very complex nanomachines that we have inside ourselves could have come about solely on the basis of natural selection.”

“I'm a pretty informal guy. I ride a Harley.”

“It is interesting that the U.S. has this very strong proportion of the population that rejects scientific conclusions about the age of the Earth and about evolutionary relationships between species, including humans.”

“For delightfully quirky descriptions of bizarre neurological syndromes that teach us a lot about how the brain works, there is no match for Oliver Sacks.”

“I'm enormously interested to see where neuroscience can take us in understanding these complexities of the human brain and how it works, but I do think there may be limits in terms of what science can tell us about what does good and evil mean anyway, and what are those concepts about?”

“I'm always feeling like I'm lacking wisdom. This reassurance that one can ask God for that and it will happen is certainly reassuring to me.”

“The brain is the most complicated organ in the universe. We have learned a lot about other human organs. We know how the heart pumps and how the kidney does what it does. To a certain degree, we have read the letters of the human genome. But the brain has 100 billion neurons. Each one of those has about 10,000 connections.”

“A virus is not just DNA; a virus is also packaged up, covered over with a series of proteins in a nice, elegant, well-compacted form.”

“Many people struggle with losing weight and then regaining it. But there is no convincing evidence that the effort to lose weight actually promotes more weight gain in the long run.”

“Scientists must venture outside their comfort zones to show the public how cool - and how important - their work really is.”

“As a scientist, you're not supposed to make decisions without the data.”

“We give our kids vaccinations. That's a biological enhancement that's considered not just acceptable but actually admirable.”

“God is an awesome mathematician and physicist.”

“Research is so unpredictable. There are periods when nothing works and all your experiments are a disaster and all your hypotheses are wrong.”

“I became an atheist because, as a graduate student studying quantum physics, life seemed to be reducible to second-order differential equations. Mathematics, chemistry and physics had it all. And I didn't see any need to go beyond that.”

“It's interesting when you read the life of Christ how much of his time he spent healing the sick. There must have been a reason for that - he was modelling for us what it is we are intended to do by following his path.”

“Successful weight management really means a permanent change in lifestyle - and success in this arena provides that person with a great opportunity to model that behavior for friends and family.”