NIH Pick Collins’ Passion for Genetics Has Roots at Yale

Francis S. Collins, who received his PhD in physical chemistry from Yale University in 1974, has been nominated to head the National Institutes of Health by President Barack Obama.

Francis S. Collins, who received his PhD in physical chemistry from Yale University in 1974, has been nominated to head the National Institutes of Health by President Barack Obama.

Collins, 59, headed the successful drive to sequence the human genome. As director of the NIH, he would oversee 27 institutes with an annual budget of more than $30 billion.

During his time Yale, Collins developed an intense interest in the biochemistry of DNA and RNA. After a stint at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he earned his MD, he returned to New Haven between 1981 and 1984 as a postdoctoral Fellow in Human Genetics and Pediatrics at the Yale Medical School.

Collins gained a reputation as a top-flight geneticist and he and colleagues developed a technique called positional cloning which helped scientists search large segments of DNA to find disease-causing genes, such as the mutation that causes cystic fibrosis.

In 1993, he became head of what would become the National Human Genome Research Institute, which in 2000 published a draft of the 3 billion bases of DNA that make up the human genome.

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