evangelical 360°
A timely and relevant new podcast that dives into the contemporary issues which are impacting Christian life and witness around the world. Guests include leaders, writers, and influencers, all exploring faith from different perspectives and persuasions. Inviting lively discussion and asking tough questions, evangelical 360° is hosted by Brian Stiller, Global Ambassador for the World Evangelical Alliance. Our hope is that each person listening will come away informed, encouraged, challenged and inspired!
evangelical 360°
Ep. 25 / Faith & Science: The DNA of Belief ► Dr. Francis Collins
Dr. Francis Collins takes us on a profound intellectual and spiritual journey from atheism to faith while simultaneously reshaping modern medicine through his leadership of the Human Genome Project. Growing up on a small Virginia farm with no religious background, Collins embraced science as his passion and atheism as his worldview until a pivotal moment in medical school when an elderly patient asked him, "Doctor, what do you believe?"
This simple question launched a methodical, evidence-based examination of faith that would transform his life. Collins shares how C.S. Lewis' rational arguments for Christianity in "Mere Christianity" forced him to reconsider his atheist stance, particularly through the universal human experience of moral law – our innate sense of right and wrong that transcends evolutionary explanation.
What makes Collins' testimony particularly compelling is how his scientific expertise enhanced rather than hindered his faith journey. As the director who led the revolutionary Human Genome Project to map all human DNA, he describes scientific discovery as "getting a glimpse of God's mind" and laboratories as potential "cathedrals." Throughout his distinguished career, including twelve years directing the National Institutes of Health, Collins has demonstrated how scientific and spiritual worldviews can beautifully complement each other.
Perhaps most moving is his account of treating a critically ill young man in a Nigerian mission hospital with minimal resources. After a successful but risky procedure, the patient provided unexpected wisdom: "You came here for me." This profound moment revealed to Collins how God works through individual human encounters rather than grand schemes.
For anyone wrestling with questions about science and faith, Collins provides a thoughtful path forward that honors both intellectual integrity and spiritual hunger.
Share this episode using hashtag #Evangelical360 and join the conversation online!
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Hello and welcome to Evangelical 360. I'm your host, brian Stiller, and I'm pleased to share with you another conversation with leaders, changemakers and influencers having an impact on Christian life around the world. We'd love for you to be a part of the podcast by sharing this episode using hashtag Evangelical360 and by joining the conversation on YouTube in the comments below. My guest today is Dr Francis Collins, a geneticist and physician who led the groundbreaking human genome project and is author of several books, including the New York Times bestseller, the Language of God. A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.
Brian Stiller:I got to know Dr Collins during the pandemic On Sunday morning talk shows. He would be regularly invited as guest because he served as the director of the National Institute of Health. It was a challenge he handled with care, dignity and gracious expertise. Today, I've asked him to share some of his personal story, to let us in on this remarkable journey of a world-famous scientist discovering faith, journey of a world-famous scientist discovering faith and remaining transparent about that faith despite challenges and complexities across the cultural landscape. Listen in as Dr Collins tells us his story. Dr Francis Collins, a joy to have you with us on Evangelical 360 today.
Francis Collins:Brian, I'm really happy to be your guest, looking forward to the conversation.
Brian Stiller:Well, you have a remarkable career and I want to get into the issues of how a scientist becomes a Christian, but I think it would be very helpful for us to hear the story of your childhood and how you came to be head of the Human Genome Project. Where did life begin with you? Was it in a religious home?
Francis Collins:Not at all. I grew up on a small farm in Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley, with parents who were kind of doing the 60s thing, except it wasn't the 60s yet. My dad was a college professor, my mother was a playwright. They sort of wanted to live off the land, but not very successfully. So my dad had to go back to teaching and, yeah, our little farmhouse had no indoor plumbing. But it was a great way to grow up. A lot of hard work involved, but also nature all around you.
Francis Collins:And I didn't go to school until the sixth grade. My mother and father were the teachers for me and for my three brothers until it got to be a little much. I was the youngest, and so by the time it got to me you can go to public school in sixth grade. It's all going to be fine, and I got the best of both worlds because my mother was a particularly gifted teacher in terms of helping me develop the love of learning that I carry with me to today, just the excitement about understanding something you didn't know about before. Maybe it was mathematics, or maybe it was literature or history or languages, but she was so good at conveying that excitement.
Francis Collins:And then I went to public school and there I encountered science which I probably wouldn't have learned much about from my mother, but that became my passion. That this was a way you could, like a good detective story, use the tools of science to discover stuff and get answers to questions that maybe nobody knew the answer before, and I figured that's what I wanted to do. But there was no religious background involved in any of this. My parents weren't I don't think you'd call them atheists, more agnostics. They just didn't think religion was very important to spend time on. I did get sent to the local Episcopal church to learn music, because that was very important to my dad, but he instructed me don't pay any attention to the theology, just learn the music. I dutifully followed his directions.
Brian Stiller:So you moved from that into science and how was your mind framed about what life was about or what mattered to you in that educational experience?
Francis Collins:The science I first learned to love was chemistry. So I figured I should be a chemist and I majored in chemistry at the University of Virginia and then went off to get a PhD in chemistry at Yale. I ignored life sciences because they seemed kind of messy which, by the way, they are.
Francis Collins:I like their, you know elegant mathematical, beautiful array of ideas that came out of physics and chemistry. But somewhere along the line I realized I'd narrowed my horizons a bit. And so as a graduate student in chemistry I dabbled in biochemistry and discovered it was really interesting and it really did have principles. There was this DNA and RNA and protein thing the molecular biology was being kind of invented, a lot of it at the time and I suddenly realized this is so much more compelling to me than I would have ever guessed and it's kind of calling to me to make a big switch. So with some trepidation, because it was a total disruption of what had been my life plan, I applied to medical school.
Francis Collins:I hadn't really given much consideration to being a physician until then, so it's sort of surprising the admissions committee even let me in to the University of North Carolina with this story. But they did. And there I really found this wonderful synthesis of science but something about humanity that I could get excited about throwing myself into. And I entered that medical school class as a scientist, getting excited about medicine and a strict atheist, and I left that medical school as a Christian.
Francis Collins:Something happened Not having had any background in faith traditions, it was pretty easy for me in college and in graduate school to slip into what I consider to kind of be the norm of other scientists, which is frankly a bit of a matter of pride. Well, I don't need any of those other concepts. Everything that needs to be known can be determined by science. So I was worshiping at the altar of scientism as a student and I hadn't really encountered any serious rational arguments for faith. I assumed there weren't any. But in medical school things that were hypothetical, like life and death, become much more real, and especially that third year of medical school where you are out there in the hospital wards taking care of patients with terribly serious diseases, many of whom are not going to survive for very long, with terribly serious diseases, many of whom are not going to survive for very long, and you had to watch what their reaction was to that. Getting that news and dealing with that news and wondering how would I deal with that news. And I noticed that the people who had a strong religious faith seemed strangely comforted by it. I would have thought they must be just really angry that it didn't work out for them, but no, they felt this sense of peace and I was curious about that. But I didn't understand it.
Francis Collins:And there was a particular moment, brian, that will always be burned into my brain, where an elderly woman who was my patient with really bad heart disease shared her faith with me after a very bad episode of chest pain. And it was so personal, it was so authentic, it was so intimate and real how she was talking about her relationship with Jesus. And then she sort of stopped and looked at me as I'm sitting there silently, not knowing what to say, and she challenged me. She said, doctor, what do you believe? It was a simple question. Anybody listening to this. What would you say if that question was posed to you right now?
Francis Collins:I realized I had no answer at all. What do you believe, francis Collins? The thinness of my atheist perspective had never been more prominent than right then and I felt it was almost insulting, in the face of this loving gentle question, to even imply that I had anything to say. I said I just don't know and I ran out of the room. I was really shooken up, shaken up about what happened there and that haunted me for a few days and I realized there's something I need to look at here. She probably asked me the most important question I've ever been asked and I'm a scientist who's interested in questions and I'd never spent more than five minutes really thinking about this one, and I set about trying to find ways to strengthen my atheism so I wouldn't be caught in this pickle again.
Brian Stiller:Francis, I want to come back to that, but I'd like to just go back again to your own career and how you became head of the Human Genome Project and why that mattered. What was there about this that was so historic in the history of medicine, and how did you come about to mastermind that project?
Francis Collins:Well, my interest in medical science settled in on the question of genetics. How is it that we humans are afflicted with certain genetic diseases and what can we do to actually find better ways to treat or even cure them? And I was particularly interested initially in the disease called cystic fibrosis, which, when I started to work on it, was really very much a black box. We didn't understand what the problem was. We could describe problems with the lungs and the pancreas, but we didn't know what the cause was. And I was determined maybe we could figure that out. And over the course of several years, ultimately, in a collaboration with another group in Toronto, we discovered the cause of cystic fibrosis in 1989. It was a very simple three letters of the code out of three billion that were missing. But that was a hugely complicated effort. I wanted to understand those thousands of other genetic diseases and we were never going to get there in my lifetime if we didn't have better ways to sift through that DNA instruction book, the human genome, and find the misspellings that are capable of causing illness. So we needed a reference copy of the human genome. We didn't have it.
Francis Collins:Basically, that's what the Human Genome Project was all about. How do we, for the first time, read out the entire script, make it in a public database where everybody can start working with it and then greatly accelerate our abilities to understand, diagnose and maybe even cure all these thousands of diseases. So the Human Genome Project was being talked about. I was excited about it, I was enthusiastic about it and then suddenly I was asked to run it, which was not part of my life plan at all. You can sort of hear a lot of things that happened to me, brian, were not part of a careful, planned life trajectory. They were just doors that opened I didn't expect and others that slammed shut that I was counting on. It was very much not the kind of thing that was linear in any way, and it was God's grace to make such things happen that I never would have dreamed of.
Brian Stiller:So just give me a quick descriptor of the Genome Project. What was it seeking to do? What were the elements of that that made it so important for the development of our medical understanding of the body?
Francis Collins:the development of our medical understanding of the body. Well, if you want to think about what's really the center of the center of the knowledge of biology, it's the DNA instruction book. You and I were born with that book, half from our mothers, half from our fathers. It drove us somehow to become a really complicated organism from what we started out as a single cell. And to be able to have that instruction book in all of its complexity, all three billion of its letters, written in a language that has just four letters in its alphabet, was. It seemed like an absolutely stunning and highly difficult task, but one that would change things forever. It would change things in terms of our understanding how life works. It would change things as far as medicine. It would change things as far as our understanding of ourselves that we've read our own instruction book. So that was the goal when it started.
Francis Collins:There was a lot of skepticism about whether this was going to be feasible anytime this century, and there were a lot of people arguing that this was foolhardy. It was going to cost a lot more money than anybody thought it would. It would ultimately fail, and so when I started it, I was aware I was taking a big risk to take on the leadership role, but it was possible to recruit some of the best and brightest young scientists of this era, because this was historic. They wanted to be part of this too, and we invented a lot of technology and we scaled things up and we did things that had never been done in life science before, basically almost building factories to turn out the information and building new kinds of computer programs to interpret it. And ultimately, two years ahead of schedule and at price tag $400 million less than what had been originally projected, we hit all of those goals and all those milestones and declared victory in 2003.
Francis Collins:22 years later, this has transformed the way we approach cancer. That's maybe the most dramatic example, because cancer comes about because of misspellings in DNA. And now we have the chance, because the technology has gotten so fast and so cheap, that for anybody who has developed cancer, find out why, look at those cancer cells and say what DNA glitches are causing those cells to go bad and grow when they shouldn't. That's almost a standard of care now. That was unimaginable even 20 years ago. We've come up with much better ways to diagnose lots of puzzling illnesses, particularly for newborns, where you have something that's not right and you're not quite sure what or what to do about it, and we've certainly empowered the opportunity to practice much better prevention by identifying individual risks. So, instead of one size fits all recommendations, we're starting to be able to give something much more personal, for each of us to know what things would help us stay healthy. There's a long list of others, so all of that's come about in a couple of decades.
Francis Collins:But I would still say the full flowering of what you might call genomic medicine, or some would call it precision medicine, lies ahead, because it's just bursting with all this potential to make it possible for us to be much more precise in diagnosing and treating disease not just rare diseases, common diseases, all diseases.
Brian Stiller:I have a personal testimony on this. I have two grandchildren who have mutation on the CNKSR2 gene and your work on the Genome Project has enabled the geneticists at Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto to better understand what it is that they have their mutations, and provide some kind of plan on medical therapy. So I dip into my own personal story of thanks to you for what you have done in giving us that awareness and knowledge.
Francis Collins:Really touching, brian, and I think, yeah, thousands of stories like that that are happening almost every day, because this technology gives answers that previously we couldn't get.
Brian Stiller:I want to come back to the question that that lady asked you in North Carolina Hospital what you believe about life after death and how that brought. That was a bit of a fulcrum of faith change for you faith from scientism to faith in God. What were the elements of your search that brought you to place first of all to believe in God and then to follow Christ?
Francis Collins:I figured that there must be some arguments in favor of belief or it would have died out a long time ago. And I even knew there were physicians around me Some of them were my mentors, my professors who believed in God. And I asked a couple of them how did you arrive at that? I didn't get a terribly clear answer to the question, but it was clear, it was very sincere. This is not something that was just sort of layered on for social reasons.
Francis Collins:And there was a pastor down the street from me, a Methodist minister, and I said hello to him on the sidewalk. So I went and knocked on his door and said I got questions. He said well, I got questions. And he said, well, come on in. And I'm sure I hit him with a long list of mostly blasphemous questions about Christianity and he was very tolerant and he gave reasonable answers to some of them. To some of them he said you know that's going to take more than this 20-minute conversation. He said but I get the sense, francis, that you're kind of searching here and you really do want some answers. So sometimes it helps to be guided by other people who've traveled the same path. So let me take this book down from my shelf because it's written by somebody who has traveled this and might have something to say to you.
Francis Collins:So I took the book home and I opened it up and I realized in the first few pages that my atheist arguments were immediately lying in ruins because of the strength, the rational approach of this author, who by now you will have guessed was CS Lewis. And this was Mere Christianity, that wonderful book written now 80 years ago but which still speaks so clearly to this question of is faith actually something that you can see as a rational conclusion to surveying what we know about ourselves and about nature, or is it something you just have to come to by sheer determination? And Lewis's argument for the rationality of faith was something I'd never heard before and I was deeply unsettled because it was not the direction I thought this search was going to take me, but it got me started. Search was going to take me, but it got me started. And the more he opened my eyes to the possibility of considering various signposts towards God, I began to realize there were actually quite a lot of them around me, some that I'd even studied as a scientist but never really thought about.
Brian Stiller:As I read your material, it seems that the moral argument that CS Lewis puts forward became very propositional for you as you were on this journey of search.
Francis Collins:And, like Einstein, concluded that you can't dismiss the evidence there of a mind that seems to be behind it all, the fact that it was a big bang, that somehow something came out of nothing, that matter and energy follow beautifully elegant natural laws that you can write down in mathematical equations. Why?
Francis Collins:should that work.
Francis Collins:And that those laws have constants in them, that if they had a slightly different value than they do, like the gravitational constant, there would be nothing at all interesting about the universe, just a bunch of particles flying around. So it looks from that perspective that there is an intelligence behind all this. But then my next question was does that intelligence care about me or about humans in general? Basically, as a theologian would say, I got to deism, could I get to theism? By considering the evidence there and there it was, as your question raises the point, the moral law, which, after all, was the first chapter in mere Christianity. That began to get to me. And here's the argument All down through history, every human society that we know anything about has had this in common, the sense that there is a certain moral law that we're supposed to follow, that there are things that are good and there are things that are evil, and we ought to do the good ones.
Francis Collins:Even though we know we fail at that, we feel that we're called upon to be good people. Now, quickly, somebody will raise the objection about well, look at the way various cultures have behaved and how differently they have interpreted that. Of course they have, because culture influences the interpretation. But even a culture that we think is really evil is probably believing they were doing the good thing. They just decided what they called good and nobody said well, I don't care about good and evil.
Francis Collins:I can't find even the strict atheists saying they don't care about good and evil. But why should you care? If that's all just an evolutionary development that somehow helped us survive, then we should just dismiss it and say we've been hoodwinked, forget it, we're not going to pay attention to that anymore. Nobody is comfortable doing that, even a Richard Dawkins. So something's there, some profound sense of goodness, holiness even that's written in our hearts. Maybe animals have some glimmers of that, but we have it in a big way. What is that about? And if you were looking, as I was, for some indication that God, that mind behind the universe, actually cares about me and I find in myself this desire to be good and holy that I can't explain, that got my attention. That seemed to be a pretty good indication of, not a proof, but a strong, pointer evidence for a God who's not just about being a creator of the universe but is also interested in me and in having a relationship with me, and who wants me to be good and holy, which sometimes I achieve and oftentimes I don't.
Brian Stiller:So the moral law argument became kind of foundational for in this search. But as a scientist, how do you bring your scientific investigatory skills into the relationship between faith and science? How did that work out as you were on this journey in your search for faith?
Francis Collins:I was worried about that and my friends were really worried about that. Like, oh boy, where is he going? This could be the end of his scientific career. If he ends up believing this stuff about God, well, he might have to give up anything in terms of the scientific method. You know, it never happened. It never even came close to happening.
Francis Collins:By the way, I did have to wrestle with what kind of faith I was going to embrace and maybe we'll come back to that and ultimately the person of Jesus as a historical figure, about which we have a huge amount of concrete evidence, was so compelling that it solved some of my other problems about how I could even have a relationship with holy God. So when I first became a Christian, I told everybody and yes, my scientific colleagues looked a little alarmed and said your head's going to explode because you're going to pretty soon figure out that your scientific and Christian worldviews are incompatible. I never found it to be the case. I certainly know that we humans have identified instances where we have decided that's the case, based upon interpretations of scripture and findings from science, particularly about things like origins of the universe or origins of ourselves. But I think thoughtful people who are willing to look at how we've interpreted both science and scripture down through the centuries can find actually fairly straightforward ways to put these worldviews together in a totally complementary and harmonious way. You just have to be really careful about what you're talking about.
Francis Collins:The Bible is not written as a textbook of science. Science is not described in a way that it helps you understand God. You have to figure out what's the question you're asking and then which tools should you be using. Science is great at getting at those questions that start with how, and faith is much better often at the ones that start with why.
Francis Collins:And I like both those questions and I don't want to be restricted to one or the other, and I'm not in the mode of some who have said well, you just have to put a firewall between your religious and your scientific worldview, where something bad will happen. They're intermingled in me all the time, which is actually kind of joyful because it means that science, which is after all exploring God's creation, is getting a glimpse of God's mind, and a scientific discovery then can be a moment of worship and a laboratory can be a cathedral why not? This is all God's creation that we're studying, whether it's by interpreting a particular verse of scripture and getting new insight into it, or figuring out. Oh, there's this really interesting thing about cells that we didn't know before and now we do. God knew both those things before we did.
Brian Stiller:So you have this movement towards faith out of the moral law argument, the resolution of science and faith, but then you came particularly to a trust in following Jesus of Nazareth. That must have been a major step, then, or did it come quite simply out of the larger macro issues that you faced?
Francis Collins:It was all part of this process that stretched out over a couple of years. But there were moments there of sudden insight, revelation. Again, I started out atheist. I became uncomfortable with that because that's the assertion of a universal negative which scientists aren't supposed to do. Then I kind of slipped into agnosticism and then I got more and more compelled by the arguments about a mind behind the universe. So I became a deist for a little while.
Francis Collins:And then the moral law brought me closer to this sense that God actually cares about me. And then I had a bit of a crisis because if God does care about me and knows me intimately and God is holy, I know I'm not. And I began to feel this somewhat desperate sense that, just as I'm beginning to recognize God, god is recognizing me as the flawed character I am, who probably deserves judgment and not much else. But then the person of Jesus, who again I had thought was a myth, emerged in my consciousness. My understanding of what the Christian message is and the idea that Jesus died on the cross for me, which I had heard people say but had no understanding of, suddenly made the most perfect sense. And so, in all my sinfulness, all my flaws, all my rebellion against God. Jesus provided that bridge where I could still have that relationship and be confident that I could be loved in spite of myself. That was the perfect solution, and I found that in no other faith quite like I did in the person of Jesus.
Brian Stiller:Was there a moment in which that dawned on you? That became a reality? Can you pinpoint a particular place or time? Became a reality, Can you?
Brian Stiller:pinpoint a particular place or time.
Francis Collins:Yes, I had that moment.
Francis Collins:It was sort of building on me and I, at the same time, was learning more about my profession of medicine. I went to a meeting in the Northwest. I'd never been west of the Mississippi before and I went a day early to hike in the Cascade Mountains, which are beautiful in Oregon and Washington State and on an absolutely spectacularly perfect fall afternoon, hiking and feeling this sense of God's grandeur and I'm turning a corner and saw to my surprise, it was pretty chilly. There was a small body of water that was flowing across the top of a cliff and then trickling down, but it had frozen, so it was frozen waterfall and it was just this spectacular image with the sun glistening off of it. And for a moment there my heart stood still and I felt okay, I can't resist anymore. I don't want to resist anymore. I can't prove that I'm about to give myself to Jesus, but that's what I want to do.
Brian Stiller:So, as a scientist, was there any tension in embracing the resurrection?
Francis Collins:any tension in embracing the resurrection, which, for me, it sort of seemed to me like the big tension was do I believe in God, the creator, who was responsible, therefore, for all of the natural laws that I had studied in physics and chemistry?
Francis Collins:That if you accept that, which I found to be pretty compelling, then if there was any capability of suspending those laws at a moment where a really significant message needed to be sent, well, god could do that. As the author of the laws, god was the one entity that could actually do something that naturally we would say made no sense, and the resurrection was, of course, that remarkable moment of suspending those laws. So I've never had trouble with that or with other examples of biblical miracles. For the most part, again, those miracles don't happen randomly. Lewis says they happen at those great ganglions of history where God has a message that the people need to hear, and God has the full capability to do so miraculously, if that's going to be the way to do it, the resurrection being the most compelling and most significant of all those, but not the only one.
Brian Stiller:But your career has taken you to the very heights of medical leadership in the US as director of the National Institute of Health, and here you are very openly identifying as an evangelical Christian. Has that brought tension or opportunity within your medical community?
Francis Collins:Some of both maybe. I do think there are folks who, especially when I was nominated to be the director of the largest supporter of biomedical research in the world, the National Institutes of Health, raised an alarm about whether this guy Collins could actually be fully rigorously objective, about whether this guy Collins could actually be fully rigorously objective about scientific questions. If he happened to believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead and even wrote op-eds about it in places like the New York Times, it didn't get a whole lot of traction. It was a little troubling, but it no doubt spoke for more than those who just wrote the op-ed. I guess my inclination at that point was well, just watch and see.
Francis Collins:If you see instances where I'm stepping into a scientific question and infusing into it some religious perspective that doesn't belong there, well then you'd be right not to criticize. As NIH director over 12 years, I don't think they found those things happening. I certainly got, from the other side of it, concerns about whether, if you're a Christian, you could possibly support certain kinds of science which some Christians would not be comfortable with, such as embryonic stem cell research Very complicated issue, one that I have wrestled with as well where I do believe that a Bible-believing Jesus follower could be comfortable with certain ways in which that research is done, but you have to be really careful how you define those. They happen to be the ways mostly that things are restricted to doing, so there's maybe less of a conflict in that space than was originally appreciated.
Francis Collins:It's all about the details. I have found it actually quite helpful to me, though, brian, as a person who is both a scientist in a leadership role and a person of faith, to be able to reassure the 60% of Americans who are sometimes a little worried about what are scientists up to. There's been an assumption on many quarters that scientists are all atheists and even that scientists have an agenda to try to destroy any remnants of faith in God that they think aren't helping us anymore, and there's certainly a few scientists like that. Most aren't like that, and for me and my colleagues who are actually deeply devoted Bible-following Christians, it's reassuring for the public to know that that's part of the community that science represents too Well your book, the Language of God.
Brian Stiller:A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. You touch so many areas that are complicated and you provide insights and responses to many questions that I've never seen another do. But your life has not only been at the leading edge of scientific discovery, but you have also served publicly. During the COVID crisis, you were a voice that I listened to most Sunday mornings on American television, even though I live outside of the US. I was intrigued by what was going on there, because we were also dealing with COVID in Canada and other places, but I was interested in the story of you and your daughter going to Nigeria and what that meant to you as a scientist who was seeking to serve as a Christian in public ways. I'd be interested in you retelling that story for our listeners today.
Francis Collins:Yeah, after I became a Christian and I was somebody who's getting trained as a physician, I had this hunger to see if there was something I might be able to do with those skills in a place where they were much needed. And so later on, as I got into a position at the University of Michigan doing research and teaching medical students and taking care of patients, I thought it would be a good experience to travel to a place that is much less well-supported with resources, and my daughter at that point was a college student, headed for medicine herself and ultimately ended up as a nephrologist, wanted to go with me and I thought this would be great for a father-daughter experience. I'd never been to Africa. We signed up for a rotation there for a couple of weeks in Delta State, nigeria, which is really impoverished, in the middle of the jungle, in a mission hospital run by the Baptist Church, and my goal there was to basically step in and take care of the medical practice of a Christian missionary physician who needed a chance to go to a conference and also recharge batteries, because this is super intense. So I had like one day to learn the ropes from Dr Tim McCall, and then he disappeared. It's like okay, it's yours. It was incredibly intimidating.
Francis Collins:I was seeing diseases I'd never seen, only read about in a textbook. The resources were very limited. In terms of laboratory, not much. There was an x-ray machine, but it was usually broken. So you were really down to what you could come up with with your eyes and your ears and your ability to do a physical exam and then try to make a diagnosis. And I was overwhelmed and I would every night write in my journal God, please come and be the strength that I don't have, because I don't think I'm actually prepared for this. I have seen things today and I have no idea if I did the right thing. I'm trying, but I don't think I've really got the right sense of competence here.
Francis Collins:And there was a particular story that I might tell about what happened. That helped me realize a message that I was missing about all this, because I think, brian, I had come to this thinking oh, I'm this Western trained physician from the University of Michigan, I'm going to walk into this mission hospital in Nigeria and I will take care of all these people and they will all be grateful and life will be changed forever. I realized that's not the way it worked. I had these grand schemes and they were not happening.
Francis Collins:About the fourth or fifth day there was a young man who came into the clinic very sick, brought in by his family, in his 20s, with profound swelling in his legs, very short of breath, coming on over the course of about a week, and he was one of those people. You look at him, you think this guy is probably not going to survive another 24 hours. And what is going on? And by a little bit of a recollection of something I had learned as a medical student and doing some basic measurements of his blood pressure, I figured out the only thing that could explain this is that he had developed a huge amount of fluid around his heart, what's called a pericardial effusion, and it was basically strangling the ability of his heart to beat anymore because it was floating in this tight sack of fluid. Now, normally in a Western situation you would quickly confirm that diagnosis with an echocardiogram. We didn't have that. The x-ray machine, again, wasn't working, so you had to trust in God and your own hoped-for expertise to make the right diagnosis, and the only solution would be to place a needle into that fluid and draw it off, which meant plunging a needle directly in the chest, aiming at the heart and trying not to go too far, one of the most terrifying moments I've ever done as a physician, because I knew the risks here were extremely high and I was doing something without the support systems that would happen in the West. But by God's grace it worked. The diagnosis was correct, almost a liter of fluid was taken off and the response and this is physiology in the most dramatic way was just phenomenal.
Francis Collins:Now, within a few hours, this almost dead young man was looking awfully good and I saw him the next morning coming around, sitting up, reading his Bible, advocating it was time to go home. And the other residents that I was there supposedly mentoring although they knew more about Nigerian medicine than I did were along. And this patient looked at me and he was aware that he had volunteered because I had asked his permission to do this, to engage in something that could very well kill them. And he said you know, doc, I have the feeling you haven't been here very long, you know, and that kind of bugged me because I thought I was coming across here as this highly knowledgeable, experienced guy. I said, well, okay, yeah, I just got here four or five days ago, you're right.
Francis Collins:And then he asked me this question. He gave me this insight. He said I also get the feeling that you're wondering why you came here. Oh man, how did he see that in me? He said I have an answer for you. You came here for one reason. You came here for me, sorry, I always get choked up when I remember that moment. Sorry, I always get choked up when I remember that moment. That was just this blinding moment of insight about what everything we do, which is really what God's plan is all about is reaching out to another person in a time of need. Sure, you can have your big, grand plans about saving Nigeria, but what it was really about was a chance to touch one young farmer's life, and he taught me that when I was too blind to see. I'll never forget that.
Brian Stiller:Dr Collins, thank you for your years of service, your medical expertise, the wealth of research and advance you've brought to us all, for your witness of Christ and your testimony, and we're so grateful for your time with us today. Thanks again for being with us.
Francis Collins:Brian, it's been a pleasure. Thanks for everything you're doing to spread the good news.
Francis Collins:God bless.
Brian Stiller:Thank you, dr Collins, for joining us today and allowing us to consider the answers Christ has offered to you in some of life's greatest questions, and thank you for being a part of the podcast. Be sure to share this episode using hashtag Evangelical360 and join the conversation on YouTube. If you'd like to learn more about today's guest, be sure to check the show notes for links and info, and if you haven't already received my free e-book and newsletter, go to brianstiller. com. Thanks again, until next time.
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