That number those number on heart anquan cert. Havent they been there forever like that . No. They are way too high. Heart disease, we have seen death from heart attacks, dropped by 60 by sporting Research Going back to the framing and that started sincety years ago. Basically laid out what are the risk factor for Heart Disease. We didnt know we discovered high cholesterol, smoking, all of those which were unknown as far as risk emerged. Out that have came a lot of development in Public Health. The development of very much something that nih Research Lead to. And a variety of other intervention including the ability to unclog arteries to the heart when it happens. 60 drop in deaths because of that research. We need go further and have idea about how to get there. Cancer certainly way too many people die of this disease. Actually the death rate has been dropping about 1 each year for the last fifteen years. We are on the right part of curve, we want to go down faster in these new development particularly with cancer genome are making many of us optimistic we could move to a very new space in term of designer drug therapy more effective than the standard approach. Host how much is diagnostic instruments and ability to see the disease before it develops too much guest we need have three things. We need to have better prevention method to keep people from getting cancer in the first place. And certainly here we have to work harder on how to come up with Behavioral Research that will encourage people not spoke or if they started to smoke stop that. Its the single most actionable cause of cancer we still have not succeeded. 20 of people in this country smoke cigarettes. That is clearly putting them at enormous risk. Christopher smoked a lot. Is that what got him the esophagus cancer . Guest heart to say exactly. He was a heavy smoker and heavy drinker. His father had cancer. Environment pulls the trigger. He may have had both. Theres a fellow i work with here who smokes. I chide him about smoking. Yesterday he sent a link to a woman who is 100 years and smoked all her life as if to say its none of your business. Im going live to be 100. How much do you know for sure that somebody who smokes or that cancer smoking will definitely cause cancer . . Guest that is proven beyond a shadow of a doubt has been now for thirty years. The fact people are denying that really means they havent had a chance to look at dat. The data leaves no doubt about the conclusion. There are a recent pair of papers in the new england journal of medicine. Somebody who is spokes lifelong lost ten years of life. Ten years. Host every single one of them. Guest on the average. This if you smoke but stop at age 30 you get most back. Cspan did you ever smoke wax. Guest i never have. My mom smoked a pack a day and then she quit in two years later she got lung cancer and she said to me i didnt get lung cancer because i smoke because i quit. Guest cancer grow slowly and when someone is a diagnosis of cancer that cancer probably started six, eight or 10 years earlier but it takes that long for that one cell to acquire the ability to grow to be enough of a mass that you can detect it so im sure her cancer started earlier than two years. Cspan there there are several sides of. Your Francis Collins and one of them as is we have footage here of you at a graduation at the university of michigan back in 2007. Were you giving a graduation address . Guest i was. Writer lets look at dr. Collins back in 2007. So this is a song which you will recognize the 10 and probably after take day you never again want to hear it. [laughter] and ive got to tell you this is a rush playing my guitar at chrysler arena. Whoa. [laughter] will somebody please lock the doors . I dont want this to slip away. So this is a song for you of the Student Experience right here in ann arbor except for the last verse which is for me. As a genetics professor. So here we go. I came. I bought the books. Follow directions. I worked. I studied hard. Made lots of friends that had connections. I cramped. They gave me grades and may i say not in a fair way. Im much more than this. I did it their way. [applause] cspan why did you do that . Guest goodness i grew up in a musical family and music with has always been for me that nice sort of right from the seriousness of life whether its a joyful spot or a silly song or even a sad song. Its a way to use another part of your brain and relate to people. As a medical School Professor at the university of michigan i also discovered medical students are not so easy sometimes to keep interested and it helps to have something a little surprising so that song originally was one i would sing for the medical students when it seemed like they were starting to read their newspapers or go to sleep or maybe just not show up to class at all. Cspan you were homeschooled for how long . Guest until the sixth grade. My mother a remarkable women who had a masters degree from yale where she met my father would. Unusual in being at graduate school in jail in the 1930s. She decided that her four sons, im the youngest of those for, would be better served by her educational methods rather than the Public Schools as the family traveled around North Carolina and long island and virginia. I think she was right area she was remarkably gifted in providing that spark that you really want to see education represent of the love of learning. I love to learn Love Learning because of the way she introduced me to topics. It was very chaotic area to. Cspan what was a day like . Guest it was totally unpredictable. There was no lesson plan answered by no curriculum standards. My mother would basically say okay whats interesting today and some days it would be mathematics and we might do only mathematics for a few days in a row because it was interesting. And then we would sort of get hired and shed say lets talk about history. Lets read this very lets talk about what the significance of that event was. She was a playwright and she also was interested in language. We did a lot of sort of studying of languages and she would say okay heres a word. Do you think thats derived from greek or old french or latin . After a while i got pretty good at that. I looked at in the unabridged dictionary to see what the answer was. Cspan where was this . Guest a small farm in the shenandoah valley. My dad at that point was teaching at the local college, teaching drama but he and my mother really liked a simpler life so they bought this farm in the late 1940s and tried to kind of live off the land. That didnt work so well so was a good thing he had a day job in college. I grew up on this farm. It was hard work in the summertime to manage all of the livestock and crops but it was a great way to grow. Cspan had your brothers been homeschooled . Jaczko yes, sir all four of us. Cspan what happened to the other three . Guest they turned out okay. My older brother talk for a while and got tired of that. The next brother is a businessman and my brother closest to me is the assistant headmaster of the collegiate school. Cspan at what point did you get interested in chemistry or biology . Guest i was one of those kids who like to have it chemistry set and like to blow things up. But it was a dabbling thing. It was really tenth grade and by that time i went to Public School. We moved in town and my grandmother had a stroke and we went to stay with her. My mother decided she had had enough of this. It was a great mix because i had Heard Foundation of love of learning but then for science i had Public School in stanford virginia a teacher john hauser taught chemistry is absolutely inspired me to see what science was about and let me to believe that was what i wanted to do. My first class gate each of us a sealed blackbox. There was something inside of it but we didnt know what it was. He asked us to think of all the experiments that we could do to try to discover what is inside that box without actually opening it. Its a perfect metaphor for what science is all about. And i have never been challenged that way. All of my classes that dabbled a bit in science we were memorizing stuff and descriptive parts of the crayfish. I wasnt so interested in this but this was use your brain. Its a detective story. Theres an answer. Whoa that sounds like what i want to do. I decided right then and there wanted to do this. Cspan how long were you an atheist and why . Guest i grew up in a home where faith was not important. It wasnt denigrated. It just wasnt considered all that relevant so a psychomore adjusted in science and majored in chemistry in college and went off to graduate school and studying Quantum Mechanics that became more and more of a reductionist. Anything of matter could be reduced to simple physics and chemical. Surrounded as it was in that standard model that most people took anyway. I the time i was a second Year Graduate student i was an atheist. Those who express that interest i really didnt think it was worth even talking about. But then something happened. I changed my scientific direction because i discovered i had kind of missed out on the excitement of biology. Dna was coming along and there were principles in biology that sounded pretty interesting. A rather strange twist and you could call it a real career plan i decided to go to medical school. Cspan where did you go . Guest the university of North Carolina. Cspan prior to that you got a ph. D. And prior to that . Guest by this time i party had been married and had a daughter. This was a lot of things to pack into a few years and then to go to medical school. I landed at chapel hill which was a wonderful place to learn medicine. I embraced that science immediately as sort of what i had always been looking for. The part of medicine that particularly appealed to me maybe because of my attraction to mathematics was dna, the genetics that underlies human biology. So i became very attracted to that even as a firstyear medical student. Cspan back in 2006 you spoke of politics and prose bookstore about a book you had written. Lets listen in on what you have to say. Speaker is how it works for me. I do believe that god created the universe that amazing flash of energy 14 billion years ago that screams out for an explanation about how could something be created out of nothing . I believe god did that Creative Action with the intentions not just to have some rocks and some gas floating around the universe but with the intention to have creatures come to Martin Willis diversity creatures including one special type of creatures with whom he would have a relationship and that would be us. I believe that god chose the mechanism of evolution in order to accomplish that old. Cspan i looked for the strongest criticism i could find a few on amazon where they have all those reviews. Just want to read a paragraph to you and get you to react because you have got a lot of positives but youve got a lot of negatives too which i know you are used to. This is not assigned. The customer back in 2006. One would hope that it would be immediately obvious to collins that there is nothing about seeing a frozen waterfall no matter how frozen, that offers the slightest corroboration of the doctrine of christianity but it was not obvious to him and it will not the obvious to many of his readers thats the end of the sentence. If the beauty of nature can mean that jesus is the son of god then anything can mean anything. So what is it like as a scientist . To move to christianity and then to get slapped around by people on amazon . Guest let me back up a second and try to reflect on what that waterfall comment was all about. As i said i went to medical school and i emerged medical school a believer. How did that happen . A lot of it was sitting at the bedside with people who are facing the end of their lives. People who talk deeply about the issues of life and death and realizing that i had not thought deeply about them and not up to the evidence. I was supposed to be a scientist who made decisions on this basis. Atheism is a natural conclusion of searching for evidence i began my own search somewhat reluctantly. I realize that probably atheism is the least rational about the choices given that it says i know so much that i can exclude the possibility of something outside of nature namely god and i dont know much of anything thats outside of nature. On First Principles atheism seems ruled out as a potential system that a thinking rational person could adopt. Obviously thinking rational people to adopt it. Agnosticism on the other hand words like well i dont know, to is a defensible position but to me it was sort of a copout. What i began to realize is there are arguments that have been put forward down through the centuries by people much smarter than me that lead you to the conclusion that the belief is in fact more rational than disbelief although it is not provable. Therefore over a couple of years of wrestling with this am beginning to recognize that the World Religions have a lot in common but theres their something very special about christianity as a person of christ and thats historic a welldocumented that became somewhat against my own best interest as a scientist a believer. Cspan have you ever doubted that . Guest oh sure. Everybody is a believer has had their doubts. It was paul till it that said dowd is not the opposite of believe its in a lament of belief. Doubt is a good thing because it gives you a chance to figure out okay what do i need to dig deeper into. How have other people understood . Guest . Cspan what impact has it had on you in the Scientific Community that you are acknowledging yourself as a believer . Im not that different. 40 of working scientist recent polls would say belief in a personal god with expectation of an answer. Thats not hypothetical deist, that is the us but scientist dont generally talk about it. What i have done is to write a book and speak about this because of the desired particular to help those people wrestling with the issues to see that there are ways to approach this year the comment from the reviewer about the waterfall is an easy one i guess for people to say oh he is being irrational. That was simply my own story at the moment when i decided to take the lead. Cspan how did that go . Guest it was influenced by particularly beautiful scene of may chair but that in no way proves theres a creator behind it who has an intelligence and that mind but it was a moment of sort of having all the distractions that get in her way of thinking about it so for me that was the conversion opportunity to. Cspan where was that . Guest that was in the caspian mountains. Reich of whom were you with . Guest i was there with a friend and we were on the way to a genetics meeting and we took an extra day to explore the height of the cascades which ive never been to. Riker to the friend know you were having a conversion moment . Guest he had no idea. [laughter] it was a very personal, is something that i was not sharing. Cspan what did you do when he had that moment . Guest guest i have this fleeting sense of personal commitment and realization that i had crossed a bridge into the coming becoming what i thought i would never be a believer in a personal god. Cspan was there anything else going on in your life that mightve helped to get to this point . Guest i think this realization as i was a physician that life and death is all around you and this is really an important question. This is not something to put off indefinitely as i had maybe planned to do. As a scientist i was looking at all these things about how nature works and how biology is wired but what is more important question than is there a god . That seemed like it was one that needed an answer. Cspan did you ever have any conversations with Christopher Hitchens where he mightve changed his mind at the end . He was telling us he wasnt going to change about his belief. Guest i made no effort to confer with Christopher Hitchens at the end. I felt that wouldnt be respectful with the situation he was in. Who was i serving the part of a physician to someone had cancer. It would be inappropriate to use that moment to impose my perspective on his. We had interesting just being back and forth about our perspectives much of it rather humorous. Cspan how close to death were you able to talk to him . Guest i was seeing him quite a lot until the last three months when he went to texas to be with therapy and never got well enough to come back. In those intervals i did not see him much. Cspan lets go back to nih. How big is the campus . Guest its an amazing place. Its about 320 acres in bethesda maryland. On that campus there are about 17,000 people. Amazing people. Five or 6000 imap doctoral degrees and they are experts in him everything you can think of from every aspect of the six lanes to the clinical research. We also have on the campus the Largest Research hospital in the world conquest, 240 beds and the people in that hospital are there because they are part of the Clinical Trial approach to understand the disease that we currently dont have a good answer for. But again will thats an amazing place a minority of the funds that nih is responsible for get spent there. The best maturity, 85 go out in our grants to the best and brightest at stanford or university of illinois or Massachusetts General Hospital or all over the country where those visionary things are happening. We are on this remarkable pace right now accelerating knowledge about how life works and how disease works. Its really a remarkable moment. Cspan in a given year thats like 26 billion. How do you control with . How do do you know that the people arent ripping you off . There have got to be people that have not gotten us money and done anything with it. Guest our system is pretty rigid, not rigid, rigorous. If you want money from the nih you have to write up a grant proposal putting forward what you plan to do for the next three to five years and defend that would be useful when its possible you might actually be able to do it read you send that grant and. It has been reviewed by a panel of experts in your field in the most rigorous peer review system in the world and they then look at a whole bunch of grants that came in th