Francis Collins Calls it Quits

It’s done:

Late last week, Christian geneticist Francis Collins resigned abruptly as a researcher at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). On Wednesday this week, the U.S. Senate held a confirmation hearing for a new NIH director, Stanford University medical professor Jay Bhattacharya, a fellow Christian who Collins privately disparaged as one of “three fringe epidemiologists” during the COVID crisis.

I don’t see the “Stockholm Syndrome” business; I think that Francis Collins, for all of his achievements, is a product of a culture that is obsessed with moving up. His fault is that he made it what winning was the Vince Lombardi: the only thing. Along with Anthony Fauci, his trashing of Jay Bhattacharya and the other proponents of the Great Barrington Declaration was, IMHO, the most disgraceful thing he did during the entire COVID-19 fiasco. But that’s part of moving up: it’s not only elevating yourself, but putting down those who would challenge you for prominence.

Photo above: a climber in Palm Beach.

Jay Bhattacharya’s nomination is a demonstration of an old saw of mine: be nice to the people you meet on the way up, you’ll meet them again on the way down. So Collins has.

I’ll close by reproducing my thoughts on this subject in my 2021 post The Unsaid Lesson of Francis Collins:

If there’s one thing shocking about American Evangelicalism, it’s its blindness to the moral hazard of getting into the upper reaches of a society. Having been brought up in the upper reaches of this one, that moral hazard was definitely apparent.

And yet, with the “have it all” and “move up” mentality that permeates American Evangelicalism, there is a general blindness to that moral hazard. I’d be the first to admit that Francis Collins’ rise is amazing—and objected to by secular types–but the things which Fisher lays out should be expected in an era when moral corners are to be cut, especially in the biomedical field.

I think Evangelicals should be more careful about the way they lionise people who move up the way Collins has, and more importantly quit encouraging people to constantly push themselves into positions where they have to make decisions and compromises such as Collins has had to do. Do we really need to push our children into elite schools? Did we think about the compromises we would have to make in a major political movement? Questions like these and many others go unasked and unanswered in the Evangelical world, which is a major reason we ended up with Donald Trump. Many of the same elite-adjacent evangelicals (such as those listed above) who have blubbered about the support for Trump have pushed people into aspiring for high positions and secular success, which in turn encourages successful political action, which in turn…

You can’t have it both ways; make up your minds.