Francis Collins
Francis S. Collins, director of the Human Genome Project, the world’s largest collaborative biological project, is a scientist and believer and finds no conflict between those worlds. However, the former atheist didn’t always embrace these perspectives. It wasn’t until he went to medical school and encountered life and death issues at the bedside of his patients where he was constantly challenged with the question “what do you believe, doctor?” that he began searching for those answers. Through that journey, he found Jesus Christ. Collins has led a consortium of scientists to read out the 3.1 billion letters of the human genome, our own DNA instruction book. As a believer, Collins said he sees DNA as “the information of all living things, as God’s language, and the elegance and complexity of our own bodies and the rest of nature as a reflection of God’s plan.”