Francis Collins will step down at year’s end

N.I.H. Exit

Dr. Francis S. Collins, 71, the National Institutes of Health director who has led the agency since 2009 and through three presidential administrations, has announced that he will leave  the post at the end of 2021. President Joseph Biden will nominate a replacement, who will require Senate confirmation, to manage a budget of more than $40 billion.

Dr. Collins, who was appointed in 2009 by President Barack Obama after more than a decade leading the National Human Genome Research Institute, which is part of the N.I.H., said, “No single person should serve in the position too long. It’s time to bring in a new scientist to lead the N.I.H. into the future.”

In calling Dr. Collins “one of the most important scientists of our time,” President Biden said, “After I was elected president, Dr. Collins was one of the first people I asked to stay in his role with the nation facing one of the worst public health crises in our history. Millions of people will never know Dr. Collins saved their lives. Countless researchers will aspire to follow in his footsteps. And I will miss the counsel, expertise and good humor of a brilliant mind and dear friend.”

At N.I.H. Dr. Collins, who trained as a geneticist and physician, led the international Human Genome Project, which mapped the genes in human DNA. He will continue to lead his laboratory at the genome institute, which is studying the causes and prevention of Type 2 diabetes and new therapies for Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome, a form of premature aging.

Under Dr. Collins’s leadership N.I.H. supported research into mRNA vaccines, according to Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the N.I.H. Scientists at made crucial discoveries that enabled the development of the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines. Another accomplishment was N.I.H. increasing its budget by more than a third, to $41.3 billion in 2021 from $30 billion in 2009.

Dr. Collins oversees 18,000 federal employees and a huge research program. N.I.H. awarded more than 50,000 grants to more than 300,000 researchers during the 2020 fiscal year alone. Its Bethesda, Maryland, campus spreads across 27 institutes and centers in 75 buildings. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Collins helped found a project involving partnerships and collaborations with pharmaceutical and biotech companies that enabled numerous trials of antivirals and other treatments for the disease to run at the same time. 

Some scientists and public health experts have criticized the federal government’s efforts at studying certain treatments that did not show strong results and that were prioritized over more rigorous research. Dr. H. Clifford Lane, the clinical director at the allergy and infectious diseases branch of the N.I.H., praised Dr. Collins for operating deftly amid a chaotic research environment, quickly mobilizing N.I.H. resources to study more promising treatments.

According to Dr. Fauci, Dr. Collins made a critical pivot from his expertise to the broader pandemic response. It was, he said, “really extraordinary to get someone who is fundamentally a geneticist, whose diseases involved cystic fibrosis and progeria, who turns out to be a valued colleague in the arena of infectious diseases, pandemics, public health.”