Scribble

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:00:00

I don't know about you, but it never ceases to amaze me how interactions with just one person can impact your whole life. My guest today, Dr. Francis Collins, is someone who's had a tremendous impact on me. We've known each other for a long time, more than 30 years. He was actually my genetics professor when I was in medical school.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:00:24

'But years before all that - before he became one of the foremost geneticists and physicians of a generation, before he helped map the human genome, before he became the longest standing director of the National Institutes of Health, he was a medical student at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. And that's where he met a woman who quite possibly changed the trajectory of his career and his life.

Dr. Francis Collins

00:00:51

I had a patient who was an elderly woman in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and that's where I was training. She shared her faith with me every time she had a terrible episode of chest pain from her cardiac disease. And one day she just turned and looked me straight in the eye and said, 'what do you believe, doctor?'

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:01:13

In his new book called, "The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith and Trust," Dr. Collins explains how that exchange led him to interrogate his personal beliefs and reassess the connections between faith, science and health. On today's episode, I speak with Dr. Collins about this journey, his new book, and why he wants people to keep believing in facts and science and goodwill. I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, and this is Chasing Life.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:01:52

I read the book. It's a great book. Everyone should read it. In the title is the word Faith.

Dr. Francis Collins

00:01:57

Yes.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:01:58

And I'm curious, what was your childhood like in terms of faith? Did you grow up in a in a faith household?

Dr. Francis Collins

00:02:04

Not at all. I grew up in a very interesting household. My dad was a college professor. My mother is a playwright. We lived on a farm with no indoor plumbing. Kind of doing the '60s thing. Except it wasn't the '60s quite yet. But faith was not part of the conversation. It wasn't denigrated. It just wasn't considered relevant. So by the time I was a college student and then a graduate student in chemistry, I was an atheist. And then I went to medical school. I had not arrived at my atheism by a careful analysis of the pros and cons. It was just the answer I liked and I thought it was probably the one that most scientists had so I could be part of that club.

Dr. Francis Collins

00:02:42

But then, Sanjay, you must know about this in that experience. You're sitting at the bedside of wonderful, good, honorable people who have terrible diseases. And our medicine is not going to bring them back in most instances to the kind of life that they would hope for. And I watched the way in which some of them leaned on their faith in a fashion that was really puzzling. And it didn't just sort of give them the ability to get through it. It gave them peace. And they were okay with this. They were joyful even. And I had a patient who was an elderly woman in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. That's where I was training. She shared her faith with me every time she had a terrible episode of chest pain from her cardiac disease. And one day she just turned and looked me straight in the eye and said, 'what do you believe, doctor?'

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:03:28

And you had never really thought about it.

Dr. Francis Collins

00:03:29

I never, I realized I had given it any thought at all. And she just asked me the most important question I've ever been asked in my life. And I'm a scientist, you know. I'm supposed to have reasons for making decisions about something that's really important, and I hadn't done any of that. So I engaged in a two year journey trying to understand how could somebody who really is rational and they're thinking about science could actually accept the idea of God, which science can't measure, and even a God that cares about me. And that was a unexpected journey where I thought I would end up strengthening my atheism and instead somewhat kicking and screaming became a Christian.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:04:14

Why did it have to be Christianity that that derived from that conversation?

Dr. Francis Collins

00:04:18

'I did a bit of a survey once I began to recognize the pointers to a creator God, many of which you can see from science - the Big Bang. the fine tuning of the universe, the kinds of things that even Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein would go, 'yeah, there's something here behind the curtain that makes this all possible.' But the personal God part of it, okay, that I needed to look at world religions and I discovered they had a lot in common. All of them talking about loving your neighbor and loving God. But they are differences as well.

Dr. Francis Collins

00:04:50

I'll tell you what did it. Sanjay, it was as I began to realize that the arguments for a God who cared about me and they came out of morality, why do I think there is such a thing as good and evil and why do I feel like I should stick to what's good even though I fail regularly? I can't fully explain that on a purely evolutionary basis unless you want to say good and evil are basically just random constructs that we've been hoodwinked into believing in. No, it feels like there's something there.

Dr. Francis Collins

00:05:19

And if I'm looking for a pointer to a God who doesn't just care about making the universe but cares about me, well, gosh, there it is. But I also began to realize, if that's true, if God cares about me, I know I'm not living up to that moral law. I'm regularly doing things that are wrong, and therefore, God's going to be a judge. And here's where the person of Jesus Christ, the center of Christianity, suddenly made sense as someone who was God but was also a man, and who therefore, on the cross, made a sacrifice so that I could have a relationship with the Holy God. And that sounded like total gibberish to me ten years earlier. And then it suddenly made sense. And that's how I landed in this particular faith.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:06:04

You write in the book, and this is from a 2012 survey about what scientists really think science versus religion. And you make the point that at least 50% of scientists consider themselves part of a religious institution. Over half of these, around 27%, state that they believe in God specifically. 30% are agnostic, 34% are atheists. Are these important discussions? I mean, when you you became the most preeminent scientist in the country, if not the world as an evangelical. It seems improbable in some ways because there has been this tension between science and religion for for so long. What are we to take away from that?

Dr. Francis Collins

00:06:42

I hope people would take away from that, that the idea that there is an inherent irreconcilable conflict between science and faith is not true because I have lived with both of those worldviews since I was 27 and I've never found an instance where I couldn't put them together. I feel like, as a believer who's also a scientist, science takes on a whole new, wonderful kind of aspect because you're exploring God's creation. And when you discover something that no human knew before, God knew that, and you just got a little glimpse of God's mind. And that makes science kind of a form of worship, and it makes the lab almost like a cathedral. And I love that.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:07:24

That's very interesting. Were there challenges along the way? Were there other scientists who said this guy, not sure with those beliefs that he should be mapping the human genome or, you know, fill in the blank, whatever it might be?

Dr. Francis Collins

00:07:36

'Yes, those things did happen. When I was nominated to be the director of the NIH, there was a particularly strongly worded op-ed in The New York Times, and it said, this is a profound mistake. We should not have somebody standing at the helm of the largest supporter of biomedical research in the world who believes in something that science can't measure and who furthermore says he's a Christian and therefore believes that Christ didn't just die in the cross, he actually was literally raised from the dead. We just can't do this. This is unacceptable. And I'm sure he spoke not just for himself, but for a lot of other people. I think over the 12 years that I served in that role, those objections became less prominent as people assessed, okay, how's he doing his job? Is he sort of smuggling in his religious perspective? No. When you're doing a job as a scientist, science is the tool that you're going to use. That's how you're going to rest your arguments. You're not going to suddenly say, well, if you look in the book of Matthew: Chapter 25, you'll see what the answer here is. I'll do that for myself in my prayer life, but I'm not going to do that in a scientific discussion.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:08:44

'Okay, so here's this phrase - trust the science; have faith in science. This came up a lot during the pandemic. Trust overall in sciences have gone has gone down. It was closer to 85%. Now it's closer to 69%. Still still 69% is still obviously more than half that, but it's gone down a fair amount, do you think it'll come back up?

Dr. Francis Collins

00:09:05

I hope so. I think for the future of our society, it needs to. Science is a critical part of how we make progress. And to the extent that people are less and less likely to trust it to help them flourish, then we're going to have more trouble flourishing. But it needs to be clearly thought about in terms of how we get back to that. And that involves some humility, some admission of things that didn't go as well as they should and willingness to really listen, to understand the other perspectives of people who have lost that trust and try to figure out what we could do to regain it

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:09:48

After the break. Rebuilding trust in science. And you're going to hear a side of Dr. Collins you've probably never heard before.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:10:11

The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith and Trust. Road to wisdom. I mean, that's a it's a great I like I read it. I'm I'm expecting a lot. I want to be on the road to wisdom. I mean, who doesn't want that? What did you hope to accomplish with this book?

Dr. Francis Collins

00:10:25

'You know, I've been in the public eye for quite a while with the genome project and then as the NIH director for 12 years. And I was becoming increasingly concerned about ways in which truth, science, faith and trust - traditional anchors for all of us, seem to be getting a little dislodged. And no more so than during Covid, when the most dramatic example, of course, being people's distrust of the vaccines.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:10:53

Yeah.

Dr. Francis Collins

00:10:53

'I think the develop those Covid vaccines in 11 months stands as perhaps the most significant scientific achievement of humanity since we started recording these things. Saved 3.1 million lives in the United States alone and many more elsewhere. And yet 50 million Americans - good, honorable people, barraged by all kinds of information and not trusting the sources from people like me said, 'no thanks, I don't want this.'.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:11:22

Yeah.

Dr. Francis Collins

00:11:22

And you've seen the statistics. The Kaiser Family Foundation did this careful analysis between the summer of '21 and the spring of '22, when vaccines were freely available, 234,000 people died unnecessarily because of misinformation, because of distrust. That's horrible. What a wake up call to say we've lost something really important here in terms of our path towards this road to wisdom. And also to deciding what's true, and who to trust, and what is science about. And where does faith play a role? I don't know that we've come to grips with how that happened and what we might do to keep it from happening again, because the distrust just seems to grow, not to shrink.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:12:06

Well, I think for people who may have been adversely affected, families who lost somebody in the, you know, 240,000 almost people you're talking about, I think it'd be a very painful thing to consider that their loved one died a preventable death.

Dr. Francis Collins

00:12:18

It is. And again, I don't in any way want to suggest that those 50 million Americans were somehow culpable for this. They were basically victims, in my view, of a lot of missteps and misinformation and frankly, disinformation of people who were out to make a buck, convincing them that, no, you don't need the vaccine because I'll sell you this other thing.

Dr. Francis Collins

00:12:40

And the way that's bled over, as you know and I know you're working hard to try to provide contrary information, is that suspicion about vaccines.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:12:48

Right.

Dr. Francis Collins

00:12:48

Which was already there before Covid?

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:12:51

Yeah.

Dr. Francis Collins

00:12:51

Expanded during Covid.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:12:53

Yes.

Dr. Francis Collins

00:12:53

And now threatens childhood vaccines at a time where we just can't afford to see more kids getting sick with measles and whooping cough and all the rest. Those are diseases we had almost put it back into the history books.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:13:06

Yeah.

Dr. Francis Collins

00:13:07

With this approach, they may come back.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:13:09

That's really it's really scary. I mean, I probably thought about this issue more than any other, and I think at the end of every doctor's visit, we're often asked some version of the same question by patients, which is: what would you do? If it were your mother, what would you recommend for your own mom? Or your own child? And, you know, I think it's a very fair question. But what they're, in essence asking you to do is consolidate all the data, maybe even your gut instincts, your judgment, all this sort of stuff together and saying make a decision. It's an interesting sort of confluence between being a physician and being a communicator. In a way you're communicating to the country as you did so often, but you're also communicating to individual patients.

Dr. Francis Collins

00:13:49

Yeah, and this is kind of a good point to sort of show the difference between knowledge and wisdom,.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:13:54

Yes.

Dr. Francis Collins

00:13:54

Which is something that I think sometimes gets muddled up together.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:13:58

Yes.

Dr. Francis Collins

00:13:58

Knowledge is the facts that the evidence, the information, the best you can put together, but it's often insufficient to help you make a decision. For that, you need experience. You need some sense about insights and maybe some common sense and a moral compass. What's the right thing to do? Knowledge doesn't necessarily carry much in the way of a moral connotation, but wisdom does.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:14:22

Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Francis Collins

00:14:23

I guess right now it feels like that road is pretty hard to travel. We're getting knocked into the ditch.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:14:29

The problem seems to be more around the messaging and the messengers. For some reason there seems to be this lack of trust in the institutions themselves.

Dr. Francis Collins

00:14:37

Yeah.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:14:38

And some of that seems to come about because of perceived conflicts. Some of that just is, I, there was a study that I shared with Dr. Fauci a few months ago that scientists have increasingly been seen as arrogant, too dogmatic. Which is heartbreaking because I think, you know, that I speak for myself and a lot of others, that's not the case. Some are, obviously. But as much as you might explain the data, it still seems to ring hollow in certain sectors of society because the issues not with the message or the data, it's with the messenger.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:15:07

I totally. And you can look at the polls that Gallup does every year to see that distrust in basically all institutions has been growing and particularly over the last five or six years. And that applies to medicine and science. It's just this general skepticism that our society has begun to adopt; much of it, frankly, driven by politics, by misinformation that is so prevalent everywhere, especially in social media, that people aren't sure who to believe.

Dr. Francis Collins

00:15:39

It troubles me greatly because it does lead to conclusions that people make that may really be bad for them where they don't trust expertise because it sounds like an elitist and then maybe they do trust some claim on social media from somebody who has no expertise but is trying to make a buck. And it's really heartbreaking to see how that has injured people's lives, especially with Covid.

Dr. Francis Collins

00:16:03

This book, The Road to Wisdom, kind of caused me to think about this in the area of trust, it seems like the way in which we make decisions about trust depends on four things. One of them is integrity. Is this a source that I believe is honest and forthcoming? Second, do they have competence? Do they really know what they're talking about? Have they done the work to look at the complexities of the issue? And third is humility. Is this a source that actually admits there are things they're not sure about and doesn't try to extend their expertise in one area into all areas of fourth one, which now has emerged very large, Is is this source part of my bubble? Is this part of my tribe? And therefore, I'm going to let my guard down and accept what they say. And that could be good or that could be bad. Because facts don't care how you feel. And a fact that comes at you from somebody who's not in your tribe, that happens to be true, is still something you need to take on board and not reject just because of its source. But we've lost some of that ability, I think, to make those distinctions. And all of us are at risk of loading up our portfolio of knowledge with things that just aren't true because we decided to trust somebody who didn't deserve that.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:17:23

When you look at these things, everything from integrity to humility as these ingredients, how would you grade yourself, if you will?

Dr. Francis Collins

00:17:31

I'd get maybe a B minus.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:17:34

That's why the B minus.

Dr. Francis Collins

00:17:37

Let me particularly talk about Covid, because that's when I was particularly put forward as one of those messengers you were talking about that didn't always generate the kind of trust that I hoped it would. I was often in a situation where I knew the data was imperfect, and I didn't make as much clarity about the fact that this was an imperfect situation; that I wasn't sure that what I was saying was going to turn out to be right. The humility part could have been a better part of the presentation. And you didn't want to do that because people were dying and it was a crisis and you wanted people to make a change about some behavior. So you were reluctant perhaps to say, 'you know, I'm giving you the best I got. It might be wrong,' because you were afraid that nobody would do anything about it.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:18:23

Yeah.

Dr. Francis Collins

00:18:23

But it would have been better to have more of a humility and less of the certainty that sometimes came across because then it had to be revised. And I didn't like everybody else living in my own version of a bubble, surrounded by other physicians and scientists. I mean, that's what my life has been, especially at NIH over those 12 years as director. And not encountering a lot of people who had a very different view about how this was playing out. I found that out later.

Dr. Francis Collins

00:18:53

I took part in a lot of sessions with this group called Braver Angels. That's put you right in front of people who feel very differently about something like public health. And I can now see how for a lot of people in the heartland, those recommendations that came along early on during Covid, about closing businesses and schools and social distances, they didn't make a lot of sense. And we didn't have the time or the expertise across the country to do the fine tuning that in the best world we should have done.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:19:24

I think that some reevaluation of things was necessary. But I do think that, you know, science and facts and truth and people's good intentions win out in the end. I think the mRNA story will be held up as a great scientific story, a great science achievement story. You know, even though it's been disparaged and minimized, you know, at this time, I think we'll see with history how history evaluates it.

Dr. Francis Collins

00:19:48

Yes, I'm also an optimist, but I think it also is a call to action for all of us to begin to re anchor ourselves in truth and science and faith and trust. And there are some suggestions in the last chapter about how to do that in terms of investigating your own filter, about how you decide what you believe to be true. And also, making a better effort to reach out to people who don't agree with you. It's a little painful at first because you really have to listen and not just go into this attack, but when somebody says something you don't agree with. Listen and try to figure out where they're coming from. Ask them, what about your experience has led you to that conclusion? You're going to learn something.

Dr. Francis Collins

00:20:26

Yeah. I've really been looking forward to this. You know, it's interesting. The audience may know, but I've known you for a long time and we sort of joke about it. You know, when I first started doing this work, I sort of bragged that you were my genetics professor.

Dr. Francis Collins

00:20:43

Oh yeah!

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:20:43

Which I still very I'm very proud of that. But then I followed you along not only as a doctor, but also as a journalist over the years with the Human Genome Project, obviously, the NIH, and in all of your work. How are you doing? How are you feeling?

Dr. Francis Collins

00:20:57

I'm doing well. Thank you for asking. I did go public a few months ago about my prostate cancer diagnosis, which was a pretty aggressive cancer, but was caught at just the right moment because I was undergoing this active surveillance over about five years. And what had seemed to be a pretty bland, slow growing situation changed its character. And so I underwent the radical prostatectomy using that robot, the Da Vinci robot.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:21:23

Yes, Da Vinci.

Dr. Francis Collins

00:21:24

which is an amazing technology. Yeah. And happy to say every indication is that the surgery should have been curative. I'll need to be watching this carefully in the coming years to be sure.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:21:37

I'm curious and I'm asking in part selfishly, you're retired now. What is retired life like? What are you doing in your spare time?

Dr. Francis Collins

00:21:47

Well, I think I failed.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:21:48

I know you wrote a book, so that obviously takes some time.

Dr. Francis Collins

00:21:49

'I failed retirement part of. I was writing the book. I'm running a research lab at NIH with 12 very incredibly dedicated, hardworking trainees and staff scientists working on type 2 diabetes, trying to understand hereditary factors and what we might do about that to do a better job of preventing and treating the disease. And the other part of the lab is working on a gene therapy cure for this rapid form of premature aging called progeria. And I think in another year and a half, we'll have a clinical trial of what would you call in-vivo gene editing to fix this one letter out of the code that's wrong in those kids and see what happens. And that opens up a whole door to all those rare diseases, thousands of them, where we know the DNA misspelling, but we don't currently have a treatment. Maybe we could.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:22:37

That's it's inspiring stuff. Another area of of overlap, I would say, between us is our shared love for music.

Dr. Francis Collins

00:22:44

Yes.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:22:44

And really being granular about what music does for the brain. Music is one of the few things, as you and I did this event at the at the Kennedy Center together a few years ago.

Dr. Francis Collins

00:22:54

We did.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:22:55

We got to see what music does to the brain. And we and we learned that just even thinking about music, maybe not even playing it or singing it is one of the few things that we do that can actually activate all these different parts of the brain. Music's a big part of your life right, Dr. Collins.

Dr. Francis Collins

00:23:09

A big part of my life has been since I was a kid. And it's a source of joy, especially if you can sometimes do it with other people like we did at the Kennedy Center. But yeah, it's also something I use to just lift my own spirits when I'm kind of going through a tough time. I'll jump up and go play the piano for a little bit. I'll grab my guitar and sing a song that seems to be a good fit for the occasion and I feel better after that.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:23:32

Do you have your guitar? Do you, can you play it?

Dr. Francis Collins

00:23:34

You know, I do happen to have right there behind me.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:23:37

You keep it close by, huh.

Dr. Francis Collins

00:23:37

I do.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:23:37

In case you need a lift your spirits never you just can grab that. You, would you mind playing us something.

Dr. Francis Collins

00:23:44

Oh, I think I could do that. This is a very special guitar that I got to design, by the way. It has a double helix on the fretboard.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:23:53

That's great. And I wish people could see this. The double helix guitar right along the fret line. That's fantastic.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:23:59

It has a name. This guitar is named Rosalind for Rosalind Franklin, who did the work to discover that DNA is a double helix.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:24:08

That they could have called it Watson and Crick. But you called it rather. I admire you, sir. I admire you. I salute you.

Dr. Francis Collins

00:24:15

Well, yeah. Here's a song that I've been seeing a lot lately. It was written during the Civil War, and it's sort of been reflecting what do you do when everything seems to be so contentious and the world is at each other? And what do you do? You sing about it. This is "How Can I Keep from Singing," a hymn written by Robert Lowery in 1864.

Dr. Francis Collins

00:24:44

I lift my eyes, the cloud grows thin. I see the blue above it. And day by day this pathway smooths. Since first I learned to love it. No storm can shake my inmost calm. While to that rock I'm clinging. Since love is lord of heaven and earth. How can I keep from singing? How can I keep from singing?

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:25:31

That was beautiful. That was beautiful, Dr. Collins, thank you.

Dr. Francis Collins

00:25:34

It is a beautiful song. And it's something we can all say. How can I keep from singing? Okay. Things don't look so great, but we can still do that. We can still be with each other. We can do all the things we're called to do about, like you say, be a lover and not a fighter.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:25:48

Right. Thank you, sir. Thanks so much for your time.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:25:53

'Before we go, 2025 is just around the corner. Can you believe it? My team and I are getting ready by taking a new approach to the new year. Instead of adding more to our plates. The first few episodes of the year are going to explore ways to do less and to let go. You heard that right. Think of these as anti-resolution episodes. It's something I've been thinking about for a long time. We want to hear from you about this. What is one thing that maybe you're letting go of in the new year? Is there an unhealthy habit you're trying to drop? Or new ways you're trying to slow down? As always, if you have questions you'd like us to try and answer or you want to share what's worked for you. Give us a call at (470) 396-0832 and leave a voicemail. As always, thanks for listening.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

00:26:41

Chasing Life is a production of CNN Audio. Our podcast is a produced by Eryn Mathewson, Jennifer Lai, Grace Walker, and Jesse Remedios. Andrea Kane is our medical writer. Our senior producer is Dan Bloom. Amanda Sealy is our showrunner. Dan Dzula is our technical director. And the executive producer of CNN Audio is Steve Licktieg. With Support from Jamus Andrest, Jon Dianora, Haley Thomas, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, Leni Steinhardt, Nichole Pesaru and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to Ben Tinker and Nadia Kounang of CNN Health, and Katie Hinman