National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins is planning to announce his resignation from the agency on Tuesday, three people familiar with the matter told Politico. He will step down by the end of the year, The Washington Post adds.
Collins, 71, has led the NIH for the last 12 years, making him the longest-serving director and the first to be part of more than one presidential administration. A graduate of the medical school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Collins is a physician-geneticist who identified the genetic mutations for cystic fibrosis. He was an atheist, but converted to Christianity as a young adult, and in 2006 he wrote the book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
-
The Duchy Files: how bad is the scandal for King Charles?Today's Big Question Making millions in rent from the NHS and armed forces a 'PR disaster' for royal family
-
'A stark choice'Today's Newspapers A roundup of the headlines from the US front pages
-
The Vietnamese migrants crossing the ChannelThe Explainer 2024 has seen a surge in the numbers of Vietnamese migrants making the illegal passage into the UK
-
NASA's Europa Clipper blasts off, seeking an oceanSpeed Read The ship is headed toward Jupiter on a yearslong journey
-
Detailed map of fly's brain holds clues to human mindSpeed Read This remarkable fruit fly brain analysis will aid in future human brain research
-
Blind people will listen to next week's total eclipseSpeed Read While they can't see the event, they can hear it with a device that translates the sky's brightness into music
-
Melting polar ice is messing with global timekeepingSpeed Read Ice loss caused by climate change is slowing the Earth's rotation
-
An amphibian that produces milk?speed read Caecilians, worm-like amphibians that live underground, produce a milk-like substance for their hatchlings
-
Jupiter's Europa has less oxygen than hopedspeed read Scientists say this makes it less likely that Jupiter's moon harbors life
-
Why February 29 is a leap daySpeed Read It all started with Julius Caesar
-
US spacecraft nearing first private lunar landingSpeed Read If touchdown is successful, it will be the first U.S. mission to the moon since 1972
