God gave us free will, and we may choose to exercise it in ways that end up hurting other people.
Francis CollinsIt's not like you're closing the old doors and that investigators working away in a laboratories on a unique hypothesis are no longer needed. My gosh, they are indeed. But this becomes a real engine for hypothesis generation and even for proof if you have interventions that you can carry out in this kind of large scale and conduct them in a rigorous way. I guess, yeah, it's different. But it's different in a good way.
Francis CollinsA lot of science doesn't require big "ns" but if you're trying to understand something about human health and you're looking at interventions that are not going to be either killing you or making you live forever - they're going to have some tweaking on the outcome - you need big numbers or you don't have enough power.
Francis CollinsMy daughter is a practicing physician so believe me I get a lot of the frustration from her. You get it from patients. For me personally, when I ask my doctor to send me my record, what I get is a scanned PDF of his hard copy! This is not good. It would be hopeless to work with a million people if you had to do this on paper, and one of the reasons this is the right time for this is because of the existence of EHRs.
Francis CollinsI took biology in high school and didn't like it at all. It was focused on memorization. ... I didn't appreciate that biology also had principles and logic ... [rather than dealing with a] messy thing called life. It just wasn't organized, and I wanted to stick with the nice pristine sciences of chemistry and physics, where everything made sense. I wish I had learned sooner that biology could be fun as well.
Francis Collins