Francis Collins on Bruce Stillman, Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
  Francis Collins     Biography    
Recorded: 31 May 2003

So Bruce is a dynamic, very effective wonderful leader of this enterprise. I’ve occasionally encountered Bruce’s strong personality when some grant that was supposed to go to Cold Spring Harbor seemed maybe not to be happening. I can testify that Bruce can also be pretty aggressive, but I think that’s probably something that he needs to be to be a good leader. So, yeah, he’s a natural heir to the king. He’s now the new king.

Francis Collins earned a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Virginia (1970), a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from Yale University (1974), and an M.D. from the University of North Carolina (1977). While a researcher at the University of Michigan (1984-1993), he pioneered “positional cloning” methods which resulted in the Collins team and their collaborators isolating the genes responsible for cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s disease, neurofibromatosis, and others.

In 1993 he accepted leadership of the Human Genome Project (HGP) by becoming Director of the National Center for Human Genome Research (NHGRI). With Dr. Collins as head of the NHGRI, the HGP attained its goal of sequencing all 3 billion base pairs of the human genome.

He has attended all of the Cold Spring Harbor meetings on genomics.