36 TIME February 15/February 22, 2021
In June, Kushner visited the NIH to hear about
the new plan, known as RADx (Rapid Acceleration
of Diagnostics), from other points of view. This time
Collins’ engineering staff went into nerd- overdrive
detail. “And that was the last we heard of White
House interest in what we were doing for diagnos-
tics,” says Collins. “To this day I have never done a
briefi ng about RADx in the White House task force.
And that was just fi ne.”
Collins believes in God and science, probably in
that order, but over the past 12 months, science has
been hogging his attention. (To get in time for prayer
and Bible study, he says, he has been waking up be-
fore 4 a.m.) As the head of the U.S. government body
responsible for funding biomedical research, he’s the
guy who has to fi gure out where to put the consider-
able resources of the U.S. purse to most eff ectively
keep Americans healthy. The NIH runs 27 agencies
and funds tens of thousands of research projects in
universities around the country. As far as health re-
search is concerned, the buck starts with Collins.
Bureaucrats are hardly ever the heroes of stories.
It is hard to extol the virtues of the person who, when
faced with a looming societal problem, fi gures out
which of the many processes and regulatory frame-
works available to him or her is the appropriate place
to start. We understand the appeal of the guy who
reinvents the wheel. We get the triumph of she who
surpasses overwhelming odds. But the soul who
liaises with stakeholders, who wields acronym- laced
organizational charts, who crafts carefully worded
and completely understandable memos, who knows
whom to contact for the details of another contact?
That soul is hard to romanticize. Is there anything
less cinematic than forming a committee and send-
ing a punishing number of emails?
Collins is known, however, for having an unusual
combination of abilities. He’s a well- respected sci-
entist (he helped decode the human genome) as
well as an impressive administrator (he has run the
biggest biomedical funder in the world for 11 years
and overseen a budget increase of 36% to, in 2020,
$41.68 billion). “There’s not too many scientists that
are very gifted at what they do in the laboratory and
can do the kind of public articulation of science with
politicians from across the political spectrum,” says
Nobel laureate biochemist Jennifer Doudna. He’s also
one of the few scientists who can speak credibly to
people of faith, who in some circles have come to re-
gard science as hostile to their beliefs.
KEEPING EXACTLY THE right height of profi le is one
of Collins’ less- appreciated talents, the kind that has
kept him at the head of a government agency through
three presidential administrations, including the
current one, to which he was reappointed in Janu-
ary. Republican Congressman Tom Cole of Oklahoma
calls him “the best politician in D.C.”
Collins has had to use every one of those abilities
as he has tried to manipulate the levers of scientifi c
mastery and money to confront the pandemic in the
U.S. at a time of political instability. If Fauci and his
team have been at the forefront of the fi ght against
the corona virus, Collins has been their staunchest
supporter, championing Fauci as he kept hammer-
ing the facts home, and creating battle plans that may
become the blueprints for the way the U.S. addresses
its most besetting diseases in the future. He’s drawn
criticism for both his methods and his priorities, as
well as his refusal to publicly challenge the Trump
Administration, but his hope is that when COVID-19
is fi nally put in the column of things we know how to
manage, alongside TB, measles and HIV, the U.S. will
have a new set of tools and processes to more quickly
mobilize around the next threat. “It would be really
poor planning to imagine that this is the last corona-
virus epidemic that we will ever see,” says Collins.
“We need to be prepared for whatever COVID-24 is
going to look like. And along the way we might even
cure the common cold.”
Collins, 70, had an unconventional upbringingP r o fi l e