Dr. Francis Collins on Faith, Science, and “The Road to Wisdom”

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: And now, culture wars and hyper partisanship are overwhelming voters and sowing distrust. Our next guest believes the antidote to this is found in both faith and science. To explain how, Dr. Francis Collins, former director of the National Institutes of Health, spoke with Walter Isaacson, discussing his latest book, “The Road to Wisdom.”

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WALTER ISAACSON, CO-HOST, AMANPOUR AND CO.: Thank you. And, Dr. Francis Collins, welcome back to the show.

DR. FRANCIS COLLINS, AUTHOR, “THE ROAD TO WISDOM” AND FORMER DIRECTOR, NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH: Great to be with you, Walter.

ISAACSON: You know, you’ve been worried for quite some time now about the growing hatred, division in our society. And now, we’ve seen presidential assassination attempts and you finally decided to write a book about it called “The Road to Wisdom.” As a doctor, diagnose it for me. Tell me how we got here.

DR. COLLINS: It’s a pretty serious diagnosis, that’s for sure. Yes, we are a very polarized society and there’s a lot of vitriol and animosity. And that has led us in this current circumstance to a place where a whole lot of things that we used to consider absolutely rock solid for our society are now rather frayed. One of them is, is there such a thing as truth nowadays? Well, my bubble says this is what’s true, maybe yours says that’s what’s true. Hey, if a fact is a fact, it’s true for everybody and it doesn’t care how you feel. We’ve lost trust in science along the way. Almost as if some people have to be the pro-science, then the other people have to be the anti-science. Science, again, is about objective facts. It doesn’t care how you feel about the answer, it just is what it is. Climate change is real, by the way. COVID vaccines actually work and saved about 3 million lives. Those are facts. But those kinds of things are harder now for people to agree on. I’m also a person of faith, and I think faith as a source of a different kind of truth, the transcendental truth, the truth about who we are and what we’re called to do and how we’re supposed to love our neighbors. That’s gotten frayed as well, and I’m sorry to say oftentimes because politics has jumped in and overtaken the messages of faith that should have been the dominant ones. All of this, Walter, kind of leads us to this area where we don’t know who to trust anymore.

ISAACSON: You saw this up close when you were heading the National Institutes of Health and we had the worst pandemic in a century hit us. And you said that it showed something was deeply wrong in American culture. What was that?

DR. COLLINS: Well, I think the vaccines are the most glaring example. Putting together in the space of just 11 months, a remarkable partnership between private industry, academia, government philanthropy, everybody pitching in who had something to contribute. And in the space of 11 months coming up with vaccines that were not just kind of OK, they were spectacular, 95 percent efficacy with very few indications of side effect problems. Studying 30,000 people. That is so much better than most people dared to hope. And that should have been a moment then for us to turn the corner from this terrible pandemic. And of course, it was for millions of people whose lives were saved by the vaccine across the world. I might have been one of them. I don’t know. But for 50 million Americans, there was a suspicion that this wasn’t really what it was claimed to be. And they said, no, thank you. And this is what broke my heart, Walter. Here we had what I think history will consider to be one of the most significant scientific achievements of all time, and yet, people influenced by other kinds of misinformation and disinformation are turned away from that. And the estimates are, by Kaiser Family Foundation, that 234,000 people died unnecessarily. The culture wars leading to actual deaths of individuals, good honorable people, who were in a circumstance of not being able to figure out who to believe. That’s a pretty serious indictment of the problems we have now gotten into with truth and science and faith and trust all getting out of whack. We’ve lost those anchors. We need to get them back.

ISAACSON: Not only did people become — some people become skeptical of the vaccine, it almost revived somewhat vaccine skepticism in general. We see Robert F. Kennedy Jr., people saying you shouldn’t do the MMR vaccines, taking an old discredited paper saying maybe they cause autism. What mistakes do you think, if any, were made? Maybe vaccine mandates weren’t the way to go because it just caused a counterreaction or what would you do differently?

DR. COLLINS: Yes. Well, first of all, I do think science communication could have been done more effectively than it was, and I’m pointing the finger at myself here because I was one of those people being called upon very regularly to try to explain what we knew about COVID and what we were trying to accomplish and what kinds of actions people would need to take to try to protect themselves and their neighbors. I wish that we had — every time we put forward one of those recommendations had a little bit more time to say, you know, there’s a very evolving story. We have incomplete data about this virus. What we’re going to tell you today is the best we can do, and please don’t imagine that any of these public health people have any particular acts to grind, we’re just trying to do what we can to save lives, but it might have to change a week from now or a month from now because we’ll get new data and we’ll realize that recommendations we made yesterday are not the ones we should make for tomorrow. We didn’t do enough of that. And so, when things changed, like, do you not wear a mask? Do you wear a mask? People began to doubt whether the experts were really experts at all. And we were unable, I think, to get control of the message of what is actually true here. So, that was certainly a lesson to learn. Did mandates make it worse? First of all, I think mandates, scientifically, were entirely justified. The paper just came out in Scientific Reports that assessed over 2020 what were the measures that were taken during that terrible year that actually reduced transmission of the virus? And mandates, looking at all 50 states, some had, some did not, clearly had a beneficial effect. But people didn’t like them at all. They sort of added to this sense that the government is heavy handed, it’s taking away your liberties, it’s making random decisions that are — getting in the way of people being able to have their own choices. And so, I think it probably did add to more of the resistance and the resentment about public health just at the point where public health might have helped us save more lives.

ISAACSON: Let me tell you the beginning of a joke. An elitist and a deplorable walk into a bar. You are the elitist, a guy named Wilk Wilkinson is a self-described deplorable, tongue in cheek. Tell me how that story plays out.

DR. COLLINS: Well, that was a session in front of 700 people in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. It was the annual meeting of the Braver Angels organization, which I am part of and so is Wilk. Wilk is a guy who runs a trucking company in Minnesota. And he is somebody who felt that the public health measures in COVID were all wrong for his community. This was not the middle of New York City. They were not seeing much in the way of cases. And yet, they were also told you got to close down your business in your schools and you got to stay at home. And a lot of harm was being done, in his view, by these overly restrictive policies. So, he and I got to know each other pretty well over the last two and a half years as part of the Braver Angels format where you bring together people who have very different views and you actually make sure they’re listening to each other and not just shouting at each other. And I began to understand a lot about where Wilk is coming from and I think he understood where I was coming from. So, we had this session in front of 700 people where we basically had a civil disagreement about our perspectives on public health. And yet, at the same time, made it clear that despite all that, we’re pretty good friends now. And we are. Maybe we could do more of that. The idea that you could sit down with somebody who’s really in a different place and maybe sounding rather aggressive about it and just listen and try to figure out, listen to understand, not to plan your snappy response. And then, gradually bit by bit, you begin to have a better grasp of what the issues were than in your own bubble.

ISAACSON: You say that there’s a paradox, you mentioned in your book, which is that scientific research has never shown more potential for breakthrough discoveries and saving lives than right now. But at the same time, public trust in science has been falling. What is causing that? Is that part of this political polarization that causes a trust in science to fall?

DR. COLLINS: Yes, I think that’s a lot of it. I think the statement about the advances in science being breathtaking is easily defended. And we already talked about COVID vaccines, which turned out to be a source of distrust, which is really strange because it was such a phenomenal achievement. But now, we have vaccines for cancer. And a lot of people are like, well, I don’t know about that either, even though they’re starting to look really promising. We’re curing sickle cell disease with gene therapy in a way that I never dreamed would happen in my lifetime. We have promising ways now to attack problems like Alzheimer’s disease. And everybody wants to see those advances happen, but there’s still this undercurrent of suspicion. Are the scientists really all atheists? Are they really all on a take? Are they just trying to promote themselves? Can you trust this data? All of the things that we know about science in terms of the peer review process and the self-correction when things are published that turn out not to be reliable, those seem to have slipped away from people’s memories as much. And now, it’s like, well, that’s what the scientists say, but let me see what social media has to say about that.

ISAACSON: You wrote a book many years ago, “The Language of God,” which is, in some ways, a precursor to this new book, “The Road to Wisdom.” And in both, you talk about being a person of faith. And in some ways, the narrative is kind of interesting when I read it in this book, because you’re a young scientist in your 20s and you’re doing some experiments, and suddenly they don’t work. They don’t prove your hypothesis, and it hits you real hard, and you talk to your pastor. Tell me how that led you on a road to faith and a road to science.

DR. COLLINS: So, yes, I did not grow up in a faith tradition of any sort. And I was an atheist when I was a graduate student studying physical chemistry. The example you talk about was the very first real serious science I tried to do after I had gotten into medicine and was trying to do molecular biology research, and it was something I care deeply about. It was my first big opportunity to make a discovery. And it was six months of hard work and I was making a lot of mistakes because I wasn’t really familiar with a lot of the techniques. But ultimately, the day came where the results were going to be clear. I had this in my head. This is going to be a big moment. I’ve discovered something that other laboratories are going to want to use, and it was a complete and utter failure. There was no chance of rescuing anything useful out of this.And I told my mentor the next day, I’m leaving the program. I must be not destined for this. And he talked me out of sticking around, but I wouldn’t — I did go and talk to my pastor and said, I’m a person who’s trying to put faith and science together, because by then, I had reached that point of becoming a Christian. But is God basically sending me a message here? Just move on and do something else. And he said, now, wait a minute, let’s look at the figures in the Bible. By the way, my pastor was a former NASA engineer. So, he knows about all this. Look at all of the heroes of faith who failed over and over again, from Moses on down through Peter and Paul, did they just give up because they had a bad experiment? No. They learned from it. They figured out something really that they hadn’t appreciated before. That’s what you need to do. OK. I decided to give it another shot. And the next experiment, I was a lot more careful about the design, to be sure I had understood all the ways that it might go wrong, and that one turned out to have gone much better. And then, here I am. Now, some — 40 some years later, having had an amazing experience as a scientist with plenty of failures along the way, but always trying to learn from each one of those.

ISAACSON: It was your evangelical Christian faith community at times that was most resistant to things like vaccines. Why do you think it caught on in that community? And what do you say to them?

DR. COLLINS: Well, that is my community. I’m an evangelical Christian. I think there’s a lot of history here going back 150 years of a concern that maybe certain aspects of science, particularly biological science and geology, are working in a way that’s contrary to what literal interpretations of the Bible, particularly Genesis 1 and 2, might say about the origins. For somebody like myself who didn’t have that particular literal interpretation sold to me early in my life as the only way to look at those verses, I don’t see a conflict at all. I don’t think those were intended to be scientific descriptions of the start of the universe. I think science helps us figure out the how part, but God was telling us the why. But people carry that concern with them, especially in more conservative Christian churches, that maybe science has an agenda, and maybe it’s an agenda that is not respectful of faith traditions. And so, when scientists come forward with something like a vaccine saying, here, this is good for you, there is going to be a slightly larger amount of skepticism than in somebody from another community. And then when that gets whipped up by other political considerations and other kinds of misinformation coming from social media and sometimes from politicians, it kind of gets a life of its own. And yes, it was white evangelical Christians that were the most uncomfortable accepting the vaccine and paid, I’m sorry to say, a terrible price in terms of what that meant for people who lost their lives as a result.

ISAACSON: At the end of the book, you talk about how all of us, citizens, you know, ordinary people, should take a pledge and should do some things to try to reduce the amount of poison in our discourse, to come together a bit more, and to try to figure out where we can agree on what truth or faith or other things may lead us. Tell me about what you think we should all do right now.

DR. COLLINS: Well, that is what I come down on as the possible solution to this unfortunate situation we find ourselves in. I don’t see the divisiveness and the hyperpolarization and the vitriol and the fear and the anger getting solved by political voices, but I think it can be solved by us. If each of us would do a couple of things, first, try to take your own truth temperature and say, have I brought on board things that are actually not true? And in which case, maybe those need to be discarded. Have a hard look at whether you’ve been able to discern the difference between facts and fakes. We all get hit with a lot of those. Sort that out.And then, second, become one of those that builds a bridge with people of different opinions, like I learned to do with Wilk and Braver Angels. Reach out to somebody who you know disagrees with you about something where there’s a lot of emotion, gun control or immigration and say, I’d really like to understand where you’re coming from because I would — I have not been able to get beyond the perspectives of the people around me. So, let’s have a glass of wine and you can tell me and I’m going to really listen, your background, where you come from, what you believe, and how you’ve arrived at this particular perspective. I want to understand that. And you might make a friend and you might also find out that your own positions are not as rock solid as you thought they were. And that’s how we bring ourselves back together again. The pledge at the end of the book basically is asking people not just to say that’s a nice idea, but to make a commitment to be part of the solution. If you sign the pledge and you can put your name up on the Braver Angels’ website to document that, that’s a reminder that we’re all in this together. And together, we might be able to do, as Margaret Mead, has suggested, make a real change in a culture, because a few committed citizens is what it takes. In fact, that’s all that has ever made a real difference. Let’s be part of that. We have a chance here to heal our nation one person at a time. I think that’s the best chance we’ve got to get back on the road to wisdom.

ISAACSON: Dr. Francis Collins, thank you so much for joining us.

DR. COLLINS: It was great to be with you, Walter.