Government's gene guru to resign

— -- Francis S. Collins, the geneticist who mingled a belief in Christianity with a fervent defense of evolution, said Wednesday he will step down as director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, where he led the historic effort to decode the human genome.

Collins, author of three books, said he will leave the institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, on August 1, with plans to write a book on personalized medicine and explore other professional opportunities.

"It's been a marvelous ride," he told reporters Wednesday. "My time at NHGRI has has been the most remarkable in my life. Scientific questions that used to be hypothetical are now being answered right and left."

Collins, 58, says he has chosen to leave before he has found a role because his federal conflict-of-interest rules make negotiating his next position "awkward." Collins says he plans to take a sabbatical for several months and will consider a variety of possibilities, adding, without mentioning any names, that he would also consider acting as a science advisor to a presidential candidate.

"If there's some way I can help in that regard, of course I'd be interested in doing so," he said.

Collins has served as NHGRI's director since April 1993, succeeding James Watson, who with Francis Crick identified the double helix as the structure of DNA and the foundation of human inheritance. In 2001, Collins appeared with President Bill Clinton and rival biologist J. Craig Venter of Celera Genomics to announce that they had successfully produced the first rough draft of the human genetic code.

Two years later, on the 50th anniversary of Watson and Crick's first report on the double helix, Collins announced that NHGRI scientists had finished decoding the 3 billion pairs of chemicals that make up the human genome.

That milestone led to others: the International HapMap Project, an effort to examine genetic features that might shed light on common diseases; the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements; the Mammalian Gene Collection and the Cancer Genome Atlas, which is a joint effort with the National Cancer Institute, among others.