Francis Collins leaves NHGRI

The director of the NIH's National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), linkurl:Francis Collins,;http://www.genome.gov/10000779 announced today (May 28) that he will step down from his position on August 1. Collins linkurl:started;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/16074/ as NHGRI director in 1993 and led the institute through the linkurl:Human Genome Project,;http://www.the-scientist.com/news/20030415/03/ which concluded in 2003. linkurl:Robert Cook-Deegan,;http://www.genome.duke.edu/people/faculty/cookdeegan/ director of Duke University's Center for Genome Ethics, Law & Policy at the Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy, said that Collins was an ideal leader to pilot NHGRI through the Human Genome Project at a time when genomics was a strange, new idea. "It was very clear that he could explain the science to a lay audience in a way that they could understand the importance of it," said Cook-Deegan, who chronicled the start of the Human Genome Project in his 1996 book, linkurl:__Gene Wars: Science, Politics, and the Human Genome.__;http://www.amazon.com/Gene-Wars-Science-Politics-Genome/dp/0393313999 Harvard geneticist and collaborator on the Human Genome...