Francis Collins Pranked by Sacha Baron Cohen

Duped into an interview with the comedian, the NIH director caught on to the joke and seized it as a teaching opportunity.

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A few minutes into an interview with a “journalist” from a Showtime special, Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, sensed something wasn’t quite right.

“Why are big agriculture putting chemicals [trans fats] into our food to make people transgender?” asked the interviewer, who called himself Billy Wayne Ruddick Jr., PhD.

“Yeah, that was interesting,” Collins tells reporters, according to STAT News. “That interview was done last November and was presented as a Showtime special where the interviewer is somebody who doesn’t know a lot about medical research, but gives you a chance to talk about the exciting things that are happening at NIH. Sounds like a plausible thing that I’d want to do.”

That’s not exactly what happened, however. “It was pretty clear that this was not the usual circumstance,” Collins says. Ruddick was actually comedian Sacha Baron Cohen in disguise for “Who Is America,” a ...

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  • Ashley Yeager

    Ashley started at The Scientist in 2018. Before joining the staff, she worked as a freelance editor and writer, a writer at the Simons Foundation, and a web producer at Science News, among other positions. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and a master’s degree in science writing from MIT. Ashley edits the Scientist to Watch and Profile sections of the magazine and writes news, features, and other stories for both online and print.

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