Dr. Francis Collins
Director of the National Institutes of Health
“Usually, it was every lab for themselves. But I learned from that just how much fun it could be to work with others who had complimentary but not identical skills, and how much faster you could go as a result. And from that point on, I was determined whatever the problem was, let's find some other people to work on it together and see if we can go even faster. It means that maybe you do have to think about sharing the credit. But you know, this isn't about credit, really, this is about making scientific progress, it's going to help somebody.”
Summary
In this episode of Leadership Matters, Alan and his good friend Francis Collins discuss what makes someone a successful leader, including sharing credit, following your passion, and anchoring yourself in faith.
They discuss how Francis became a scientist, first following his love for solving the detective mysteries of chemistry during his undergraduate education, to finding a more human connection in life sciences and moving onto medical school. Francis found his passion in tracking down the genetic cause of diseases, and through that, realized the importance of teamwork, giving up some scientific credit to combine work with other labs for quicker results.
Francis explains that leaders must act collaboratively and with humility to achieve major results. He emphasizes the role of his faith in guiding him through the stresses of his job.
Mentions & Resources in this Episode
National Institutes of Health – Click here to learn more about NIH.
International Human Genome Project – Click here to learn more about NIH’s Human Genome Project.
Lab-Chee Tsui – Click here to learn more about Lab-Chee Tsui.
C.S. Lewis – Click here to learn more about C.S. Lewis.
Jim Watson – Click here to learn more about Jim Watson, formally known as James Watson.
Anthony Fauci – Click here to learn more about Anthony Fauci.
Guest Bio
Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D. was appointed the 16th Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the Senate. He was sworn in on August 17, 2009. In 2017, President Donald Trump asked Dr. Collins to continue to serve as the NIH Director. President Joe Biden did the same in 2021. Dr. Collins is the only Presidentially appointed NIH Director to serve more than one administration. In this role, Dr. Collins oversees the work of the largest supporter of biomedical research in the world, spanning the spectrum from basic to clinical research.
Dr. Collins is a physician-geneticist noted for his landmark discoveries of disease genes and his leadership of the international Human Genome Project, which culminated in April 2003 with the completion of a finished sequence of the human DNA instruction book. He served as director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at NIH from 1993-2008.
Dr. Collins is an elected member of both the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in November 2007.
Follow Dr. Collins on Twitter @NIHDirector.
Clips from This Episode
On the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic & scientists' ability to swiftly create a safe vaccine
On his involvement in the development of COVID-19 therapeutics
Episode Transcription
Alan Fleischmann
You're listening to Leadership Matters on Sirius XM. I'm your host, Alan Fleischmann. I am here with an extraordinary human being a great leader, Dr. Francis Collins, the head of NIH, the National Institutes of Health. Imagine finding yourself at the helm of the nation's preeminent institution for public health research at the very moment of the most important health crisis, frankly, in history, the work you do now will have meaning for years saving lives and informing how we deal with pandemics and infections going forward. What a massive responsibility. We need leaders like Francis Collins, and we're so lucky that he's been in this role. Since 2009. Dr. Collins, my friend Francis, has served as the Director of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, not far from where I sit here in Washington, DC. He was nominated by President Obama. And he was asked to stay on in that role by President Trump. And now more recently by President Biden, given where we are as a nation, that's a rare, significant and honorable moment in unilateral bipartisan trust, a man of great scholarship and a man of great faith. Dr. Francis Collins is a physician who served as the Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at NIH from 1993 to 2008. He has been lauded for his landmark work in the discovery of diseases and genes, and his leadership of the International Human Genome Project, which culminated in April 2003, with the completion of a finished sequence of the human DNA instruction book, so much of what we now know about DNA, and about ourselves is because of his hard work, this interview is not going to be all about medicine, though. I want to get you I want you to get to know this man. He is truly a renaissance man. He plays music. He's a poet. He's a great scholar. And I said, He's a wonderful man of faith. He really is a treasure. And I'm so grateful that you're joining me today, Francis on Leadership Matters.
Francis Collins
Oh Gosh, Alan, that's awfully generous of you. And really glad to be part of this conversation with you on Sirius XM. And Leadership Matters sounds like an important theme. I hope it fits today's conversation people, can decide later.
Alan Fleischmann
Exactly, but it will because you are the, you know, you are a great leader. And what I love about you is you combine two incredibly important qualities that we talked about on this show a lot, confidence and humility. You live your life with purpose and humility, and you're willing to take risks and be daring, and you're willing to serve. And we don't have to get into any of the politics. But I know for a fact that you were under a lot of pressure in the last couple years to serve. There were a lot of people like me who said, Please stay and don't give up. And, and I think your commitment to humanity, and the humility in which you go about everything you do. But also the confidence to know that you have a voice, and that you need to be there for others is really profound. And I am grateful. So I want to start this by just saying thank you.
Francis Collins
Well, gosh, Alan, that's awfully generous. But again, I feel privileged to have been called to take on this role of trying to lead the National Institutes of Health, which is, after all, the largest supporter of biomedical research in the world. And I get to work with amazing people on critical problems that are life and death for so many people who are waiting for medical answers. So I can't complain other than being a little exhausted from time to time. This has been an incredible experience.
Alan Fleischmann
And when you're working on it from Zoom from dawn to dusk, it's not any less exhausting than running around the way you did. And I see you're all over the world. And I know how much travel you did. But I'm sure it's it's certainly more intensive. And right now with the pressures you're under. I would love to start off with a little bit about you. Because it because well this is a show about leaders and getting to know leaders as well as really understanding what they're doing today. I know you were raised on a farm. You were homeschooled, I think until you were in sixth grade. You know, I'm just curious, what made your parents, tell us a little about your parents, who are pretty extraordinary. You've got a pretty cool ancestry, which I recall from our conversations. Tell us a little bit about why you educated, who your parents were, and how did that prepare you.
Francis Collins
My parents were indeed unique individuals. They met in graduate school at Yale University in 1931, where my dad was finishing up his PhD in Renaissance literature and my mother was getting a graduate degree in English, one of the few women in the Yale graduate school at that point. They fell in love and they decided after they finished up their degrees that they were going to try to help people in the depths of the depression. So they went to work for Eleanor Roosevelt in a little experimental community and Arthur Dale was West Virginia, when Eleanor herself would drive at her own car from the White House to West Virginia on many weekends, to encourage this community now where my dad was the assistant headmaster in the school that was trying to teach all these miners some new skills, because coal mining was not going to feed the family. And that was a wonderful sort of experience of trying to see what they could do to encourage people and the really depths of the depression. But it all fell apart. FDR got wind of the fact that people were saying this sounds like it might be socialism and shut the whole thing down. Were upon my parents became lifelong republican swishes, put it mildly, but it sort of stuck. And they went on and had four boys. I'm the youngest of four boys. My mother, because of her education, and her spunk and her creativity, thought she could probably do a better job of educating her for boys and then giving them over to the public schools. So all of us had some degree of teaching at home, mine was the shortest because I was the youngest. And I think she was about done with it. So when I got to sixth grade, and we ended up in town, instead of at the farm, I ended up going to public school, it was a great mix for me, because my mother taught me those first five grades, all these amazing things about how exciting it is to learn new things. And she was amazing at teaching mathematics and literature and history. And she was a playwright. So there was a lot about language and how you use language. But then I got to a very good public school that got me excited about other things, ultimately, about science, particularly in a chemistry class and 10th grade, and I was hooked. I wanted to be a scientist.
Alan Fleischmann
I'm curious, we get into that, because there's a correlation between music and science. And the one thing anyone who knows you well knows that music is a huge part of your life, you actually, in my own home, and in your own home, I see you, you know, bring music to life. And I'm curious whether your mother or your father had that talent.
Francis Collins
They both did. But my dad in particular had played a major role in music after they left North Carolina left West Virginia and ended up in North Carolina, he was intrigued by the music that he heard of the regular folks. And he became a folk song collector. And if you go to the Library of Congress, even now, you will see hundreds of songs collected in the late 30s and early 40s by Fletcher Collins, my dad. So he knew all of the people at the time where folk music was a curiosity and not a big deal. And as I was growing up in Virginia, on this farm, many of those legendary figures would show up at our house, usually when they ran out of money, and maybe stay for a couple of days and play amazing music. So if I wanted to be part of the family, I'd better learn how to play an instrument, learn how to sing, learn how to do some harmony along the way. That was all part of the experience, which was glorious. It was a wonderful way to grow.
Alan Fleischmann
It's a wonderful way to deal with stress I imagine as well. Yeah, which is a metric that comes in handy today. But then, you know, you'd use it, you learn you learn beyond that you wanted to be a chemist.
Francis Collins
I did. And that chemistry class in high school, it was clear to me all of a sudden, this is really interesting. This is a detective story. You're trying to figure out how things work. You use the tools of science, sometimes you go down a blind alley, but eventually, you get an answer. It's Yeah, you figured out exactly how things work out. That's what I want to do. That sounds like that could be life sustaining.
Alan Fleischmann
That's when you studied chemistry and university, you went all the way through?
Francis Collins
Yeah, I went to University of Virginia, majored in chemistry, by the way, I ignored life science completely, it seemed very messy. And it didn't seem to have the principles and the mathematics that I loved about chemistry and physics. So I avoided that finished my college degree and went on to graduate school in physical chemistry. And my research was all about quantum mechanics, and most of it was mathematics. And that was exciting and stimulating, but it was a little abstract. And after a while, I began to be hungry for something that would have more of a human connection and discovered, to my surprise, that there were really interesting things going on in life science, I had totally missed out on that. And I didn't know about DNA and RNA and all of those amazing information molecules and all the mathematics that you could do with that, and discovering that I realized, Oh, that's what I really want to do that science but it's about people. I'd better figure out how to reinvent myself. And so thinking of various ways to do that ultimately decided to go to medical school, which was quite a change in direction for somebody who'd already gone quite a ways down the path towards becoming a professor of chemistry. But it was exactly the right thing. It was it was what I was looking for. I knew that once I got there.
Alan Fleischmann
Where did you go to medical school?
Francis Collins
University of North Carolina, which was, for me a wonderful place, a warm, embracing environment, fantastic professors. And in that very first several months, as a first year medical student, Professor came to class to teach us about genetics, and how it's relevant to human disease. And he brought patients to class with him, which was unusual at that point, a young man with sickle cell disease, a child with Down syndrome, and very young infant with an inborn error of metabolism called galactosemia. I remember those moments like they were yesterday. And it was like it all sort of came together. This is science. This is DNA, which is mathematical information molecule, but this is about human people who are having medical challenges that maybe someday we could figure out. That's what I want to do.
Alan Fleischmann
And I guess it was the secrets of everything that tell me there's so much more we know today. But I imagine we feel there's still a mystery today, but I imagine that it must have been so intriguing. You know, this big black box, if you will, that you had that you were ready to jump right in?
Francis Collins
It was and I must say people around me are like, Well, why would you want to do that? Sure. You can sort of read about these things. But you'll never be able to help people who have genetic problems that's hopeless. Well, it hasn't been that hopeless actually turned out to be an amazing time to get on to that journey of trying to put together really rigorous basic science with clinical applications that might protect people from terrible outcomes. So it worked out.
Alan Fleischmann
I love it. I love it. And then you, was there was I guess it was it went from there to a fellow, you were a fellow at Yale. But then after, was that after medical school?
Francis Collins
Yeah. Then after that, to Michigan to get a real job. It was about time after all this training. Landed at the University of Michigan as an assistant professor in Internal Medicine and Human Genetics, setting up a lab and teaching medical students and taking care of patients with genetic conditions, just the sort of Triple Threat kind of thing that I dreamed might be possible. And I loved and I loved Ann Arbor as well. It was an amazing place to be at that point in my career.
Alan Fleischmann
And then you went to, you were part of this team in Toronto, though, right?
Francis Collins
Well, what, happened was-
Alan Fleischmann
Was that much later or that was pretty much right after?
Francis Collins
It took a little bit. So one of the things I wanted to work on when I got to Michigan, this is 1984, was to try to use these tools that I developed as a postdoc, to track down the actual genetic cause of diseases for which we really didn't understand the basis, we knew they were inherited in certain ways. And one of the ones I was most interested in was cystic fibrosis. There was a disease that had been described decades earlier, we knew it was inherited in what you call a recessive fashion where both parents turned out to be carriers. And although they're fine, one out of their four children, on average is going to have this disease. So we knew there must be a gene involved. And it must be a gene that has a misspelling of some sort. But we had no idea what gene that was, what its normal function was where it was located on what chromosome this was like a true blackbox. But just at that point, it began to become possible that you could survey the entire human genome, all those 3 billion letters and actually find the answer if you worked really hard. Well, we worked really hard at it for about three years and got pretty frustrated, made some progress. But there was another group in Toronto, which was led by a wonderful scientist, Lab-Chee Tsui. And we were sort of competitors. But at one point, we realized he had a certain approach, my lab had a certain approach, they were actually pretty complimentary. Let's just merge our labs together and not worry too much about who's going to get the credit. Let's just get this done. And so for the next two years, with a lot of driving up and down the road between Ann Arbor and Toronto, and meeting and dingy Holiday Inns in between with running lap meetings in the strangest surroundings, ultimately, it all fell together. In 1989, we had it. We found the cause of cystic fibrosis, just three letters that were missing, or that should have been there out of 3 billion and that was enough to cause this illness. And that started us down a path which stretched out over many years that now has led us to the point where people with that disease have an effective treatment. That means most of them have a pretty good shot at a normal lifespan. What an incredible thing it is to be able to say that.
Alan Fleischmann
Wow, wow, wow. And then also it led to other discoveries too, Huntington's disease, other ways to get to solving other horrible diseases as well.
Francis Collins
Yeah, it was a proof of principle that you could actually find the needle in the haystack, that this very subtle change causing a genetic disease could be identified. It wasn't hopeless. And a lot of people weren't sure if this would ever work. And once it did work for cystic fibrosis, well, let's try it for some other things. It worked for Huntington's disease, worked in my lab for a disease called neurofibromatosis. And then now today, there are 1000s of rare genetic diseases that have had their cause discovered right down to the individual letter in the code that's misspelled, as a result of extrapolating this, and as we're probably coming to being benefited by having the Human Genome Project and make it a heck of a lot easier than it was back in the 1980s.
Alan Fleischmann
Yeah, I love how you're saying this spell that that's a wonderful way of describing it. It's not a problem, but it's been dispelled as well. I'm wondering, sort of indigo, which struck me, you know, a leadership moment here, too, when you think the competition when you said they would have been your competition, you kind of change that. I mean, there was this collaboration that now we hope for the age of COVID, for example, we're seeing science first, again, we expect some collaboration. But what you did in 1989, and 1984, to 99, is you kind of broke the mold a little bit, you were part of a team, an international team, that collaborated as a group.
Francis Collins
Yeah, absolutely. And that wasn't done very much at that point. Usually, it was every lab for themselves. But I learned from that just how much fun it could be to work with others who had complimentary but not identical skills, and how much faster you could go as a result. And from that point on, I was determined whatever the problem was, let's find some other people to work on it together and see if we can go even faster, it means that maybe you do have to think about sharing the credit. But you know, this isn't about credit, really, this is about making scientific progress, it's going to help somebody.
Alan Fleischmann
And if you're a person of deep faith, and you talk about faith, which is also from Southern, you don't hear a lot about it from a scientist, honestly, usually you don't hear a scientist talking about faith. But I'm wondering, you know, does that, that humility, and that and that, I guess the the inner conversations that you're having externally, I guess, does that also give you the grounding to say, you know, it's about the outcome, it's about the goal. It's about the mission, it's about the collaboration, it's about the journey, not the destination. I mean, is that, is that, you really are a leader that people love to follow, because you bring us all with you. And I'm just curious, is that, is that, is that related to your faith?
Francis Collins
It is, I wasn't raised in a circumstance where faith mattered very much I told you about my parents who were free spirits, they were doing the 60s thing, except it wasn't the 60s quite yet. And faith was not really considered as something to pay much attention to. And I ended up as an atheist, as a graduate student studying physical chemistry, who was in medical school, when I had to sit at the bedside of good people whose lives were coming to an end. And I realized I haven't really given serious thought to this faith question. And is there any real rational way that a person who's pretty determined to look at evidence could actually become a believer, I assumed not. And, to my surprise, discovered quite the reverse that atheism was the hardest perspective to defend, from a rational perspective, because it's the denial. It's basically an assertion of a universal negative, which scientists really aren't supposed to do, because you might be missing some evidence. And ultimately, I became convinced that the most rational choice was believe, to my great surprise. And it took me a couple of years to get there. And I had a lot of help from the remarkable writer CS Lewis, who had traveled the same path that I found myself on. So yeah, having become a believer in at age 27, and having a sense that there's more to what we are surrounded by than just the natural world. That also therefore that gives you a sense of confidence and reassurance, that it isn't all about, you know, being first on the paper, or having the opportunity to have your, your contributions turned into a headline, it really is about love your neighbor, and it is, and for a scientist translating that into what I could do to bring the scientific method to bear to help people who are suffering. As long as I'm doing that, then I feel like I'm in the right place.
Alan Fleischmann
It's really about celebrating the marvels of our lives as well and see them as miracles. You know, you know, and if you do that at the labs and and you're doing the the collaborative way, what a wonderful way to keep the journey and the focus on what you're doing.
Francis Collins
Indeed, and it does feel like that is where one ought to be. It's a calling not just a job.
Alan Fleischmann
Yeah, no, that's amazing. You live your life that way. You're listening to Leadership Matters on Sirius XM. I'm your host, Alan Fleischmann. I'm here with my good friend, Dr. Francis Collins, who leads us at the National Institutes of Health, NIH. And we're talking about his journey, his leadership journey, his personal journey, as well as the many contributions that he and his colleagues are making every day, to save lives, and to create a better life for all of us as human beings. You had an important career, you've had an important career, you continue to have an important career, all these discoveries that you've made, you know, but you know, talk to us about, you were the, I guess, you, before you came to NIH, you were the head of the National Center for Human Genome Research. And you, and that, again, that building on your work with DNA. And now seems like that's the normal thing. But I imagine when you did that, that was also another chapter where people are like, what is Francis doing?
Francis Collins
Yeah, yeah, Francis wondered a little bit himself. So we talked about this challenge of trying to find the causes of diseases like cystic fibrosis and how hard it was and how it took years and 10s of millions of dollars of research and multiple groups that fell by the wayside along the way, it just was not the way we were going to get the answers, what was the problem, we didn't really have the map of the territory that we were trying to search through the human genome. So if you wanted to be much more adept at this, you really ought to go ahead and invest in that map and reading out those 3 billion letters of our own instruction book. And then this process of searching for a misspelling, that might cause a disease would become orders of magnitude easier. And so let's do that. So that discussion was getting started in the late 80s. I was pretty interested in it. But I didn't expect I would have a hand in it. The original leader of the Human Genome Project in the US was none other than Jim Watson. And that would be the Watson of Watson and Crick, who had discovered the double helix structure back in 1953. And now was being called to step forward to see whether he could lead an effort to get all of those letters of the code read out. And again, for people listening who aren't familiar, it's a pretty simple code in its own way, DNA is like a language just has four letters in its alphabet, those letters are actually chemical basis, but you can think of them as letters in a code. And you get an either an A or a C, or a G or a T, those are the only four possibilities. And the genome instruction book is made up of 3 billion of those in just the right order to specify all the biological properties of a human being, which is pretty astounding. And every living organism has a genome. And that's how those instructions get passed from parent to child over hundreds of millions or billions of years. It's an amazing system. And the idea that we might actually be able to read those letters out, and from that point on, know what they are, was both revolutionary and very controversial, because a lot of people said, we'll never be able to do that in our lifetime. That's too big a project. It'll cost too much money. It won't work. It'll steal resources away from other things that might have been more useful. And it'll be so boring, that only mediocre scientists will want to work on it. I took offense at that one, because I wanted to work on it. So Watson got it started, Watson, though, was a bit of a capricious fellow, still is and after he had insulted his boss, and the NIH Director, Bernadine Healy, for about the third or fourth time, he was suddenly gone. There was this desperate feeling about oh, my gosh, what are we going to do, and my phone rang, and it was an invitation to be considered to step into those very shoes of James Watson and to lead this effort, not part of my life plan. And again, people listening to this story, I'm sure would agree that most of us can't really count on having a life plan that's going to turn out the way you thought it was. You just have doors that open and sometimes they're doors you should quickly slam shut and keep moving. And sometimes you should just walk through. And after a bit of a struggle, I decided I've got a, I've got to try this. It might fail. But this is historic. This is like one of the biggest things that humankind has ever tried to do. This is like splitting the atom or going to the moon except it's about ourselves. And if it actually works, it's going to change everything. So okay, I'll take the chance. And this was part of NIH, but it was one of the institute's that was focused specifically on the genome and it was pretty hairy. I gotta say, for the first two or three years, I began to fear that I better start planning my speech about failure because it didn't look like we are going to get this done, but bit by bit, because it was such a compelling project, people were excited about it. And some of the best and brightest minds of that generation of biological scientists said, yeah, I'll come and join this, I'll bring my brains and my ideas. And I won't worry too much about who gets the credit, either. We just got to get this done. And ultimately, I ended up being the sort of field general, if you call it that, of about 2400, scientists in six countries who all put their shoulder to the same wheel to get this done, and what a wild ride that was. And the other thing we did, which I think history will note, hopefully, positively, was we decided this is the kind of data that ought to be put in the public domain, immediately. It's our shared inheritance. It's our own instruction book, as the human family, the idea that you would lock that up somewhere or charge people for access to the information was just anathema. And so that was the ethic that we established, this has got to be freely accessible to everybody, every 24 hours new data, put it up there on the internet, so people can start working with it.
Alan Fleischmann
Because when I think of getting so used to now 11 months and being in the land of Zoom, but I imagine you didn't have that ability to, you know you had 2400 scientists working with you collaboratively globally. How did you communicate?
Francis Collins
You know, a lot of conference calls. And then there was an internet. So we could send things around, but not like it is now. And sometimes it became quite a challenge just to get the data transference from the group in Japan to the group in the US, and vice versa. Ultimately, we had workarounds, I think probably in terms of biology, we were the biggest thing going as far as just the information challenges of dealing with all of this, because not only you'd had to have those letters, you had to have quality assessments to see if they were right, we didn't want to turn out a product that was clunky, you had to be able to track if there was a lab that was falling behind, even if they didn't kind of want to admit it. Because you couldn't say you'd finished the genome if part of chromosome eight was still not done. So yeah, to have everybody get done at the same time. And people had to be willing to admit, if they were slipping, and others had to step in and try to cover for them. And that was part of the challenge. I mean, managing a team of this sort, I had the budgetary control over about a third of the project because it's what NIH was supporting. But the rest of it was supported by other sources. And I could just try to cajole people to follow the guidance that I was offering up, and they didn't really have to agree, but their colleagues would make them pretty uncomfortable if they didn't.
Alan Fleischmann
I mean, you must have honed some pretty extraordinary leadership skills, then that you use today. I mean, to persuade other people to stay on mission to state to persuade people just to be collaborative and open. And then and this and that. And actually, you know, as you said earlier, just share credit, or not run away with it looked like there was nothing on the horizon that was promising because it took awhile.
Francis Collins
It did. And there were setbacks, as you can imagine, there would be in a circumstance of this sort. And yet, what really kept people going was the sense of the significance of the goal. Nobody could say, well, this just doesn't matter. You had to say, I'm working on a project that's really going to transform our understanding of human biology. This matters a lot. Okay, we've had a bad week here, we have to pick ourselves back up and see what happened and try to fix the places that weren't quite right. And yeah, that guy over there in that lab is always kind of given me a hard time. And I really don't think I like working with him. But we still have to figure out our team.
Alan Fleischmann
And it took seven years because right now, that seems so quick to me, was it seven years only? Or is it long?
Francis Collins
You know, it depends on when you started the clock, we didn't really start sequencing the human DNA until about 1996, even though the genome project started in 1990. And we finished all of the goals of the genome project in 2003. So you could say we did the human part of it in seven years, which was a lot faster. And the overall goal of the project was expected to go until 2005. We finished more than two years early. And I'm glad to say at about a $400 million under budget total price tag, which made me very popular in the US Congress.
Alan Fleischmann
Well, I can imagine why people wanted to have you serve and continue to serve in leadership positions with a combination as well. You know, I love that you call it an instruction book. And what it really is I mean, you you the way you describe this, and the way you talk as a scientist to people like me, you make us visualize exactly what was before what we got out of this I mean instruction book literally. And you said the only person you know who knew about this with the scientists and the and that there's a a wonderful quote actually from you where you say I guess, "It is humbling for me and awe inspiring to realize that we have caught the first glimpse of our own instruction book, previously known only to God." I think you made that announcement to President Clinton when you actually when you actually, I guess, handed over what would be the instruction book to the rest of the world.
Francis Collins
That was June 26, the year 2000, in an event in the East Room of the White House, with the president with a hot link that Tony Blair in the UK can say a critical partner as well, where we announced that we had a draft of about 90%, we weren't going to stop there, it took us another three years to finish cleaning up the last 10%. But that was the big moment where the world really heard something's happened here. It was sort of surprising to me that until that point, the visibility of this effort, which seemed to all of us so profoundly significant, was pretty modest. Maybe because it hadn't killed anything yet. So a little bit like an academic exercise, but boy talk about walking across a bridge and a totally new territory. That's what it felt like.
Alan Fleischmann
Well, but what a moment, personally, I got to imagine as well, for you to hear that the moment where you can say, wow, I mean, those long nights, those endless days, really, truly, and I'm sure not seeing daylight many times over. And long calls, as you said, you know, with your with your colleagues that they must have been able, I mean, it has to have been one of the greatest moments anybody could imagine.
Francis Collins
It was quite the experience. Indeed, this sense of history and the sense of having done this with all of these other incredibly dedicated scientists, many of whom were crowded together there in the East Room of the White House, putting on clothes that they probably want to try to look nice, instead of looking exhausted and disheveled.
Alan Fleischmann
You know, one of the things about you, besides your extraordinary scientific, genius, and, frankly, success, and obviously, I keep saying humility, when I hear and think about you, it's also your sensitivity, you always articulate everything you do, to talk about the ethics and value to humanity. And you talk about privacy, and the and the you know, as much as you look at all the things that unites us as human beings, I mean, the vastness of you know, of this instruction book in the in the DNA that binds us, each one of us, you seem to always look at every individual, as the individual that they're destined to be, and the conversations around privacy, what we think you don't need to have when you're doing the kind of work that you do, because the you're doing big deal solutions to big deal human problems and challenges health wise, but you do really believe in the individual importance of you know, one person at a time and the ethics around data privacy, tell us a little bit about that, because that's a big deal.
Francis Collins
It is a big deal. I think it helps me that I came through medical training, spent much of seven years as a medical student, and then as a resident, learning how best to try to minister to patients who were sick, and how important it was to them, to have the confidentiality of the information they were sharing be respected, that you could have this personal relationship trying to help somebody, but it wasn't going to spill out of that room unless they wanted it to. And so when you came to something as personal as your own DNA sequence, which basically unless you have identical twin, your genome is unique to you. That seems like something that deserves respect and shouldn't just be distributed without your permission, especially because it contains information within it that may have potential consequences for future risks of illness. And maybe that might be used against you in a health insurance decision, for instance, or in a job promotion. So I got very focused on the importance of respecting that need for confidentiality and privacy. And it took 12 years and this is when I really learned the ins and outs. And the the problem of making the sausage, you could call a congressional legislation was to try to come up with a legal protection against misuse of genetic information against people in health insurance or health coverage. And in the in the workplace. And finally, after those 12 years, with a story that went up, down and all around, stood in the Oval Office as George W. Bush signed the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, GINA, that now protects people in the US against that kind of misuse. And that was a moment also of considerable satisfaction that we got there and it took an awful lot of time and an awful lot of people making that case.
Alan Fleischmann
That's amazing Francis, that's amazing, because, again, you know, they're there they're too powerful transformational lanes. One is to figure out what connects us in mass. And one is to protect us individually. And privately. That's a it's an amazing combination, you know, you know, which says so much about your leadership. And the idea that I guess at the end of the day, it's it's not only humility, but it's the respect, the respect that I deserve to be understood, and protected.
Francis Collins
And I think that does come also out of my faith foundation, that individuals are, in fact, people to be considered as worthy of great respect, no matter who they are, what sort of path in life they've traveled. And that we also therefore have obligations to consider that and by loving our neighbors, not to do harm to them. But also because we're a community. And whether it's a community of people in health careers, or a community of believers, we do benefit most by working together in a shared fashion. And certainly, that is one of the motivations for a lot of public health majors, especially at a time like this. So trying to hold those things together. And in every situation, do both that respecting the individual and the importance of community feels very natural for somebody like myself, who comes out of both a faith perspective and a healthcare perspective.
Alan Fleischmann
You know, I wonder, you know, President Clinton was famous for always talking after, you know, you handing over the instruction book, he started talking more and more about data points he loved to use, that talked about how we have so much more in common and how, you know, that, you know, and he will use his DNA data points to break down barriers of differences to show that we, as human beings are more or more alike than we're different. They came from your work, right? I mean, he-
Francis Collins
Absolutely, he loved this stuff. He, at one famous moment, during the terrible, terrible war in Kosovo, he went there. And he gave a lecture to the Serbs and Croats about how their DNA sequences were 99.9% the same. So how could they possibly be making enemies out of each other? I'm not sure how effective the argument was, but it was scientifically correct.
Alan Fleischmann
I remember him using that. It was earth shattering. It was mind boggling. But it was not known by people, you know. And it was at a time when everybody would look at each other and think we were different, everyone's different. And why you want to honor and respect the fact that each one is originalist. We have an identical twin, like you said. But it's also an extraordinary way for science to teach us that we are more alike that we are brothers and sisters, that we're more alike than anything else.
Francis Collins
Absolutely, Alan, I'm glad you mentioned that. Because I do think that's one of the great, wonderful lessons that comes out of the study of the genome, we are all one family. We are all descended from a common set of ancestors. And current estimates, maybe 100,000, maybe 50,000 that lived in Africa, probably 150,000 years ago. We're all part of that family. And so let nobody imagine that somehow they're those other people that are not like us, we are all incredibly alike. If you land in here from an alien planet, and began to survey diversity of living things, you would look at this group of humans and you'd say, you know, all of the other species I looked at have a lot of diversity, those humans are just all alike, because it would look that way. from a scientific perspective, even though we get all worked up and try to make a big deal out of differences based on things like skin color, it is just such a subtle difference. And there's more diversity amongst groups than there is within groups. And genome science has taught us that. And I hope we don't forget it.
Alan Fleischmann
Wonderful, wonderful way to look at each other, as family and as community. And were to us earlier as well. You're listening to Leadership Matters on Sirius XM. I'm your host, Alan Fleischman,. And I'm here with Dr. Francis Collins, my friend who leads the National Institutes of Health, and we're just sort of lucky to be able to talk about science, faith, humanity and his leadership. And I imagine everything you did prior to what it's almost a year ago, can serve you well, when all of a sudden were hit by a pandemic. I mean, I you know, here you are the head of NIH. And you know, and you hear about COVID-19. I'm just curious, you know, where you were when when that, when you heard about it, and I everything I'm thinking about when I'm talking to you about your journey to almost a year ago, it does seem like it was meant to be.
Francis Collins
It does sometimes feel that way. You know, I became director of the NIH in 2009 at the invitation of President Obama, I had not really expected to take that on, I was happy to have made a contribution to the genome project and thinking it's time to do something else. And then the president said, I've got a job for you. And it's not something you say no to. And so over those eight years under Obama I had a wonderful opportunity to help build some new ideas in areas like cancer in areas like understanding how the brain works. And then something called precision medicine, then got asked to stay on under President Trump, which I had not expected. There's not been an example of an NIH Director who was carried over when there was a change in presidents because it's a presidential appointment.
Alan Fleischmann
It was very rare for President Trump because he didn't keep a lot of people.
Francis Collins
No,almost nobody, I think I might have been down to n equals one. So again, I'm not a political person, I was glad to be able to do whatever I could to steer the scientific engine of discovery, that is what NIH is, as fast as we could and then Wham COVID-19, hit us. Yeah, where was I? I remember early January, having a conversation with Tony Fauci, who runs one of the 27 Institute's at NIH. So Tony reports to me, I'm Tony Fauci, his boss. That's one of my favorite ways of-
Alan Fleischmann
Knowing you, I feel like Tony Fauci should be wearing a sweatshirt that says, like, I get to work for Francis Collins.
Francis Collins
Tony is amazing. And it was pretty clear first few days in January, that whatever was going on in Wuhan, China was really looking serious, that even though they hadn't been completely coming clean, there was human to human transmission. This was not just something that a few people in the market caught, it was spreading. And it, within the next few days, the sequence of the virus was posted by a Chinese scientist who probably got in a little trouble for doing so. And so we all jumped on that. I mean, hey, I'm the genome guy. I'm gonna look at his viral genome as fast as I can. Okay, it's a Coronavirus, Okay, it looks most close to a virus isolated from a bat several years earlier in a cave in China. So somehow this has made the leap into humans, but it's differen now. It's acquired some new changes, and we have to figure out what that's all about. And within days after that sequence, the vaccine was already designed and being manufactured. This was just a phenomenal turnaround in terms of time. And it wasn't that suddenly, overnight, somebody thought, Oh, I got a new way to make a vaccine. Let's try this. This was based on 25 years of figuring out how to use this messenger RNA approach, as it's called, to take a very fast track towards developing a vaccine that could still be safe and effective, but would trim months or even years off what normally would be a very long drawn out process. And 63 days later, the first human volunteer was being injected with this experimental vaccine, which has now become the Moderna vaccine, which, at this point, about 40 million people have received, including me. And all of that happening in the space of less than a year, just astounded in terms of the timeframe and yet done without any serious limitation and rigor, we were not going to do this in a slapdash way. And I know people are worried about that, especially because it happened fast. And this term warp speed got applied, which was maybe not the best choice for scription if you want it to give people confidence. But I can tell you having been right in the middle of this, I don't think there's ever been vaccines that were created more carefully, with more attention to every detail about safety and efficacy, and then the Pfizer vaccine and the Moderna vaccine, the two that are now being distributed through because FDA has approved them for emergency use.
Alan Fleischmann
And they're different. They're different than the other ones that are coming out. Their, the mRNA you just described is different than the other approaches as well.
Francis Collins
Right. There are three different platforms as we call them, and each of which has two different companies playing it. So total of six vaccines that are in various stages. The first ones out of the gate, were the mRNA ones from Pfizer and Moderna. The adenovirus vector ones, which is AstraZeneca and Janssen, Johnson and Johnson are coming along but not yet approved in the US, the J and J. Johnson and Johnson one may well get FDA greenlight in the course of the next 10 days we shall see it's gonna be a big week coming. And then there's Novavax and Sanofi, which are protein subunits actually purifying the spike protein and injecting that directly that's more technically challenging, so it's a little far behind but not too much. And this is great and we have this time diversity of scientific approaches because we didn't know if any of these were going to work because the history of vaccine development is littered with disappointment. And the fact that the very first two came through with 94, 95% efficacy and a very good safety record was better than any of us could have hoped for. It was astounding when Tony and I would talk about this back in August or September, we'd say, you know, I would really settle for maybe 60%, after all, the flu shot is that good. And we got 95. And hallelujah for that. And now we're in a pretty good place to try to see those get distributed, although there's lots of concerns about whether people are going to accept them or not, which is a whole nother story we're dealing with.
Alan Fleischmann
Which is why your, your statement about, you know, people who are worried, you know, shouldn't be so worried that it just came out of nowhere. It's built on decades of research, it happened to be that scientists realize, by looking at like you did, that there's a way to apply it and apply it quickly. That's a really important message, actually. Yeah, yeah. There are a lot of reasons why I think people who say they don't want to don't want it. But I think for the sake of greater good and community, there has to be a trusted science at this point. This has also been another example where if you want to get something done, figure out how to do a collaboration bring teams together, this whole effort has been an effort to bring the best and brightest scientists from academia, from government and from industry, and get them around the same table to do the design and implementation. That's not just true for vaccines. It's also been true for the development of therapies. And of course, we need therapies, also, people are getting sick, and they need treatments. And we've been able by developing some of those to reduce the death rate for people who get infected substantially, although not to the degree I'd like to see it. And we're in the middle of that right now, one of the things that I spent a lot of my time on in the last year was building a partnership with industry called active, which stands for accelerating COVID-19, therapeutic interventions and vaccines. This is an unprecedented group of 20 pharmaceutical companies represented by their Chief Scientific Officers, for the most part, as well as FDA and NIH and CDC, the Veterans Administration, the Department of Defense, and all of this led in a very able way, by something called the foundation for NIH, which does the program management. And that group basically had to prioritize hundreds of possible therapeutics, not knowing which of them was most likely to work and pick the ones that had the best chance organize the clinical trials, make sure they were rigorous and large scale and get answers that you could trust. And out of that have come quite a number of advances drugs like Remdesivir, Dexamethasone, the monoclonal antibodies with others that are in the works right now we have about 15 therapeutics that are currently in rigorous trials and should result in new answers in the next month or two. I imagine the treatments and therapeutics are going to be where all eyes will be soon enough because I you know, I mean, I think the vaccine rollout, because of the efficacy of the early, the early winners, I guess, in the race to the vaccine are showing, you know that that's the most important thing. But at some point, if we're talking about normalcy, it's going to be the very, very focus. And you've done this this, this is another example of your leadership, where you brought in everybody that needs to be brought together, you did it under very quiet terms, a lot of collaboration across lines, they're a very disparate uncommon table you created. But I imagined I imagine that collaboration is going to bear fruit soon enough that we're going to hear because that those therapeutics mean, there's so many that you have to figure out, which are the ones that are going to have that kind of Pfizer would dare to efficacy on the treatment side. But we're going to need those probably sooner than later. And I imagine fast tracked as well, because there's going to be such pressure to focus on those in addition to the vaccine.
Francis Collins
Exactly. And drug development is still an art. It's not like the Moderna vaccine, where you look at the sequence of the virus and you know exactly how to program the vaccine to produce the protein that the immune system will recognize. Drug development is still let's try a lot of stuff and have a really good assay to know what looks promising, and then try to get it into a clinical trial that's rigorously designed. This is hard. And so it's taken a huge amount of organized effort to get where we are and we're still not done.
Alan Fleischmann
I mean, I, it's extraordinary. I'm blown away by the the diversity of who you have working together. It's active you call it right. It's active. Yeah. actv active. Yeah, that's, that's a brilliant move. And I think the urgency will be will will prove to be, you know, kind of the next big the next big saving grace for all of us, because I I think that is going to be the answer to figure out who's real and who's not. And I guess are two types of things, right? There's the, the, you know, if you're well along, and you've been diagnosed with COVID, and you're suffering from enormous inflammation, where so many have those therapeutics to get you back, but you know, frankly, prevent you from dying. And then there's the treatments. I guess, when you're just the Tamiflu is of our time, I guess the idea that if you get diagnosed, before you do anything, before there is any sign of inflammation, because one thing that's baffling to everybody is how many people are asymptomatic not just young people. But we meet people who say guy tested positive, but I had no, but we're now hearing headaches, we're hearing that they do suffer from inflammation that there are issues that come later on. And these treatments will matter if you get them early on in the therapeutics will matter if you if you're treated, you know, and you realize you have the problems.
Francis Collins
Indeed. And we are also realizing that there's this so called long haul are in situation where people who have had COVID-19, who should be better after a couple of weeks, because their immune system has kicked in and they're not in the ICU, and they're not on a respirator, they're at home, but they're still not better. And some of these folks, months afterwards still are fatigued, still are short of breath, still have brain fog that keeps them from being able to function at the level they were before they got sick. We don't really understand what's going on there. That's another big project that NIH is plunged into right now trying to get a better handle on what exactly is going on there. But obviously, that's something you'd want to try to prevent. And some of the people who end up with this long drawn out situation weren't that sick when they got the acute illness, but it just lingered. We've got to do something to help those folks too.
Alan Fleischmann
Yeah, I know, you keep hearing about people who told me Hey, I had it, it was no problem. And then I check in with him, you know, a few months later, and they're telling me they have headaches. I wonder, is it because of where the virus goes? If it if it goes after a certain organ, if it goes to your lungs, and it goes to your brain? Or is it more systemic?
Francis Collins
We don't really know. And the virus is certainly capable of getting out of the lungs and going other places. I mean, we have a new blood tests that actually will detect the presence of the virus in a blood sample. For most people who are ill, even if they're not that ill. So it does invade. But what causes long term consequences, isn't that direct effect of the virus which likes to mess up blood vessels, for instance, even the small blood vessels? Is that what's going on that you basically subjected many of your organs to a vascular problem? Or is it the immune system that got so excited about the presence of this virus, that it didn't reset itself in a healthy way? And it's continuing to make you feel sick, even though the virus is gone? We don't know.
Alan Fleischmann
And should we be concerned about our kids? Because I you know, there is also that, that's the other thing that happens is Oh, they're kids, it doesn't matter if they can get COVID. I hear that too often. And I imagine that's not the answer, either. We should be very careful. We don't know enough to know.
Francis Collins
Yeah, I mean, it is true that most kids if they get infected do extremely well. But there are exceptions. And the particular exception, which fortunately, is uncommon is something called MISC, multi system inflammatory syndrome of children, you don't want that one. And that seems to come on, not with the acute illness, but a few weeks afterwards. And it does seem like in that situation, the immune system has just kicked into overdrive, even though it shouldn't have. And those kids can get pretty sick. And we are understanding better now about how to manage that. But it's still a serious concern. So nobody should say, well, you just don't worry about kids, they're all going to be fine. Most of them certainly will be. But there are occasions where kids can get pretty sick.
Alan Fleischmann
You know, I'm just curious, at our remaining moments together here to first I'm just so grateful that you're doing this job because, you know, you're bringing all these collaborative things you're building on decades of extraordinary breakthrough work that you've done and let you know, you've been quite. You're never under the radar. Anyone who knows and feels they want to know what's going on in the world of science knows that you're the head of NIH, you've been doing it for long enough that people know and think of Francis Collins and NIH in the same sentence. But you know, when you think about, you know, Dr. Fauci, Tony Fauci his role during the last year, he played a prominent role. It kind of was the face of so many of this. You must have purposely chosen not to, and I don't say anything about him, you needed to have a face out there, but you must submit an ability he works for you. So you made a deliberate choice to say, okay, NIH, you're going to go this path. We're going to put Tony out there who's also a man of great humility. And we're going to figure this out in a way that we're going to we're going to be science focus inside first and do like active and collaboration you're doing I meant to there was a had to be a leadership moment.
Francis Collins
That was an intentional decision. And again, as part of this, okay, let's figure out, we're all going to be a team and who is in the best position to play which part of the team's role. And Tony Fauci is this incredible legendary expert in infectious diseases, who has been at NIH, and for the whole world, really, the person you most wanted to hear from if there was an outbreak of influenza, or Ebola, or Zika. Or now, of course, SARS co v2, and the idea of doing anything other than getting him out there to share the word would have been a really bad idea. So I did everything I could to encourage that and to be as supportive as I could, especially because it took a huge amount of his time. And so his other responsibilities needed to be somehow offloaded a bit so that he could do what he has been doing as far as being such an incredibly effective public spokesperson. Tony, and I talk usually at night, at least, for a few minutes. And many times during the day, as well, we are joined at the hip here in terms of approaching this, and I try to do what I can to play the role of the NIH Director can and support him in what he's doing with an amazing team that he has in his Institute of the real experts in biology.
Alan Fleischmann
How many people work at NIH?
Francis Collins
44,000 people report to me, so it's not a small organization.
Alan Fleischmann
44,000 people, and I hope that one of the lessons learned in this year where I think everyone agrees science first that, you know, from, from the individual to the community, to the advocates that resources, financial resources, as well as human resources have got to float NIH, that is the one place that is not partisan. That is the one place that's all about science. I mean, that should be you know, like, you know, when people talk, I want to say that cause I want to say that that organization, I want to make sure that organization gets the resources it needs, I don't think anyone should if they get a just should be number two on any list, it should be number one in every list.
Francis Collins
We think we're pretty good investments. Basically, whether you care about human health, or even if you just care about the economy, the dollars that the Congress gives to us every year about the best thing the government could do to improve the state of our nation. And I think we have been well treated in the last few years by the Congress in a bipartisan way by the NIH budget has managed to sustain itself after some pretty tough years of gradual dwindling, and a sequesteration thing that really hurt us bad. Now, we're on a pretty good path, but it would be great to stay there. But worst thing for biomedical research is this roller coaster feast or famine, because you've got a plan. And most of the things that we are trying to do don't get done in six months or a year, these are five or 10 year efforts, we wouldn't have the messenger RNA vaccine, if we had been so strapped that we couldn't try that as a new idea a few years ago, and who knows what we should be doing right now for the crisis that looms 10 years down the road, we got to be sure we're doing those things. It's still the case, Alan, that somebody who sends their best ideas to NIH, which is where most of our money goes to grantees out there, and all those great institutions across the country, they only have a one chance and five, that that's going to get funded after the rigorous peer review, we put them through because that's all the money we've got. And I know we are leaving good ideas on the table, it would be much better if we could fund maybe 1 in three, or even one in two, but we're funding one in five. And that is a source of anxiety and distress for all of us, you know, we could be going faster and doing more if we weren't limited this way.
Alan Fleischmann
And the challenge is only gonna increase, it's not going to get easier, it's gonna get harder. You know, climate change brings new challenges. Other things bring new challenges. And so we got to do more to get resources. So that it's one out of every two and neither one of them for I mean, I think that's, that's so essential, because it should be NIH and then na because you bring you bring partners from around the world to your work. You can't bring it without resources.
Francis Collins
And it's such an amazing time right now, Alan, in terms of the scientific opportunities, new technologies that have come along that open doors, we can look at single cells and ask them what they're doing. We're figuring out how the brain works, which is the most amazing mystery that still remains unlocked. We have things that are happening in terms of treatment of cancer using immunotherapy that are astounding of people whose lives have been saved when we thought all was lost all of these things coming along right at this moment where we ought to be investing in the biggest way because the progress can happen at a rate that I would not have thought possible. So yeah, we we got a moment here but we don't want to have that engine with not enough fuel.
Alan Fleischmann
We can't lose this moment where people understand how important science is because it's never been more highly regarded and understood as being essential. It always should have been but I think now more than ever I started is talking about your, your incredible journey. You know your amazing parents. You know, though, you know the journey that led you and then Frankly, how you balanced life, you know, and you're cranky with your leadership, there's another person in your life and whether they fan out and that's your wife, Diane, and she and I got a badge. And that, you know, you're under enormous stress. And well, on this note, I wanted to get your last words on this as well. You know, the good a lot of folks that listen to this show are people who are leaders, CEOs, a lot of folks who are taking on big things. It's an amazing audience of future CEOs and current ones and leaders who are leading no matter what the title is. And everyone has a role and they lead. How do you do, I mean, I mean, you obviously found a great life partner in Diane, I can see.
Francis Collins
Oh, my gosh, yes, yeah.
Alan Fleischmann
And I imagine, you know, you said, you came with great parents, music is a big part of your life, just any words of advice at the end about dealing with stress, because I don't know anybody who handles stress better than you?
Francis Collins
Well, there's nobody that helps me anywhere near as much as Diane does. She is just a wonderful advisor, counselor, a breath of fresh air, person with a ready smile, even when things feel like they're not going well. I am the luckiest guy that I know, in terms of having found a soulmate that can just make everything that I'm going through seem more like it matters and like it's gonna turn out okay. And she's the person I would go to first whenever I'm really struggling with something. So yeah, that helps, music helps, I would, if I'm having a time where I'm really needing to clear my head, I will get up from this desk, and I'll walk across to the piano, which is like 30 feet from here, and play the piano or the guitar a little bit and just clear my head, trying to get music, to do something to the brain that sometimes needs. And my faith, I get up at five every morning, and I try to get anchored for the day, by thinking about what God is calling me to do that day reading a bit of the Bible, spending a little time in prayer, trying to be sure I'm starting off at a place of strength and not a place of weakness, all of that together. And I'm a lucky guy. So I can't complain other than as I said at the beginning, occasionally I get exhausted. But otherwise, this is a gift.
Alan Fleischmann
I am very lucky to to, to be able to be in your presence today. I'm very lucky that we're all hearing from you today. Because I am very lucky whenever we're together because I do leave you with a feeling that I that I there's a little bit of a glow that you give to everybody who's with you. Because you do combined confidence which we need desperately as the director of NIH to know that we that we're going to be okay. But there's also an extraordinary humility and gratitude that you exude. But let me just end this by saying this with all your gratitude that keeps you going to faith and keeps you moving and taking on these tasks. I just know that there are millions, literally millions of people who are grateful for you. And just so grateful for you and I am, I count myself as the as one of the leaders of that fan club and as a father, as a husband as a as a leader in my own worlds. I am grateful that the people in my life are able to live a better life because of the work you've done and the work you continue to do. So on behalf of Leadership Matters, Francis Collins and for all that you've done and all that you do as the Director of the National Institutes of Health, just know that we want science to win and we know what the hell you're helping make it happen and we're so grateful.
Francis Collins
Alan, thank you so much. You're much too generous, but it's been great having this conversation with you.
