Francis Collins Interview

What was your childhood like?

Francis Collins: I grew up in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, on a small farm with no plumbing. It was a fairly arduous existence during the winter, because we had stock that had to be taken care of. It all sounds very pastoral. It was hard work, but it was also educationally challenging in a good way, because my father was a Ph.D. in English, and my mother a very talented playwright. My mother decided that the county schools were not a place where a young person would learn to love learning. And so she kept my brother and me at home and taught us there until the sixth grade. And that was I think probably a very important part of my life's experience, because I really did learn how to love acquiring new information.
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She was very good at figuring out when a topic had caught my fancy and let me run with it. When it reached a point where it wasn't so much fun anymore, we'd quickly shift to something else. Whether it was mathematics, or studying languages, or understanding the roots of various words, which was a big thing for her. There were no lesson plans, there was no sort of organized curriculum, but somehow it sort of worked out. I was really fortunate to have that experience.

My parents were also very involved in the arts. My father ran the drama department in a small college, and when I was three years old they founded a summer theater in the grove of trees above the farmhouse. It's now in its 45th consecutive season. So summertimes were great fun, with all of these interesting people and different productions going on. My father had been a folk song collector in the '30s in North Carolina, so he knew amazing people who were real musicians, in the old style. So there was always music around.

Nobody in this environment had any particular involvement in science or medicine, that was not part of my upbringing, yet that's what I've ended up doing. I started going to regular school in the 6th grade, when we moved in town to be with my grandmother, who'd had a stroke. My mother decided those schools were okay and it was safe to send her boys there.

Do you have brothers and sisters?

Francis Collins: I have three brothers, I'm the youngest.

What was that like, being on the bottom in that pecking order?

Francis Collins: My two oldest brothers were much older, they were almost in college by the time I was born. They seemed more like uncles. The brother closest to me was only two years older and I think it was much harder on him than it was on me to be growing up together. My mother taught both of us at the same time. It was a lot easier to do that than to have two different curricula for these two boys who were so close in age. As a result, he was always being threatened by this younger brat brother of his, who wanted to be just as advanced as he was in whatever we studied. I think that took a toll on him. It was great for me, I had a ball.

Do you think it affected you, being the youngest of that group?

Francis Collins: I think it was a good position for me to be in. I'm not sure I thought so at the time. I knew my brother could beat me up if we got into a real tussle, 'cause he was a little bigger. But once in a while I would score a few points. Other than that, I think it was really helpful o have a brother who's a little bit older. I could watch the things that he had figured out and learn how to do them myself. All kids will copy somebody who's a little older, and he was right there to copy.

What books were important to you when you were growing up?

Francis Collins: I read everything that Frank Baum wrote, The Wizard of Oz and all the rest. I was very much into the Dr. Doolittle series, and a whole series of books about exploration, that I read all the time. My mother took me to the library, that was a real important outing. We would pick a book and that was a big part of my life. On the farm in the wintertime, when you weren't working outdoors, there wasn't a lot to do, so reading was a big part of my childhood.

There was no television, we didn't have one. My parents thought it was an evil force, and I think they're probably right. Without that kind of distraction, and books were my friends. I wouldn't say I dug into the classics. I preferred Winnie The Pooh, to reading Homer, but Dickens was important to me. Every evening my father would read after dinner. We'd sit around and he'd read a chapter from whatever book we were going through. We went through a lot of Dickens that way.

I really learned to love the language and my father's voice reading it. And the cohesiveness of this family sitting around the fire, a special time that nothing was allowed to interfere with. That was a very clever idea on my parents' part to teach this love of reading, and of language, and of togetherness, and how that can all work together.

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