Francis Collins Interview (page: 2 / 9) Presidential Medal of Freedom	Print Interview

How do you think it affected you, learning at home, instead of going to school with the other kids?

Francis Collins: I think it affected me in a positive way, getting excited about learning. I had the best teacher/pupil ratio you can imagine. It probably affected me in a negative way socially, because I had no other kids to interact with, except my brother who was two years older than me. There were no other kids my age for two miles. I had to catch up, which was a little difficult when I was suddenly thrust into the social scene of the sixth grade. But one copes and compensates, and I don't think I sustained any lasting damage.

Didn't you resent it at the time that you couldn't go to school with the other kids?

Francis Collins: I did feel like I was missing out on things like sports, social activities and birthday parties. During the year, when everybody else was in school and seemed to be having a good time, I was not always so happy. There was a lot of hard work on the farm, not a lot of chance to get out and fool around. But during the summer, when the theater was happening, I thought I was the luckiest kid on earth, with this swirl of activity going on.

When I got to public school I wasn't at all clear what my interest was. I wanted to be a truck driver, I knew that much. That was the major goal in my life for several years.

What made you want to become a scientist? What persuaded you that this is what you wanted to do?

Francis Collins: When I got to high school I had an experience like that of almost everybody I've talked to who's become interested in science or mathematics. I had a teacher who took a real interest in my interest, who taught me chemistry in a way that emphasized the power of the human mind to get answers to questions, as opposed to memorizing things. I really liked that. With the scientific method you could discover things that weren't known before. I liked mathematics, and chemistry, and physics. Those suited me quite well, because they were organized and had principles. You didn't have to memorize stuff. I didn't like memorizing stuff and I wasn't very good at it.

It was the 10th grade in high school, it was the first day of the chemistry course. Mr. House, this wonderful man who'd dedicated his life to getting high school students excited about science, came in and said, "We're going to do an experiment today. I'm going to give you this box, which is painted black, and it has an object inside it and I want you figure out all the ways that you might investigate this to figure out what the object is." And my initial reaction was, "What a dumb idea!" And then I started to try to come up with a list of the kinds of experiments one could do to determine what's inside this black box. And I got caught up in it. It was the first time I think that somebody had challenged me to come up with the ideas. I had some exposure to science in previous courses, but it was, "Here's the facts, learn them." This was, "Okay, I'm challenging you. Here's a problem, how would you solve it?" And I knew something was different here.
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He built on that. I just happen to remember that first experiment, there were many others after that. Here was a teacher who really knew how to excite your interest in the exploration of the unknown. That grabbed me and it never let me go.

I also took biology in high school and I didn't like it at all. It was focused on memorization. Learning the parts of the crayfish was a typical assignment. I didn't think that was very interesting. I might have made a bit of a mistake. I didn't appreciate that biology also had principles and logic. I concluded at the age of 15 or 16 that I had no interest in biology, or medicine, or any of those aspects of science that dealt with this messy thing called life. It just wasn't organized, and I wanted to stick with the nice pristine sciences of chemistry and physics, where everything made sense. I wish I had learned a little sooner that biology could be fun as well. Unfortunately, it was not taught that way to me in high school.

The very well intentioned biology teacher really was not at all attuned to the fact that learning involves more than pouring information into somebody's head, that you ought to challenge them to actually think about it. There's a wonderful quote from Yeats that I ascribe much significance to and try to adhere to when I get the chance to do teaching myself. Which is that, "Education is not the filling of a pail, it's the lighting of a fire." Mr. House knew how to light my fire in chemistry and physics. The biology teacher was filling the pail, and the consequences were very different. I didn't get much of a bang out of that.
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