The Genome Mapper Who Found God

The machines never slept, so neither did I. Four sequencers running through the night on the third floor at Bethesda, their fans humming a pitch you learned to feel in your teeth, spitting out strings of A's and T's and G's and C's onto strip after strip of printout. I fed gels. I logged runs. I waited for the sound of his motorcycle in the lot before dawn, because that sound meant the director was in, and if the director was in, something in the building would move faster.

He rode a Honda Nighthawk 750, black helmet, six foot four folded onto it like a grasshopper on a matchstick, and half the postdocs in the building had learned to recognize the engine note before they recognized his face. Francis Collins came to work that way for years. It became a kind of clock for us. If the Nighthawk was in its spot by seven, it was going to be a long day, and it usually was.

I knew the outline of him the way you know the outline of somebody you've watched more than talked to. A farm in Virginia, ninety-five acres, no indoor plumbing, a father who taught drama and a mother who wrote plays, and somewhere in that house a seven-year-old boy who wrote and directed his own little production of The Wizard of Oz before he ever touched a test tube. He went to Yale for physical chemistry, finished the doctorate at twenty-three, and then, restless with equations that never touched a human face, walked into a medical school at the University of North Carolina and found genetics waiting for him like something he'd forgotten he'd lost.

By the time I started at the institute he already had names attached to his name — the gene behind cystic fibrosis, the gene behind neurofibromatosis, the gene behind Huntington's disease, each one a needle he and his collaborators had found in a haystack the size of a human chromosome. Those were the credentials that meant something to the rest of us bent over our gels at two in the morning. Before we ever heard him use the word God in public, we knew him as the man who found genes nobody else could find.

It was 1992 when the position opened up, and it opened up loudly. James Watson, who had helped work out the double helix itself decades before, quit as head of the public genome effort in a public argument with the people above him. Everyone expected the next person through that door to make an entrance to match. Instead Francis Collins came in quietly, the way he seemed to come into every room that had just had a controversial man walked out of it, and picked up the project like it was a patient he'd been called in to stabilize.

The project itself was almost too large to hold in your head while you were living inside it. Three billion letters. Twenty-three pairs of chromosomes. An instruction book, he called it once, and the word stuck to the whole enterprise the way good words do — not a map exactly, not a blueprint exactly, but a book written in a language none of us could yet read past a few scattered, half-understood pages. We were transcribing something whose sense we didn't have. That was the strange discipline of it. You could spend a decade copying a sentence you couldn't translate.

For years the work had the plodding rhythm of any long labor — gels, sequencers, more gels — and then, in the middle of the nineties, a man named Craig Venter changed the tempo. He left the government side, started a company called Celera Genomics, and announced he intended to beat the public project to the finish line, sequence by sequence, and in some places claim ownership of what he found along the way. Collins objected to that last part hardest. Genetic information sold off in patented pieces was, to him, a betrayal of what the book was supposed to be for. The two men circled each other through newspapers and conference podiums for the better part of two years before anyone in the corridors I worked in believed they'd ever sit at the same table.

They did sit at the same table, eventually, and something like a truce got written. I remember the relief in the building more than I remember the details of the agreement — the sense that a race that could have ended in two incompatible books had instead ended, or was ending, in one.

What I did not know, not for a long while, was the other race that had already finished inside him, years before any of us clocked in — the one that had nothing to do with Celera or sequencers.