Francis S. Collins (born April 14, 1950), M.D., Ph.D., is a physician-geneticist, noted for his landmark discoveries of disease genes, and his leadership of the Human Genome Project (HGP). He is director of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI).
Collins has described his parents as "only nominally Christian" and by graduate school he considered himself an atheist. However, dealing with dying patients led him to question his religious views, and he investigated various faiths. He became a believer after observing the faith of his critically ill patients and reading Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis.
In Collins' book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (published in July 2006),
Humans are unique in ways that defy evolutionary explanation and point to our spiritual nature. This includes the existence of the Moral Law (the knowledge of right and wrong) and the search for God that characterizes all human cultures throughout history.
Evolution is God's way of giving upgrades. As somebody who studies DNA, the fact that we are 98.4 percent identical at the DNA level to a chimpanzee, it's pretty hard to ignore the fact that when I am studying a particular gene, I can go to the mouse and find it's the similar gene, and it's 90 percent the same.
On-line video of a lecture entitled The Language of God: A Believer Looks at the Human Genome given at the 2006 meeting of the American Scientific Affiliation