We need a new NIH director: Column
Francis Collins is most definitely not pro-life, nor in the same leadership class as Trump.
Over his first 100 days in office, President Trump has set a new direction for the country in a variety of areas, from Defense policy to health care and federal hiring. One by one, he has been making good on his campaign promises. He is burnishing his pro-life credentials as well as proving his drive to innovate and put America back in a position of global leadership. Next on the president’s list should be a new director for the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The incumbent, Dr. Francis Collins, is a leftover from the Obama administration. That is startling enough for such a vital role, but Collins is most definitely not pro-life nor in the same leadership class as Trump. Collins left the NIH in 2008 to work for the Obama campaign team, where he helped set the Obama research priorities, including creating the NIH registry of human embryonic stem cell lines. The registry is a listing of cells created by destroying human embryos that are eligible for federal taxpayer dollars, and the power to approve for this deathly listing rests with… the NIH director.
Collins also supports human cloning to create embryos for experiments. Some call such a technique “clone and kill” since the cloned human embryo is not allowed to survive and develop, but is disaggregated to use her cells in laboratory tests.
He takes the completely unscientific view that a cloned embryo is not really an embryo, because, he says, this is not the natural way that embryos come into existence. This makes any cloned human beings fair game to be used, including destroyed, for experiments. By Collins’ logic, Dolly the cloned sheep was not really a sheep.
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Unethical research under the Collins-led NIH doesn’t stop there. In 2016, NIH began consideration of allowing creation — with taxpayer dollars — of human-animal chimeras, including creation of animals that could contain human sperm, human eggs or a human brain. This macabre, unethical science certainly does not represent innovation in healthcare.
Even though we are now in the Trump era, Collins continues to approve more cell lines from destroyed human embryos for use in taxpayer-funded research; the most recent approvals were last month. Embryonic stem cell science relies on destroying embryos to “harvest” their cells. Collins not only approves of this technique but continues to award federal dollars to the destroyers of young embryos. He has called it “important, life-saving research”, despite the fact that embryonic stem cells have not saved a single human life nor had any proven success in patients. It’s all about destruction and lives lost.
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Personnel, the adage goes, is policy. Leftovers represent stale policy. Trump needs someone in this critical leadership role for American research who aligns with his strong pro-life ethic and his desire to unleash American ingenuity. There are well-qualified candidates to rev up America’s biomedical engine and to make it a fountainhead of new therapies against some of the worst diseases facing our world.
In this enterprise, we haven’t a moment to lose. We just need a new NIH Director.
David A. Prentice is vice president & director of research at Charlotte Lozier Institute, research and education institute of the Susan B. Anthony List, an organization dedicated to electing candidates and pursuing policies that will reduce and ultimately end abortion..
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