Yearning for Wisdom

What does it mean to truly seek wisdom in an age of information overload and rampant misinformation? The need for wisdom is especially urgent in our times, as we grapple with the perils of being misled by falsehoods, the deep mistrust fueled by societal polarization, and the weight of making consequential decisions under uncertainty. Nowhere has this been more evident than during the pandemic, when public health leaders faced the daunting task of navigating a deadly crisis where the right course of action was often unclear, and every choice carried profound costs and inevitable regrets. Few understand the demands of such a journey better than my guest today.

Dr. Francis Collins, former director of the National Institutes of Health and a celebrated physician-geneticist, has spent his life navigating the intersections of science, faith, and public service. Known for his leadership in the Human Genome Project, Collins has been a towering figure in both the scientific and public spheres. From 2009 to 2021, he served under three Presidents as the Director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the largest supporter of biomedical research in the world.  Following a year in the White House as the President’s Acting Science Advisor, he oversees a research laboratory as a Distinguished Investigator in the intramural program of the National Human Genome Research Institute.  He also leads a bold administration initiative to eliminate hepatitis C in the United States. His contributions to science, medicine, and society have been recognized by the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Medal of Science, and the Templeton Prize.  

In our conversation, Francis shares how beauty shaped his early life and sparked his journey into science. From playing the piano in his childhood home to marveling at the complexities of the genetic code, beauty has been a thread running through his life’s work. He describes science as a detective story, filled with moments of awe and wonder that sometimes feel like glimpsing the mind of God. But beauty and truth, he notes, are not confined to science. Francis opens up about his personal journey of faith and how it informs his scientific inquiry. He discusses how faith and science enrich one another, offering complementary ways of engaging with the mysteries of existence.

We focus our conversation on his new book, The Road to Wisdom, which offers a timely exploration of how we can recover our love of truth and rebuild trust in institutions. Drawing from his vast experience, Collins reflects on the challenges of public health leadership during the pandemic, candidly addressing missteps and lessons learned. He also emphasizes the importance of fostering meaningful dialogue in our polarized times, advocating for deeper listening and greater understanding of those with whom we disagree. Here, Francis recommends the work of groups like Braver Angels in fostering such understanding across divides.

Here are five key takeaways from our conversation.

1. Beauty inspires science: Collins recounts how the beauty of music and the natural world inspired his journey into science, showing that creativity and curiosity often go hand in hand.
2. Trust in institutions is crucial and can be rebuilt: Rebuilding trust in science and public institutions requires transparency, humility, and a willingness to engage with communities.
3. Science and faith enrich each other: Religious faith and scientific inquiry can coexist, offering complementary lenses through which to explore truth.
4. Healthy conflict is essential: Engaging across divides with respect and a willingness to listen can foster understanding and reduce polarization in society.
5. We are stewards of creation: Collins emphasizes the moral imperative to care for the planet, advocating for actions that ensure its preservation for future generations.

You can listen to our conversation in two parts (here and here), watch the full video, or read an unedited transcript below.

Transcript:

Brandon: Francis, thank you for joining us. It's such a pleasure to talk to you today.

Francis: Brandon, I'm glad to be your guest and to talk about beauty.

Brandon: Yeah, well, let's start, actually, by talking about beauty. I usually ask my guests to share a story about a profound encounter with beauty from their childhoods that remains with them till today. I wonder if anything came to your mind when I sent you that question.

Francis: I thought about it and, yeah, there were instances. I'll tell you about one. They all had for me to do with music as a source of beauty that catches me by surprise, lifts me up of myself in a way that I can't quite explain. But I will remember, as a child growing up on a farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, with pretty limited means, my parents were intellectually full of activities and interests in music and theater but not necessarily good at financials. So, for us, the Christmas season was always pretty scaled back. It had to be. But a certain Christmas Eve always had a certain series of events attached to it. One would be going with my father and my brother, walking across the forest that was up above our farmhouse to a neighboring stand of trees that we were allowed to survey and cut one for our Christmas tree and bring that back and set it up in our living room. Never did it before Christmas Eve. Then I would have made all sorts of ornaments for the Christmas tree, the usual popcorn and cranberries on strings and some of those chains that you make out of construction paper that's different colors. But then, there would be this moment where it was time to start putting those decorations on. By then, it would be just twilight getting dark. My father would always put on the record player, which really was a record player at that point, the Messiah.

Brandon: Oh, wow.

Francis: And it was familiar every Christmas because that was part of the tradition. But this particular time, there was one part of it that just caught me by complete surprise because it was so exquisitely beautiful. It was that aria for He Shall Feed His Flock Like a Shepherd. It comes from Isaiah. I had no spiritual or religious background, so I didn't recognize where the words were coming from. But it certainly was a sweet image of feeding the flock. Then the second part of that aria where the mezzo-soprano steps aside and the soprano comes forward and the whole thing moves up considerably is now from the New Testament. It's from Matthew, chapter 11. “Come unto me all you who are burdened and heavy laden and I will give you rest.” And, you know, being a seven-year-old probably didn't seem like heavy burden. But maybe at times, it did to me. That was like, "Whoa, those words. What is that about?" The combination of those words and the exquisite music or handle just left me with this sense of beauty. But it was an aching kind of beauty. It wasn't like, "Oh, hooray. This is like fireworks and yippee." This was more like, "I feel like I'm longing for something, but I don't know what it is."

Brandon: Did that mean anything to you? I mean, as you were navigating your childhood years, your teenage years, did that sort of surface in any way at all, or wasn't it until much later?

Francis: I was pretty good at suppressing because I was Imagining myself more and more getting into a scientific frame of mind. And this was not an experience that scientifically I could explain, or understand, or even think about. But then I would get caught again, usually, by a musical moment to feel somehow transported.

Brandon: Well, there are many who might be moved by such experiences and decide to become artists. You were growing up in a more literary, humanistic household. How did you gravitate towards science?

Francis: It might not have been the obvious. I certainly loved music and started playing keyboards at age four or five. Then I picked up guitar somewhat after that. But it never felt to me like that was a calling, as what I was going to spend my whole life on. It was something to enjoy. Science came into my foreground as a tenth grader in a public school in the form of a chemistry class taught by an extremely gifted teacher who helped me to see that science was a detective story. It was like, you're going to explore nature. Nature works in predictable ways, but we're not all that good always at understanding them. This is how you understand them. You design experiments. Sometimes they work, and sometimes they don't. But ultimately, you're finding out something that nobody knew before. And I was like, "Okay. That's what I want to do."

Brandon: Yeah, solving puzzles, the detective work, that's exactly — yeah, we've heard that among a number of people who we've interviewed, scientists we've talked to. There's also another thread I want to pick up on very briefly. You mentioned in your book that your parents worked with Eleanor Roosevelt. I wonder if some of your public service work has been inspired by that in any way.

Francis: It may have, although they ultimately were pretty disheartened by the way it turned out. Having just finished their own graduate school training at Yale, they signed up to be part of this experimental community in West Virginia called Arthurdale. Eleanor Roosevelt was really the main supporter of this model to try to help the coal miners who were in the depths of the Depression, to get back on their feet by teaching them some new skills, by providing them with a plot of land and sort of a Sears, Roebuck home you could build yourself and a lot of abilities to begin to grow their own food. My dad was the assistant headmaster of the school, teaching adults as well as children things that they might benefit from. He and my mom were totally into this. Eleanor Roosevelt would get in her own car by herself, drive from the White House over terrible roads to West Virginia, to spend the weekend fairly regularly with this group to cheer them up. And so that was inspiring. It was like this moment of feeling like, okay, this is maybe going to really help these people. But then some people came to FDR and said, "Do you realize what your wife is doing out there? This sounds to us awfully close to communism." He realized the risks, and he shut it down. My parents were incredibly disillusioned about that and basically counseled me as I was growing up. "Whatever you do, don't ever work for the federal government." Well, it didn't quite work out that way.

Brandon: Well, let's talk about that trajectory. So before that, before starting in — I mean, you started out in chemistry and quantum physics and then eventually — tell us about that trajectory. Because it's such an unusual pathway to start with physics and chemistry and then move into genetics.

Francis: It's very odd, isn't it? I got excited about science at that chemistry class and I made the assumption, therefore, that I should be a chemist. I think a lot of people at my age at that point have that same feeling. Like, "Oh, here's something I'm excited about learning. That must be what I'm supposed to do." Well, let's keep your horizons a little more open maybe, which I didn't. So I went to college. I studied chemistry and physics and math because they were all kind of tied together, and I stayed away from life science. That was much too messy. It is, by the way. But just to say, it's also really interesting. I wasn't ready for that kind of complexity. So I went off and got a PhD in physical chemistry, basically studying quantum mechanics. But along the way, I recognized there was a chemical that I had studied that was really interesting. It was called DNA. It was the stuff that actually functions as an instruction book for all living things, including us. I began to realize what I'm doing with my quantum mechanics equations and computer programs is kind of interesting from day to day, but I'm not sure it's something I want to do for the rest of my life. This other thing is really calling me. I had to struggle then about what to do with that realization. Just sort of shift and do a postdoc in a life science lab. But I wanted to keep all the options open. After having been so narrow, I wanted to be really wide. So I decided, well, I'll just go to medical school. I could study the science, but I could also study the medicine part and maybe even figure out how they could fit together.

Brandon: Well, that's so unusual. I mean, we've talked to — again, one of the things we find with scientists we talked to is that many of them find very different sort of aesthetic aspects to the work they're doing that are primary motivators. And so a lot of physicists love the symmetry and the simplicity. Then biologists are much more drawn to complexity and actually don't like the simplification. That becomes, we find in some interdisciplinary collaborations, a bit of an obstacle, where the aesthetic criteria are so different. And so for someone to switch from those fields, it's almost like you have to value different forms of beauty. I don't know if that rings true.

Francis: It does, Brandon. I'm not sure I quite thought about it that way. But yeah, as somebody studying quantum mechanics, I was struck by the beauty of the mathematics. Hψ̂=Eψ, the Hamiltonian, and the way in which that all describes exquisitely in the form of a second-order differential equation how matter and energy work, and Maxwell's equations about electromagnetism. Simple, beautiful. So how did I jump from that into something as messy as human biology? I think the link was DNA because it was still simple in a way. I mean, it's structured as beautiful double helix. This idea that the information necessary to create a human being from a single cell could somehow be encoded in this script, which is not infinite in size. It's big, but it's not infinite. That with three billion letters of this code, you could build a brain and all the other parts of a human. That still is both awesome and beautiful. And so I can't look at that script without having that reaction over and over again. So maybe that helped me because that was, at least on the surface of it, simple and elegant. Almost like an equation. But what it led to was complex and elegant, and they were both beautiful.

Brandon: As you moved on in your career, you moved into more leadership roles, both with the Human Genome Project and then at NIH. And as you moved away from bench science, did you find yourself encountering other forms of beauty in working with people and with teams and large collaborations? Is there a different kind of beauty there in science?

Francis: There is. Even before getting to that, I found there was beauty in the clinical practice of medicine. I invested myself pretty heavily in learning how to be a physician and spending time at the bedside of people who were struggling with very difficult issues and being put in this position of intimacy with people, that normally would not happen with someone you had only just met that afternoon, who maybe now is talking about the most important considerations in their life — sometimes including their faith right there in front of you. That was a beautiful example of how people can really reach out and touch each other. I loved that experience, although it had that same kind of aching component to it, a feeling inadequate somehow to be able to really fill the needs of many of those people who are in a very needy state. Then certainly, moving more into the scientific arena, starting with my own lab, which was maybe a small group of 8 or 10 people. But then turning that into the genome project, which was 2,400 people in six countries, quite a bit of a scale-up. That also had its moments of joyful relationships and a beauty to what it looks like to have a team like that, of people with diverse backgrounds, different languages, different skills all attached to the same historical of being able to read out for the first time this instruction book for human life, which nobody could say was unimportant.

Brandon: Are there moments that stand out to you of profound beauty in your professional life in the last few decades?

Francis: I think scientific discovery itself is a beautiful thing. I've had a few occasions where that happened to me, and I could see something that nobody had known before. But it was a glimpse of God's mind so that made it much more significant than if it was just a detective story of a scientific adventure. When we first discovered the cause of cystic fibrosis after a five-year really difficult search before there were the kinds of technologies and resources to be able to make this feasible, there it was on a rainy night in New Haven when I was at a meeting with my collaborator. We looked at the data coming off the fax machine that our labs had just generated in Ann Arbor and Toronto, and there it was. Part of me wanted to cry, and part of me wanted to cheer. Part of me just felt profound significance at the moment. And to have something this simple be the cause of such a really dreadful disease and the sense that we had now crossed into a territory where we knew that and might be able to do something about it, that was a moment. It had a lot of components, but beauty was certainly one of them.

Brandon: In your book, I was moved by just the stories of people whose lives had been changed by the medications that were developed as a result of this discovery. To be able to see what modern science can do and how it can transform life, that's really profound. Let's start talking about your book The Road to Wisdom, which is such a delightful read. I'm really glad you wrote this. Could you tell us about why you set out to write it, and why is wisdom the central concept there?

Francis: Well, I didn't really want to write it. I got to the point where I couldn't help myself. I had a lot of encouragement from others, particularly the Reverend Tim Keller to whom the book is devoted, who I got to spend a lot of time with in his last couple of years as he was suffering from pancreatic cancer. I've had the privilege, Brandon, of being in the public eye as a physician-scientist, leading projects like the Human Genome and leading the NIH under three different presidents, and feeling the excitement of what science was bringing forward in terms of advances to alleviate suffering and improve people's ability to live a full and happy life, not being struck down early by disease. And yet, I could see our society, despite all of that promise, was becoming more and more torn apart by other issues that were spilling over into their acceptance of science. That was true of faith communities, just as much as secular communities.

When COVID came along, what should have been a moment to bring everybody together — because we had a really serious shared enemy of virus called SARS‑CoV‑2 that was threatening our very survival — it didn't quite work. Maybe for a little while, it sort of seemed like, okay, we're all in this together. But it didn't last very long. Then it began to become again a source of bickering and disagreements about what was the right decision. Then a flood of misinformation that did great harm to our ability to get along with each other and even cost people their lives when it came to misinformation about the vaccine, which was the most amazing achievement of science at that point in just 11 months. But which, in the United States, some 50 million people decided not to take advantage of. And the saddest of all statistics is that, that led rather directly to the deaths in the U.S. of about 234,000 people, who were good, honorable people flooded with this kind of information that made them doubt whether the vaccine was safe or whether it would work and chose to pass up the opportunity to take advantage of that. Then COVID came along. How could that have happened?

Looking at that as a scientist and a person of faith, I was astounded that in such a technologically-advanced country — we think of ourselves in that regard — this kind of confusion could have been so rampant, and led not just to some unfortunate disagreements but actually loss of life. Our culture war had actually started to kill people. And I couldn't stay silent about that. Ultimately, I began to think about writing this book. After I stepped down as the NIH director, I got pulled into the White House unexpectedly at that point for about a year as the president's science advisor. Then finally, after finishing that phase, it felt like I've got to do something. And Tim Keller, again, kept pushing on me. "Francis, you have to do this." So blame him if you don't like the book.

Brandon: You say also it's predominantly white evangelicals, your tribe, as it were, who were the main opponents of the vaccine and so on, right?

Francis: They were particularly prominent. They were certainly not the only ones. It was actually, in many instances, it seemed like the main determinant of one's attitude about a scientific achievement, namely a vaccine, was your political party. When you start mixing politics and science, nothing good is going to happen. In this instance, it led to the conclusion by a lot of people that they shouldn't trust science because some particular political message made them doubt it.

Brandon: Even before the pandemic, there's some research I'd done with my mentor and your friend, Elaine Howard Ecklund, on people's attitudes towards science. We'd found that, for instance, among climate change, it was very clear that among more conservatives, it was seen as or interpreted as a propaganda by Al Gore. I mean, this was the way in which a lot of the signs around climate change was seen as sort of politically fueled. And so that kind of suspicion has been in the air for growing, I suppose, for the last few decades. But it certainly precipitated in a horrible way during the pandemic.

Francis: Yes, and it's reflective of the way in which we have become divided about almost everything. Distrust in every institution has been steadily increasing. Maybe some of that being earned by institutional bad behavior, but much of it is just manufactured. Based on this overall epidemic of cynicism, that seems to be part of daily discourse, especially if it comes to any kind of an organization that sounds like it might be not actually doing things in your best interest. We are dangerously close to being paranoid about a lot of institutional activities when society can't exist without such institutions as a way in which we establish our constitution of knowledge, as Jonathan Rauch calls it, that we can depend upon and then build upon to move forward and try to improve human flourishing. Without institutions, it's just chaos.

Brandon: Yeah, and that's a really critical point. I realized many people feel that they've been betrayed by institutions, whether it's through corruption, or ineptitude, or other forms of perceived betrayal. But to reject these institutions as a result is not a wise strategy. I mean, you yourself had, you know, I was struck to read about your botched — it was a nasal septum surgery. Could you share that? Because that would drive a lot of people to say, I have no more trust in a medical establishment, much less become a physician.

Francis: Yeah, the chapter I wrote about trust sort of asked everybody to think about occasions where you put trust in a person or an institution and when it worked and when it didn't work. Thinking about my own experiences where it didn't work, I had a really badly deviated septum that was causing me a lot of sinus infections. I was a resident in internal medicine at University of North Carolina. I figured, okay, it's time to get this fixed. I went to the chairman of the department thinking, "Well, he's got the most experience." He was an incredibly, intellectually gifted surgeon. But manually, he was way past the prime. I couldn't get my mind around why that would be an issue, even though I was getting some warning signs from some of his younger colleagues. So I went under his knife and came out worse than before. I guess I will never breathe through my nose. So that was the case of badly placed trust, where I didn't really think about his surgical competence. I just thought about his academic competence.

Brandon: It's helpful that you lay out those different criteria for trust and the discernment process that we have to undergo as a society. Well, let's talk about those different themes. Maybe we'll come back to trust. Let's talk about truth because that's such a contested issue these days. One of the things we found, which I found quite surprising when I talked to the scientists. We interviewed some. We surveyed some 3,500 scientists in four countries. We interviewed more than 200 of them, and we talked to them about whether they saw science as being in the business of, was science about the quest for truth? What is science about? We were surprised to hear most of them say, "No, we don't think science is about truth." They felt very reticent to embrace the term truth. And it was in part — now this was during 2021 — they felt that what had happened was that the public expected there to be a more, truth as a sort of dogmatic and fallible sort of thing. When scientists changed their minds, they were getting criticized. And so they said, "Well, we shouldn't talk about truth. Maybe we should talk about understanding and convey the idea that everything we come up with is potentially subject to revision. It's fallible." And so it was interesting to hear a lot of hedging around that concept. You offer some distinctions that might be helpful to our scientists to say, well, wait, don't throw out the concept altogether. Could you respond to that a little bit? What might you say to some of these scientists who read it and say, "I don't think we're about truth anymore"?

Francis: Yeah, I would certainly not want to say that. But I also hear what they're saying about the dangers of putting forward a tentative conclusion as if that's the final answer, and then people wonder what happened when it had to change. We had to do some of that with COVID as well. It was a great example of how science works in real time. But it wasn't necessarily seen that way. I think it's really helpful to distinguish what kind of claim someone is making. If it's a truth claim, wait a minute. What level of truth are we discussing? In the book, I kind of have this series of concentric circles that has helped me to think about that in a given situation. The innermost circle, which is a truth that basically would have to be the way it is in any universe, is mathematics. Two plus two is going to be four. I don't think we can change that just because we don't like the answer. It won't help you on the math test to say, "Well, that's not true for me." The next circle out, which is where a lot of science tries to land, is in this area of established facts. Here is something that has been scientifically explored. It has been re-tested by others. It has been confirmed over and over again. The earth is really not flat. It's round, or it's sort of slightly elliptical. That's a fact. It's not okay in that situation to say, "Well, that's not true for me." Sorry flat earthers. But this is something that we can all kind of hang on to. It's really important for society not to give up on those once they're established. There's a lot of history facts in there as well. A man really did walk on the moon in 1969. And for people who try to say, "Well, that was just a fraudulent made-up thing," sorry, you have to have extremely compelling evidence to take a fact in that zone and decide it's not a fact anymore. We've gotten careless about that. Almost any historical thing is now under question. Did 9 /11 really happen? All of those kinds of conspiracies find their way in and are grabbed onto by a lot more people than I would have thought a decade ago would be taken in.

Then the next circle out — maybe this is what the scientists are talking about that you described — is this uncertain area where we have data. It looks like this is probably right, but we're not quite sure yet. We need to do some more work. We haven't elected it yet to move inward to that next circle of established facts. But that's what science is all about. We're going to make hypothesis. We're going to test them. We're going to look at the data, and we're going to compare things with our colleagues, and we're going to get peer review involved. And only when we really reach that magic moment where everybody can see, "Yes, this really is truth," then it is truth. It really is. We shouldn't be shy in saying that. Science did discover truth. That's what science is able of doing about nature. Then we can be, okay, confident that we move that particular finding into a place where we can call it truth. But we got to be careful when things haven't quite made it there. Once in a while, something in that circle of established facts, something comes up and like, well, classical mechanics was an established fact. It still works really well in daily experience. But there was quantum, and so we have to have a little asterisk there saying, in certain kinds of situations, you probably can't just be confident that Newton's laws are going to work for you. Then the outermost circle is just opinion. We spend a lot of our time arguing about things that are opinions, which is fine. That doesn't threaten the order of things, as long as we're clear that my opinion doesn't mean that you're wrong if you don't agree with it. But whenever we get into one of these truth arguments or a claim is made, stop for a minute and say, "Wait a minute. Which circle are we in?" If it's an opinion, fine. We can argue about it. You don't have to be wrong, and I don't have to be wrong. It's an opinion. But if we're in established facts, then let's look at the evidence. And if one of us is making a point that doesn't fit with the evidence, then we may have to give up our position. I might have to say, "I don't like that fact." But it's still a fact. Facts don't care how you feel.

Brandon: Yeah, that's really helpful. I think a lot of category are in the ways in which people respond to things. I think you also lay out Bernice's nature of lies, the variety of untruths that we embrace, which some people might embrace as truth out of sheer ignorance. But then there are things like delusions and even bullsh*t, which, you know. I'm curious to know, why do you think we embrace that? Is it a disregard for truth, or is it a valorization of some other criterion like power or status? I'm curious to know what you think is behind the rejection of truth for the sake of some other goal.

Francis: Yeah, it is hard to sort that out. Because I think all of us, in our own personal relationships or within our family, we do value truth. My daughters, when they were growing up, knew there was one thing that would get me more upset than anything. It was if they told me a lie, that that was just not something that could be let go. That was going to require a conversation. Maybe even a little bit of a pointed finger and a discussion about, okay, how did that happen? And why could we make sure that doesn't happen the next time, even if you're tempted to do so? It didn't always work, but it was a pretty profound principle. I think a lot of families have that same set of guidelines. You don't lie to your family members just to get out of trouble. But I don't know. In societal terms, it feels to me like we have kind of allowed more and more of that kind of misinformation or frankly disinformation, intentional lies, to go by without being challenged. Certainly, in politics, where politics has become so performative, there doesn't seem to be a consequence for saying something that's demonstrably false. It's just like, oh, well, you know, it's politics. That maybe has infected other parts of our society along the way. The bullsh*t one, which is one of those areas of lies that philosophers have even written about, it is more what you do in marketing, where you basically put forward a whole host of claims about something that the person putting for the claims knows it probably isn't true, but they don't care. That's almost worse because you don't care than somebody who's really got an agenda, and they set up a plan to distort something. At least, they had a plan. This is just like, it doesn't matter. And we get numbed, I'm afraid, by some of that when it's so much around us. And sad to say, I think social media has turned into a really bad influence in that space. If you look at an awful lot of what's going on social media, most people will agree, well, that's probably not true. But it's still out there, and it even spreads rapidly when it makes you angry or fearful. There's data to support that. You know this, Brandon. If somebody had put out something that's not true but it makes people mad or fearful, it spreads ten times faster than a reassuring fact that's actually true.

Brandon: No it is quite frightening, and the ways in which this can be used to manipulate people is quite scary. Let's talk about science as the other big theme. We talked a little bit about it. Well, I asked you a little bit about COVID, and you talked about the way in which the pandemic was handled. Science communication, in particular, during the pandemic is one area where you say, "I have to point the finger at myself and my other colleagues as well. Their communication was not always as clear and helpful as it needed to be." If you could go back in time, and with the Wisdom of Hindsight changed how the NIH handled the pandemic, what would you all do differently? Knowing the way that things unfolded, what do you think could have been done differently?

Francis: I was one of several folks who were shoved in front of cameras on a regular basis to try to tell the public what we thought would be the best way to protect yourself, especially during 2020. There was so much happening on a day-by-day basis that most of the time we were doing the best we could, but we were not that confident that we had the whole story. I wish we had said that more often. I wish every recommendation to the public would have started out with, "Look. This is an evolving situation. We don't have all the data we need. We're going to tell you the best recommendation we can come up with right now based on what we do know. But it might have to change in another couple of weeks or a month. Don't be surprised if that happens." We didn't usually say that. I'm just sort of anxious to try to get people to take action so I was like, "Now hear this. This is the thing you should do for yourself right now." I think that did not help. At one point, you're saying you don't need a mask. Then a month and a half later, you're saying you need a mask. There were good scientific reasons for that, as we began to learn that asymptomatic people could be spreading virus like crazy. So masks were going to be important. But that didn't necessarily come across, and we lost confidence along the way. So I wish we'd done a better job of that.

I wish we'd figured out a way to have the science communication more distributed. It did come across as there was this sort of limited set of talking heads. They're people that you and your community somewhere in the heartland don't know, have never met. They seem like they're a little bit on the elite side of the spectrum. So after a while, you start to wonder, should I trust these people? If we had a better way — maybe this is what we need for science communication but it hasn't happened yet — on distributing the information through recognized local sources, giving the materials to all of the docs, all of the high school science teachers, all of the folks who are in a position to be able to share truth about what's happening instead of having it so limited, maybe people would have been more willing to listen and to accept what was being put forward. But that would be a big task. You almost need a science communication corps – not a peace corps but a science communication corps — that would be empowered to do this in a responsible professional way to cut the facts right but were seen as part of the community.

Brandon: Yeah, I suppose the challenge is doing that in real time, where it's fast enough to have the impact but also the challenges with the kind of back and forth that happens within the scientific community, with the peer review process and the disagreements. So it becomes hard to imagine how that would happen. While we were doing our research, we were wondering whether one of the big takeaways from our project and what the public could learn from scientists could be not so much the beauty of scientific facts but the beauty of understanding and the intellectual humility that goes into the scientific process, right, and the ability to value truth and to change one's mind when the evidence is presented. Then we had some pushback from a colleague who had run some citizen science experiments. What he had found was this. They had done a couple of different groups of people. In one group, you have citizens working with scientists on an established experiment — they run this experiment various times. They knew what to expect — and another group where the scientists didn't actually know what they were going to find. It turned out, at the end of the study, that the group where the public had actually, members of the public were discovering something new with the scientists trusted the scientists less than the group in which the scientists were the established experts. That was a sort of frightening prospect for him. Because he's like, "Oh, I thought the people would value scientists who are in it with us, changing their minds, et cetera." So we're wondering whether maybe, you know, is that just a short-term thing, or is it just in the context of a pandemic? Do we really need certainty when there's a lot of uncertainty in the environment? Are we looking for high priests to give us dogma and comfort us more than truth?

Francis: Yeah, that's a really interesting observation. I would guess it is, especially when you're in a crisis and people are fearful about their very survival, that you want certainty. And to say that, "Okay. We don't know the answer and we're going to have to work to figure it out through science," is not the way a lot of people would want to think this is playing out. That probably played out in terms of the dynamic we were talking about a minute ago. Even if we had said, "You know, this is the best we can do. But here's what you should do today," people would still want to believe that that's certain and they can count on it. But we could have been, I think, more effective in having that kind of a conversation about the importance of uncertainty instead of dismissing it.

Brandon: Would you have any recommendations for, you know. As you say, there will no doubt be a future pandemic. I mean, what should we do the next time in case something starts to emerge? Would you have any advice for future leaders?

Francis: Yeah, I do think we need to have this community-based network. We've started that in 2020 with something called CEAL, the Community Engagement Alliance, which took a lot of the information about vaccines and distributed that to various community leaders in a way that they had access to the stuff that was science and evidence-based but could then reach out to their communities as trusted authorities to be able to share that. I was really worried, for instance, that the African-American community was going to be particularly skeptical of vaccines given that their history of being well-treated by medical research, given Tuskegee and other things has not been great and the healthcare system is still full of plenty of disparities. And by activating this kind of a community system, that turned out actually to go pretty well. The vaccine trials were very nicely engaged in by people of color. And when you look at what happened with vaccines once they were available, people of color did better than a lot of white evangelicals did, even though they might've had reasons to be suspicious based on history. But a lot of that was because of having a community voice there to say, "It's not just those people in Washington or Atlanta that are telling you what's true. We're telling you too."

Brandon: Yeah, and it seemed like faith leaders had a big role to play. Faith communities were sites of distributing vaccines as well, and of administering.

Francis: Yeah, they were.

Brandon: Politically, though, it seems like that's one of the biggest challenges. In a network like that to ensure that it's sufficiently diverse politically and getting buy-in across the different parties, the culture war seems like maybe one of the more pressing obstacles.

Francis: It is, and it can't be underestimated in terms of how important it is. To take that into account, I spent a lot of Saturday mornings in 2020 with the teams that were doing the vaccine trial enrollment. Because their default was to try to enroll as many people as they could in a short period of time, because that's how we're going to find out if the vaccine worked. In the first few weeks, it was pretty much 95% white people. That was not going to be the way in which we could really assess whether the vaccine is going to work for everybody. So that meant having really creative ideas about how exactly to do that outreach. Because we haven't been that good at that when it came to offering people the chance to take part in clinical research. We learned a lot of new things, that I'm glad to say can now be utilized in other situations. But it was tough going at first.

Brandon: I want to come back to some aspects of this, which, you know, what you've learned also from your critics through Braver Angels and your conversations with Wilk especially in just a moment. But I want to ask a little bit about faith because that's the other key theme in your book. You grew up in a household, as you said, that wasn't particularly religious. But in your late 20s, you had a powerful moment where faith became salient to you. Could you say a little bit about how that happened?

Francis: I entered medical school as an atheist. I sustained that for the first couple of years, which is mostly book reading and lecture listening. But then they are in the hospital. Sitting at the bedside of people who are facing probably fatal conditions that we aren't going to be able to rescue them from. You have to think in that circumstance, how would I handle this? And so I began to wonder. Had I kind of skipped over the phase of really thinking deeply about religion, about whether God exists? But I tried not to think about it too much because it made me uncomfortable. I actually had a patient — I had one moment that's just absolutely locked in my mind. It's a moment in time — who shared her faith with me as she was in the last stages of dying of heart disease and then turned to look at me directly and said, "Doctor, I've shared my faith with you, but you haven't said anything. What do you believe?" Anybody listening to this, imagine being asked that question right now. "What do you believe?" Would you have a nice, crisp answer? I sure didn't. I stammered. I guess I don't really know. I heard the words come out of my mouth. Like, wow, that's a pretty terrible admission for somebody who thinks he's got his mind all tuned to what matters. You've totally avoided the most important question you've ever been asked. That's not good. That started me down a path, Brandon, that went over a couple of years. I'm trying to understand whether there was any evidence out there to believe in God. What do you know? Some of it came out of science. Like, there's a big bang. Oh, wait a minute. Nature didn't create itself. How did that happen? The universe is beautiful, and it's organized around mathematics that are also beautiful. And for this fine-tuning thing that makes the whole thing work to be interesting, sure seems like an intelligence behind all of this.

Then there's this thing called good and evil, which I hadn't really thought about. I couldn't figure out how to explain that on a purely materialistic basis, that morality thing which seemed to point to a creator who wasn't just interested in matter and energy but was also interested in me. And after a long struggle over those two years initially trying to strengthen my atheism and ultimately realizing now what to do, I also came to know the person of Jesus and realized that that solved for me another problem of recognizing that God was holy and that I was not. I needed some way to be able to approach God. That's what Jesus represented for me. That he also was a man but he also knew what God was all about because he was God. He died on the cross. He died for me. And that of all the world's religions — I studied a lot of them — just sort of jumped out at me. It's something. I can't ignore this. So I became a follower of Jesus. I was 27, and I have had that as the rock that I could stand on when the storms are crashing around me, and they have sometimes, and know that this is not something that I have to be fearful of going away or turning into something different. It's the foundation of everything that matters.

Brandon: Beautiful. You talk about C.S. Lewis being a big influence for you, as he was for me. I want to quote where you say he opened you to those rare moments often inspired by the beauty of music or nature. "When I had a glimpse of something profound, a sense of longing I could not name, a piercing ache, it was somehow more satisfying than any earthly happiness but gone too soon. I recognized those in myself." Our theme for this season of the podcast is yearning, and you've voiced this profound core yearning. Could you say a little bit more about that and what that means for your faith's journey?

Francis: Yeah, this is one of those things that is hard to put into words accurately, this moment of longing. Again, what Lewis calls joy. Although, that gets used in lots of other ways. But this piercing ache, it is what it feels like that is both incredibly sweet. But also, there's something about it that makes you feel so much like you're longing. Like you're made for something different than what most of your experience is all about. This is a glimpse of that. And I do take that, as Lewis did, as one of those signposts to maybe what we're really made for and what we eventually will be able to experience. Oftentimes, those experiences do happen in a moment of beauty. That can happen to be in nature. That moment when I realized I could no longer be resisting the idea of becoming a Christian was on a hike in the northwest of the United States, in the Cascade Mountains. On a beautiful fall day, it came around a corner. To my surprise, I encountered this very high up, frozen waterfall, and it just changed me. Again, that sort of moment of where it's a sudden intake of your breath like, uh. Then you have to, for a moment, figure out, why did that hit me so hard? Well, I want it to hit me hard. I want it to last, but I know it won't. But that was the moment for me. That very specific image that said there is so much more to what life is and to who you are, Francis, than the materialistic view that you have spent most of your 27 years on. Open yourself up. Don't be afraid.

Brandon: Has the practice of science ever generated those moments for you?

Francis: It has. I think science can also have a form of beauty which is visual. As somebody who studies life science, there are things that we are able to do with images that are exquisite. My lab work is on diabetes. One of the things we've learned how to do, which is turning out to be really very revealing, is to study somebody who has diabetes. What we really want to do is to understand what's happening with the cells in their body, the pancreas, that make insulin. You can't biopsy those. That's not allowed, and that would be very bad for somebody. But you can take a skin cell, and you can turn it into a stem cell from that person. And then if you do everything right, over 32 days, adding just the right cocktail of growth factors, you can turn that stem cell into an insulin-secreting beta cell just like you'd have in the pancreas. In fact, you can even make a whole pancreatic islet that you can look at under the microscope. So it has both the cells that make insulin and the ones that make glucagon. It looks remarkably like what that person has. But you're looking at it under the microscope in your laboratory because of this magic. That's a moment of beauty. And it just, yeah, the first time I saw one of those — because it took a while to set this up appropriately stained with the right fluorescent antibodies. It's in multiple colors — I just had to stop and have a jaw dropping moment of, "This is amazing that this is possible to do." That is clearly opening up a whole new window of understanding diabetes but also a window into the beauty of science.

Brandon: Yeah, amazing. Francis, you're a bridge builder. You created BioLogos, which is this organization that integrates faith and science. Then also, you've been working with Braver Angels to help rebuild trust in society. Could you say a little bit about what led you to your work with both these organizations?

Francis: Well, with BioLogos, my own realization that science and faith could co-exist happily in my own experience after that conversion at age 27, I found I, was not encountering all the ways in which people said your head will explode. That I was having a wonderful time seeing how science could be a form of worship. It was uncovering things about God's creation, giving us a glimpse of God's mind. I was not encountering places where I thought what I could read in scripture and what I could learn in a laboratory were in conflict. Sometimes I could see how we would assume that by a certain interpretation of one or the other, but it wasn't too hard to figure out how to put them together in a fashion that wasn't just like okay. It was actually complementary. It was harmonious. I wrote this book called The Language of God to try to explain that view, because it didn't seem as if it was being talked about very much. Even though I knew a fair amount of scientists who had that same view, they were nervous about speaking about it. And after the book came out, I got deluged with all kinds of follow-up emails from people who had seen the book and had other questions and wanted to have the conversation go on. That was the motivation to start BioLogos, this wonderful foundation that has grown over the course now over the last 15 years, to have a couple million people who regularly tap into its resources and who engage in this gracious dialogue about how rigorous science and Christian faith have a lot to say to each other. There's a whole lot of resources there for people listening who want to see what some of those conversations look like at biologos.org. There were meetings, and they have a curriculum for high school students that also brings together faith and rigorous science in a way that sometimes people were having trouble finding resources for. So that's just been a joy.

I'm now a senior fellow at BioLogos. I had to step away from it for 12 years when I was the NIH director, because you aren't allowed to have any other activities outside of that job. But now I have a little bit more of a chance to come alongside and cheer for what they're doing. So yeah, maybe that helped, having that experience of seeing that sometimes when there's a conflict, it's because we haven't listened to each other. We haven't really understood each other's perspectives. I think because I live in both the science and the Christian faith world, I do understand the perspectives. And it's been very reassuring that when we thought there were conflicts, they can generally be resolved. But now here we are with what's happened in our society, especially in the U.S., with all the contentiousness about what's happened with public health and about everything else for that matter. It's hard to identify an issue right now in American society where we aren't polarized, a lot of it driven by politics. I needed to understand that. And so I did get engaged with Braver Angels, which has its mission to bring together people on opposite sides of a contentious issue. Maybe it's gun control, or maybe it's immigration, or maybe it's public health response to COVID. That's where I often got engaged. You really have to listen to the other side of that issue. Not just plan your snappy response but listen to understand so well that you can say back to that person, "Here's what I heard you say. Tell me if that's right." This is like marriage counseling for our country, I think.

And I learned a lot. So for COVID, I learned from Wilk Wilkinson. He's my alter ego in this because he's very much on the conservative side. He runs a trucking company in Minnesota. A lot of the public health recommendations really seemed tone deaf for what his community was going through. Nobody was asking them. "Well, wait a minute, what's your situation? Does it make sense for you to have to close your businesses when you haven't seen a case yet?" He had all the good points there. Well, he had some positions that I think are wrong. I have some that he thinks are wrong. But we're good friends now. We kind of enjoy the banter. We enjoy going to get a beer together, and we both share this idea that this is what we should do more of and build those bridges. The book, really the last chapter of it, is all about that. How can we individually start to bring our society back together again? Don't count on the politicians to do it. They're more polarized than the people are. I'm afraid the media isn't helping much either. Certainly, social media isn't. So how's it going to work? It's got to be from each of us. We, the people, maybe have the solution in our own hands, but we've got to act on it.

Brandon: You make a good distinction between healthy conflict and high conflict. Do you have recommendations for how do we rebuild trust through healthy conflict?

Francis: Indeed. Healthy conflict is where you don't expect that everybody is going to agree on the point because that's not how we are. I would hope, if we're talking about an established fact to come back to our circles of truth, that we could agree on those. But anything that's sort of in that zone of uncertainty, okay, let's listen to each other. Let's figure out, why does that person have such a different view? They're not evil. They have a different perspective based on their own sources of information, on their life experience. Learn from that. Listen to that. Maybe my view isn't as solid as I thought it was either. But the goal can't be to convince the other person they're wrong. That does not work. It's going to be to understand the other person's perspective and then reflect on your own. That's what Braver Angels has done. I've spent a lot of time with them, and it's given me a chance in some instances to talk about the ways in which I think I have failed in various aspects of the COVID response. I think that's the way you start. As each of us both understands the other position and then begins to admit maybe ours wasn't so perfect, then you could really start to see people coming together. Unfortunately, in our media-driven society right now, people are reluctant to admit any kind of failure because there's a piling on — has this happened to me — of media saying, "Oh, there. You see. He's saying what he should have said all along. Actually, there are a lot of other things that he did wrong, and he should have talked about those too." So it has to be somewhat symmetric, yeah.

Brandon: Yeah, nothing will be satisfactory. Right? So that's the challenge. Well, let's close with perhaps, any advice you might have for our listeners who are still sort of trying to figure out how to move forward in a context in which we're becoming increasingly polarized? Maybe you suggest ways to develop mental immunity that might be helpful for us to start implementing in our own lives as we move ahead.

Francis: Yeah, so I even suggest a pledge in this book that people might consider reading and thinking about whether they would want to sign on to. The pledge is up on the Braver Angels' website. If you just go to your Google search and punch in "Road to Wisdom Pledge," you'll come to it. Because I think it's one thing to talk about this and then go on doing what we were doing before. It's another to say, okay, it's time to take action for each of us. It's time to step away from saying, "Things shouldn't be like this," to saying, "I should be like this." So one of them is the mental immunity, to realize that we're all barraged with information that's coming at us in large volumes from multiple sources. And we've got to be really careful about which of those we should bring onboard into our own portfolio of truth. Because a lot of what you're seeing is not. That means tightening up your own criteria by which you make those judgments about trust. Is this a person with integrity, or do they have competence? I mean, real competence. Do they have humility? Are you being misled by the fact that this is somebody who's part of your own tribe, your own bubble? That doesn't mean that they necessarily know what they're talking about. And are you ignoring information that's coming from another tribe even though it's actually highly qualified and factual? All of that begin to really change your view so that you're not absorbing things that are bad for you or passing them on to other people.

The other part of this, I think, really is to try to step outside of our comfort zones and begin to talk to people who do have a different opinion and not be afraid of that. But do that kind of outreach. Think of somebody that you used to be friends with, and now it's gotten really difficult because of different political views. Just reach out and say, "You know, I'd like to begin to understand why you and I have gone such different directions. The first thing I'd do is to have you tell me your story. I really want to understand. I might ask you some questions, but I'm not going to yell at you. I'm not going to try to convince you that you're wrong and I'm right. I just want to understand." People will likely say yes. Then enlarge that a bit. Not just a one-on-one. Build a group setting where people can start to do this. Join Braver Angels or one of those bridging communities. There's a lot of them out there. And maybe we, the people, can start to turn this around into a society that's just not at each other's throats but instead is jointly interested in flourishing and building a future for our society, for our children and our grandchildren. That's what we all want. But we've kind of lost our momentum. We're not going to get it back unless we all decide it's a priority.

Brandon: Yeah, absolutely. I'll read the pledge at the end. Perhaps our listeners can join in owning and embracing and taking on some agency. Francis, The Road to Wisdom is such a brilliant book. I highly recommend it. Anything else you'd like to direct our viewers and listeners to?

Francis: Well, it's been great talking to you, Brandon. We haven't talked about another big science issue that I know is on your heart and mind also, which is, what's happening to our planet and the need for what faith communities I think maybe could be playing a larger role in. Considering it not just as global warming, which doesn't seem to appeal to people, or even climate change but creation care. God gave us this gift of this beautiful planet, and we're kind of messing it up. It's not something to be hopeless or catastrophic about. There are things we can do. But particularly, if we're worried about our future generations — most of us are — this is not something to dismiss or try to say, "Well, I'm not sure that it's really been proven yet." It's been proven. Look at the data. That's up to all of us then to take whatever roles we can individually, and to insist that our leaders do also to try to mitigate against what otherwise is going to be a lot of harms. A lot of the harms are going to be done to the people who did not create the problem but who are themselves in the most vulnerable place, particularly low-lying areas like Bangladesh. So come on, folks. It's time to stop arguing about whether creation care is necessary. It's necessary. Let's figure how to do it.

Brandon: Yeah, absolutely. Francis, thank you. It's been such an honor and a delight to have you on the show. I wish you the best with all the important work you're doing.

Francis: Well, thanks, Brandon. It's been a delight to talk to you. I'm so glad you're highlighting this theme of beauty. Because as I get older, it seems more and more apparent to me that we underestimate the significance of this in our own lives, and also the way in which it draws us spiritually into a place that otherwise maybe we can't quite find. It's a beautiful place. Beauty should be beautiful, and it is. It's something that I think you're helping us think more deeply about.

Brandon: Well, thank you.

So here's the pledge that Francis puts forward at the end of the book. Perhaps this is something that we can all embrace and take to heart as we move forward. "I pledge that from this day forward, I will seek to be part of the solution to our society’s widespread divisiveness, which is hurting individuals, families, communities, our nation, and our world. I will actively seek out opportunities to engage in dialogue with those who have different views from mine; by respectful listening, I will strive to understand their perspectives better, to identify our shared deeper values, and to build a bridge across the gap that has divided us. When sifting incoming information, I will seek to be a wise consumer. Taking into account my own biases, I will carefully assess the plausibility of the claim as well as the integrity, competence, and humility of the source, in order to decide whether the information is likely to be trustworthy. I will resist the temptation to speak about, write about, or share on social media information that claims to be true but is of uncertain validity. I will bring a generous spirit to all my interpersonal interactions, refusing to ascribe evil intentions to others simply because of different political or societal beliefs. I will be slow to take offense. Loving my neighbor will be my goal."

Thank you.

If you found this post valuable, please share it. Also please consider supporting this project as a paid subscriber to support the costs associated with this work. You'll receive early access to content and exclusive perks for members.