NIH director to speak on new horizons for human health in biomedical research

Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health and recipient of the nation’s highest scientific honors, will address the National Press Club Dec. 21 on “Biomedical research: New horizons for human health.”

The recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his breakthroughs in decoding the human genome, Dr. Collins has a longstanding interest in the interface between science and faith, and has written about this in The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (Free Press, 2006), which spent many weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. He is the author of a new book on personalized medicine, The Language of Life: DNA and the Revolution in Personalized Medicine (HarperCollins, to be published in early 2010).