The National Academy of Sciences awarded its 2026 Public Welfare Medal to Francis Collins in January, and the announcement has received the coverage it deserves — which is to say, not nearly enough. [1]

Collins served as director of the NIH from 2009 to 2021 — the longest tenure of any NIH director — under Presidents Obama, Trump, and Biden. Before that he led the Human Genome Project to completion, a multi-decade effort to sequence the entire human genome that, when completed in 2003, was the largest collaborative scientific undertaking in history. The applications of that project — in cancer research, in genetic disease diagnosis, in drug development, in the COVID vaccine — continue to accumulate. [2]

Collins retired abruptly from his NIH lab directorship in March 2025 after the new administration eliminated his position and reduced NIH funding through executive action. His departure statement — a quiet plea to protect agency staff and preserve the institutional knowledge accumulated over decades — received brief coverage and was then subsumed by other crises. [1]

The NAS medal recognizes what that departure represented: the end of a particular era of American public science, in which the government funded basic research at scale and treated scientific expertise as a form of civic infrastructure rather than an ideological inconvenience. Collins embodied that model without becoming its symbol — he was too modest and too focused on the science itself to perform the public intellectual role his career justified.

Wartime is when you notice what you've lost. [2]

-- KENJI NAKAMURA, Tokyo