Former director Francis Collins retires from NIH, urging 'respect' for embattled workers

WASHINGTON — Francis Collins, a renowned geneticist and former longtime director of the National Institutes of Health, announced Saturday that he has retired, leaving an agency being upended by budget cuts and layoffs.

Collins — a guitar-playing researcher and evangelical Christian known for finding common ground between religion and science — gave no reason for his abrupt departure. He issued a statement that he’d been honored with a long career at an agency “rightfully called the crown jewel of the federal government for decades.”

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