Dr. Francis S. Collins, a renowned geneticist who ran the National Institutes of Health for 12 years, announced Saturday that he has retired from the institutes and the federal government, issuing a parting statement that offered a pointed, if somewhat veiled, message to the Trump administration, which has fired hundreds of N.I.H. employees.
“As I depart N.I.H., I want to express my gratitude and love for the men and women with whom I have worked side by side for so many years,” Dr. Collins wrote. “They are individuals of extraordinary intellect and integrity, selfless and hard-working, generous and compassionate. They personify excellence in every way, and they deserve the utmost respect and support of all Americans.”
Dr. Collins, 74, served under three presidents: Barack Obama, Donald J. Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr. He became one of the nation’s most recognizable doctors during the coronavirus pandemic, when he helped steer the development of new tests, therapeutics and vaccines.
He did not give a reason for his retirement, and he said in a text message that he “was not doing any interviews.”
His announcement comes just days before the Senate confirmation hearing, scheduled for this Wednesday, for President Trump’s nominee to be the next director of the N.I.H.: Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, who has expressed disdain for Dr. Collins.
Dr. Bhattacharya is one of three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, an anti-lockdown treatise that was signed in October 2020, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. Emails that later became public showed that Dr. Collins had called Dr. Bhattacharya and his co-authors “fringe epidemiologists.”
In an interview with Fox News at the time, Dr. Collins said he stood by his statement, adding, “Hundreds of thousands of people would have died if we had followed that strategy.” Dr. Bhattacharya later assailed Dr. Collins as one of a number of scientists who “abused their power to conduct devastating takedowns of scientists who disagreed with them.”
Dr. Collins joined the institutes in 1993, during the administration of President Bill Clinton, and gained acclaim for leading the Human Genome Project, a federal effort to map the human genome, the set of genetic instructions that defines the human organism.
He also became known for his religious views: Dr. Collins is an evangelical Christian who has publicly sought to bridge the divide between science and Christianity, including in a 2006 book, “The Language of God.” Amid the political fallout over the coronavirus pandemic, he joined a group called “Braver Angels” that sought to bridge the partisan divide, and later publicly acknowledged some Covid mistakes.
His carefully crafted statement offered a forceful defense of the N.I.H. and a lament for the days when biomedical research had strong bipartisan support.
Dr. Collins noted that when he was recruited to the institutes and through many of the years that followed, “investment in medical research was seen as a high priority and a nonpolitical bipartisan effort — saving countless lives, relieving human suffering and contributing substantially to the U.S. economy.”
“N.I.H. is the largest supporter of biomedical research in the world,” he wrote. “It is the main piston of a biomedical discovery engine that is the envy of the globe. Yet it is not a household name. It should be.”
He went on: “When you hear about patients surviving stage 4 cancer because of immunotherapy, that was based on N.I.H. research over many decades. When you hear about sickle-cell disease being cured because of CRISPR gene editing, that was built on many years of research supported by N.I.H.”
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, a longtime colleague of Dr. Collins’s who retired at the end of 2022 as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, praised Dr. Collins on Saturday, saying he has had an ”extraordinarily positive impact” on biomedical research.
But allies of Mr. Trump and his health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., cheered Dr. Collins’s departure. Among them is Katie Miller, who served as Mr. Kennedy’s spokeswoman before Mr. Trump appointed her to the Department of Government Efficiency, the Elon Musk-led effort to overhaul the federal government.
“Francis Collins was an ineffectual leader who bent at the knee to Tony Fauci and openly mocked President Trump,” Ms. Miller wrote on social media. “@DrJBhattacharya is the right leader to move @NIH forward.”
Dr. Collins’s retirement, which took effect on Friday, comes on the heels of the departure of other high-ranking N.I.H. officials, including Dr. Lawrence A. Tabak, the longtime No. 2 official at the institutes. Dr. Tabak left last month, according to a person familiar with his decision, after being confronted with a reassignment that he viewed as unacceptable.
Dr. Collins was appointed to lead the N.I.H. by Mr. Obama, and he stepped down as director in late 2021, the first year of the Biden administration, to return to his lab. “Millions of people will never know Dr. Collins saved their lives,” Mr. Biden said at the time. “Countless researchers will aspire to follow in his footsteps.”
