Francis Collins, the geneticist who led the US National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) in Bethesda, Maryland, through the completion of the Human Genome Project has announced that he will be stepping down from his position on August 1, 2008.

In the 90s, Collins led the challenge against Craig Venter’s venture to sequence the Human Genome. Having successfully completed the genome project on 2003 (from which Venter draw extensively for his own project partially based on his own DNA) Collins and the NHGRI started a variety of initiatives, including the international HapMap Project, ENCODE (the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements) and, most recently, the 1,000 Genomes Project.

Collins was a controversial figure of science as a devout Christian who believes that human evolution occurred through natural selection according to God’s plan. But he rightly foresee the future development of personal genomics that are going to change our way to receive treatment and even change the way we live as individual aware of the risks we have to develop diseases during our life. Gattaca springs to mind but we could look at it less seriously with Recreational Genomics.

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