Name: A Scientific Brain Drain Has Followed Trump’s Gutting Of The NIH - Dr. Francis Collins
Uploaded: 2025-07-20T17:05:54.000Z
Duration: 7 min 42 s
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Ladies and gentlemen, my next guest tonight is a brilliant physician, geneticist, and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient who served as the director of the National Institutes of Health for 12 years.

Please welcome back to The Late Show, Dr. Francis Collins.

You know, my dad was in the NIH for many years.

Earlier this year, you retired from the National Institutes of Health.

You're no longer the director, but you were still over there doing research.

Okay, you served there as director for 12 years, as I said, under three presidents.

Well, I hadn't really planned that until it became pretty untenable to stay.

We get instructions that we are not supposed to go to scientific meetings, not supposed to speak to the public in any sort of way.

We're not allowed to order any supplies to do the research.

And basically, we're told, don't start any new projects.

Just, you know, keep doing the kinds of things that you were already doing, but nothing new.

So you go ahead and be a scientist, but don't do science.

And, you know, I thought that'll be a short-term thing.

But after a few weeks, it was pretty clear that wasn't getting any better.

I'm not able to come up with scientific ideas with my team that I'd like to pursue.

The message was, this is a government agency, the National Institutes of Health.

It's probably full of waste, fraud, and and we better just stop everything until we can figure out what we need to get rid of.

Did they find any waste, fraud, and abuse?

Depending on who you ask, I would say very little.

Having run the place for 12 years, the people at NIH, the most amazingly dedicated, hardworking, selfless people trying to find answers.

Well, I assume you must, you know, having been there so long, you must have, you know, lowest I've ever seen it.

People who really thought they were there to make that next breakthrough happen, or at least build a pathway towards that, aren't sure anymore whether that's still possible.

Particularly worried about young scientists who are maybe on this path towards being that next person to win the Nobel Prize.

And now they're just not sure that that's going to be possible in the United States of America.

And many of them, like one of my former graduate students who can't seem to find an offer in a really good lab, even though it's probably the best student I've had in 10 years, he's looking at Australia.

That's the kind of brain drain that's going to happen going the other way.

We took wonderful benefit from having so many scientists come to our shores.

The United States has always had the pick of the litter.

So Australia to help the kangaroos, where else?

Europe, the United Kingdom, depending on what language you speak.

If you happen to be a Chinese student, the Chinese are offering you all kinds of opportunities to come back because, you know, China thought they had to compete with America to be top of the pack here.

They must be looking at this and they can't believe their luck.

Well, how long before we get a sense of this brain drain?

Like how long before this is going to affect our future health care?

And the kind of things that have happened in these six months, 2,500 projects were stopped without any particular reason to explain that cancer was a cancer cancer, Alzheimer's disease, rare diseases caused by genetic misspellings.

HIV research was pretty much stopped cold.

And certainly vaccine research has taken a serious downward turn.

You can't just turn that back on again when it happens like that.

And the way in which this plays out, what NIH does is through the taxpayer support all over this country, supports all the science that you build as a foundation upon which that breakthrough may happen.

It may not happen for 10 years, but we're mortgaging that opportunity now by having that foundation in such deep trouble.

Your book, The Road to Wisdom, hopes to find a way to unify our polarized society.

You appeal to a group in this book called The Exhausted Middle.

Yeah, I think people are just worn out with all the controversy, all the outrage Olympics that seems to be flying back and forth all the time.

The animosity, the grievances, it's just like, ah, I'm going to have to check out.

It's about two-thirds of the country that has the best chance of bringing us back to where we want to be.

We worry about things like our national debt, what you might call a fiscal deficit.

But Stephen, we have other deficits that politics aren't going to solve.

We're in a place now where there seems to be no real penalty for saying something that's demonstrably false.

We have a trust deficit where because people don't know if they can be sure somebody's telling the truth, why should I trust that person?

So we stop trusting each other most of the time.

And that's dangerous also for our future.

But you know what I'm worried about most?

How can it have become normalized not to be concerned about our fellow human beings, even if they're not living in our house?

Maybe they're down the street suffering, or maybe they're in another part of the globe suffering.

Predictions are that since the plug was pulled on USAID and PEPFAR, 90,000 children have died unnecessarily.

That's the prediction from the people who follow this closely.

If we want to flourish as a society, that's what we need to do.

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A Scientific Brain Drain Has Followed Trump’s Gutting Of The NIH - Dr. Francis Collins

pursue

compassion

disease

research