How to respond to failure, lies, and Borat
What Francis learned from getting punked by Borat’s Sacha Baron Cohen, the 4 criteria he uses to discern who to trust at work and in life, and what Tim Keller’s Out of Office message said the day he died.
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EPISODE 272
[INTRODUCTION]
[00:00:05] JR: Hey, friend. Welcome to the Mere Christians podcast. I'm Jordan Raynor. How does the gospel influence the work of mere Christians? Those of us who aren't pastors or religious professionals but who work as teachers, plumbers, and programmers? That's the question we explore every week.
Today, I'm posing it to a living legend, Dr. Francis Collin, former Director of the National Institutes for Health. Before that, the leader of the Human Genome Project. Man, when history looks back at the scientific achievements of the 20th century, I think they're going to point to splitting the atom, going to the moon, and sequencing the human genome, the project led by today's legendary guest. Dr. Collins and I recently sat down to discuss the lesson he learned from getting punked by Borat, aka Sacha Baron-Cohen. We talked about the four criteria Dr. Collins uses to discern who to trust at work and in life. Finally, Dr. Collins shared what Tim Keller's out of office message said, the day that he died. Trust me, you are not going to want to miss this terrific conversation with Dr. Francis Collins.
[EPISODE]
[0:01:29] JR: Dr. Collins, welcome back to the Mere Christians podcast.
[0:01:32] FC: Glad to be with you again, Jordan. I had a good time the last time, and hopefully this will be like that too.
[0:01:35] JR: Must have. I was joking with a friend of yours, I said, it took 18 months to get Dr. Collins the first time, when he was trying to save the world from a global pandemic. It took like 18 hours the second time. So, got a little bit more time in your hands. Hey, I told you before we start recording, this new book, The Road to Wisdom was exceptional. Easily one of the best books I've read this year so far. You immediately drew me in with your humility. On the very first page, you opened up about this professional failure you experienced in 1981. Can you share that story with our listeners?
[0:01:35] FC: Sure. So, here I was, having gone through a lot of training already. At that point, I was a physician, trained in internal medicine, but I was trying to learn the research side of how to be a molecular geneticist. I landed in the laboratory at Yale where everybody knew what they were doing and I didn't. So, It was a little intimidating. I actually had a Ph.D. at that point, but it was in quantum mechanics. It did not help me figure out how to operate the equipment in a biology lab. But I was determined to try to make some kind of impact, and I had an advisor who wanted me to aim high for a project that was really going to make a difference. It was a recombinant DNA vector that would allow you to study human DNA much more efficiently.
I had big dreams about how this was all going to be just wonderful, and I would succeed, and that everybody would want to have access to this technology, and I would publish papers, and give talks at big symposiums. I had this all blown up in my head. But I didn't really completely understand why this particular experiment was risky. I just pressed ahead, and it took a long time to know whether it was going to work or not. I was a good six months of toiling away, making mistakes, having experiments fall apart.
[0:03:27] JR: Working crazy hours, it sounds like.
[0:03:29] FC: Working crazy hours. I was off in there at three or four in the morning, even though I had two little kids at the time that I was ignoring. Finally, the big day came where the definitive experiment was ready to have the results revealed. And there it was, a complete disaster. It was not just like an experiment that wasn't set up right. It revealed that the whole premise of the experiment was fatally flawed. There was nothing salvageable about this. Six months into what I thought was going to be this triumphant part of my career, I felt like I have totally failed. Not just the experiments failed, but I've failed, and I should probably quit, and do something else.
I admit – I didn't want to admit this to the other researchers around me. So, I headed into the men's room and had a good cry where nobody could see me, because I was so devastated. But the next morning, I went to tell my mentor that I had failed, and I should probably just resign and go do something else. He was like, "Oh, no, these things happen. Let's find you another project." I wasn't sure I was ready for that. I went to the department chair because he was the person that really encouraged me to come to Yale. I had great respect for him and it was really hard to tell him what I had failed to do, and expected he would be coming down pretty hard and saying, "Yeah, you probably don't belong here." But instead, he smiled and said, "Well, let me tell you about my first experiment and what a spectacular failure it was." And walked me through how that had set him up in his view for the rest of his career to be a much better scientist because he had learned what it meant to fail and how you can discover things about yourself, and about your approach to asking a question that you would never get if you succeeded every time.
[0:05:20] JR: Yes, it's a really good lesson. You said in the book, I thought this was really interesting, you alluded to it a minute ago. Then, the immediate aftermath of this in 1981, it didn't just feel like the project had failed. It felt like you personally were a failure. Since then, I'm curious, has your faith and your understanding of the gospel inabled you to decouple professional success and failure from personal success and failure?
[0:05:48] FC: It has. To some degree, yes. Although, I confess when you get really attached to a scientific hypothesis, and it feels like, this is an insight into how nature works or maybe even how God created nature for us to explore. Then, your hypothesis turns out to be flat wrong. It's still a little bit of a hard-to-take moment, where it's not just an intellectual defeat, it's also a little bit of a personal defeat.
But I guess, when I had that first failure, I also went to my pastor who happened to be a NASA engineer. I was a fairly early Christian at that point, because I only became a Christian at age 27. He kind of walked through the Bible about all of the people that we admire as having been wonderful spiritual leaders and how they had also had their big moments of failure.
[0:06:35] JR: Terrific failures.
[0:06:37] FC: Yes, absolutely, going all the way through. Then, helped me find some verses in the Bible, particularly Proverbs 24:16. Listen to this, "For though the righteous fall seven times, they rise again, but the wicked stumble when calamity strikes." Well, gosh, I'd rather be righteous than wicked. So, I figured somehow, I was going to have to recover from this setback and learn from it. Not just feel sorry for myself, but learned from it. What I learned was, if you're going to put your time into a really complicated experiment, you better think of all the ways that could go wrong before you start.
[0:07:15] JR: I also love the point you made. You said, if your experiments work every time, you're probably not working on anything very important. I remember early in my career, somebody posted on Twitter. I had announced that I was starting some new venture, whatever. And they said, "Everything Jordan Raynor does turns to gold." I remember, that making me feel really sad, because if everything I'm touching by God's grace is turning to gold, it probably means I'm not taking big enough risks and swings in our work. I think that's what you were alluding to in the wake of this.
[0:07:44] FC: Yes. You need to fail some, Jordan.
[0:07:47] JR: Yes, exactly. Hey, one more question on this theme of responding to failure, and then I have to ask you about the Borat story, which might have been the best story in the entire book. Oh my gosh. You said in the book that, "Future historians will judge the development of the mRNA vaccines for COVID in record time is one of the greatest medical achievements in human history." I agree, but I love that you also humbly admitted that, "Hey, you got some things wrong during COVID, especially around in the way that federal officials were communicating with the public.
Listen, this sort of failure is to be expected, of course, of any human being who would have been in your role. But as you point out in the book, there's a lot of risk in you admitting your flaws on a project that is so politically divisive in this cancel culture, where any admission of wrongdoing leads to this escalation of mean-spirited attacks. So, here's my question that I think is relevant to the Christian professionals listening. How can our listeners create workplace cultures that invite these admissions of failure, that invite both the weaknesses while also ensuring that those admissions aren't led to the cancellation of the person entirely?
[0:09:06] FC: That's a great question. And yes, in our current culture, admissions of failures usually result in a piling on of your adversaries, who see a sign of weakness and take a sharp object and just poke right in there. That happened when I spoke very clearly at a Braver Angels' meeting about what I perceive as my own failures in terms of some of the public health communication. I should have done that better. That ended up in a Wall Street Journal editorial with my name in headline, where they did that piling-on thing.
I think in a culture where you have the opportunity to set some kind of expectations ahead of time, this is something that should be done. I tried to do that as NIH director, working around people who were incredibly devoted to their work and letting them know up front, "Look, what you're doing is going to be really hard, and there are going to be times where it falls apart. Don't ever feel like you've got to hide that. If you hide it, and I find out later, then I'm going to be unhappy with you. But just come and tell me and we'll walk through what can be learned from that. By the way, people, if you see I'm on the way to something that's going to fail, you better tell me too."
You've got to have that kind of trust and respect for each other. Otherwise, the possibilities of actually making much progress and human foraging doesn't seem to be there. But somehow, in our culture, Jordan, we've really gotten away from that. We're so polarized, so anxious about whether somebody is going to find us out in terms of some position that we've taken, that everybody's afraid to admit their own shortcomings. The effort that I've had with Braver Angels to try to bring people together who are on totally different sides of an issue is a really good sort of morality play to watch how that plays out. Because in the first bit, each group is basically very strongly stating their opinion. The other group has to listen. I mean, really listen, listen well enough.
[0:11:05] JR: They can't rebut.
[0:11:06] FC: No, no, you have to listen and you have to actually state back to the people you were listening to what you heard them say, kind of like marriage counseling here for the country. Then, after that happens, something starts to feel a little bit safer in that environment because people really have started to understand each other and somebody will say, "You know, so as we're talking about this, I told you my position on this. There's a part of that that I'm not really sure I'm right about. How about you? Do you have some things on your side of this that maybe you've kind of attached yourself to but you're not sure they're true?"
Then, everything starts to go in a very positive direction. But somebody has to kind of start it and not be afraid that they might be actually talked down to, or even attacked as a result. Braver Angels makes it safe. In a lot of our culture, it doesn't feel safe, but somehow, we have to do it anyway.
[0:11:59] JR: Yes. If we're leaders within an organization, and we expect vulnerability, we probably have to model vulnerability first. All right, I got to ask about Borat. You told this amazing story in the book. I actually had seen this and you told the story to set up this chapter on how to discern who to trust. Can you share this Sacha Baron Cohen story with
our listeners?
[0:12:21] FC: Well, you all may know, Sacha Baron Cohen is the guy who plays Borat and a variety of other fairly outrageous roles, and spooks, and all kinds of people into believing that he's on the real when he's not. So, he was doing this series called, Who is America? and interviewing people in various guises that made you not realize who he was. Nobody knew this was going on, and I got asked, would I meet with this very earnest person who wanted to understand better how NIH does medical research?
My interviewer was supposed to be Billy Wayne Ruddick, Ph.D. My staff did not catch on to the fact that this might be a total put-on. So, I show up. They managed somehow to convince my staff to go into another room where they couldn't see what was happening. And rolling into the room in a wheelchair came this overweight, Southern drooling guy, with dyed blonde on here, Billy Wayne, who, I got to say, in a million years, I never would have guessed that was really Sacha Baron Cohen. It was a pretty effective makeup job.
He started in sort of reasonably, but it didn't take very long before I could tell, this is just not the usual interview. And maybe five minutes into it, I realized, "Okay, I'm being snookered here, this guy is spoofing for me. So, what do you do? He got into nutrition, and he was asking, "Well, you know, all this about trans fats. If you eat trans fats, does that make you transgender?"
[0:13:56] JR: Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh.
[0:13:57] FC: I was like, "No." I just decided, "Okay, I'm going to play it straight." I could get offended, and get up, and walk out. But maybe somehow, I can fold some medical information in here.
[0:14:07] JR: My only regret of this interview is that I did not hire Sacha Baron Cohen to show up and reprise the character and have him here interview it. That would have been incredible, incredible. Alright. So, you tell the story in the book, and right afterward, you share these four criteria that I loved. I actually walked my 10-year-old through this the other day. These four criteria our listeners can use to decide whether or not to trust a prospective employee, a prospective vendor, a new source, et cetera, et cetera. Can you talk us through those four criteria?
[0:14:38] FC: I can, and I think they'll resonate with most people. Although, one of them, you have to think about. You want to have a source that has integrity. You can be confident that this is an honest institution or a person that has a track record of playing things straight. You want them to be confident. You want them to have expertise and to be actually basing their recommendation to you on something that's called facts and not just something they made up that day.
But you also want to have humility and not to extend their claims of expertise beyond where they belong. So, if it's a celebrity who's telling you about how to change your diet, be a little careful there. Those three are pretty obvious, but the one I hadn't thought about until I wrote the book and now seems to loom very large is the fourth one, which is, does this source have values that are aligned with you?
Now, that could be good if your values are goodness and truth and beauty, but if your values as they increasingly are right now are more along the lines of political positions, what particular tribal alliance you're part of, what bubble you live within, that can really get in the way of being able to accept valid information that happens to come from a different bubble or making a mistake of accepting things coming at you from your bubble that really don't meet those other criteria of integrity, competence, and humility.
So, think hard about that. When you're being asked to trust something, and there's a lot of social media that would deserve this kind of careful scrutiny, does it live up to those standards? And particularly, is this something that's good for you, or is it coming at you in a way that actually is kind of sideways and might smuggle its way into your store of information in a way that's not justified?
[0:16:26] JR: Yes. I thought that was a super, super helpful framework. I loved how nuanced you made that last point. I really love the focus on humility. Personally, one of my favorite things to look for if I'm interviewing prospective members of my team is the answer, “I don't know,” right? I genuinely don't have that answer. I don't have expertise there and just a genuine humility that they don't have expertise in all things. That just shows me somebody that I can trust.
Hey, we've beat around this bush, but I want you to be real explicit about this for a minute. Can you tell our listeners why you believe this book, The Road to Wisdom, is particularly relevant to our audience of working Christians of Christian professionals?
[0:17:06] FC: Christians are so blessed to have a foundation that we can absolutely count on in whatever circumstance we base. I have a whole bunch of scriptures pasted on the wall next to me at my home office and when I'm in a tough spot, I can look there and try to find that guidance. If I really want to know what Jesus wants me to do, I don't have to guess. I can go read the sermon on the Mount or all those other parts of the New Testament that are just full of wisdom and they're not what you necessarily would have expected. It's all about the humility, the meekness, the love, the grace.
I'm sorry, but it doesn't seem that in the present time, our Christian communities have entirely embraced those principles that should be our very foundation. Churches have been, I'm afraid, overtaken in some instances by other kinds of messages. Many of them political, or they're things that induce anxiety and fear, causing people to say, “Well, those words might have been fine for Jesus' time, but now we're at war against forces that are trying to destroy our lifestyle.”
That's not really the case. We're being awfully hyperbolic to say, “This is worse than the first century.” Come on, people. Look back at the history.
[0:18:26] JR: When you got crucifixions lining the roads.
[0:18:28] FC: Exactly. But our churches have also gotten very splintered sometimes by topics which are much more about our current culture and oftentimes our current politics when they should be unified at this point as a source of truth and love and grace to try to bring us out of this terrible hyperpolarization that we live within, but they've been caught up in it too.
So, the whole chapter in the book about faith, describing how I came to faith from an unlikely perspective of an atheist in graduate school, and how I think, looking back on that journey and trying to remember for myself all of the reasons why Christianity rings so true, maybe we could figure out how in our churches to go back to that space.
The book is dedicated to the Reverend Tim Keller, who was my spiritual mentor and I learned so much from him about these kinds of issues, and the last article he wrote about the decline and renewal of the American church is worth everybody reading to try to see how we can put ourselves back on that road to wisdom.
[0:19:35] JR: It's really good. You and I both love Tim dearly. You knew him far better than I did, and Tim was really the one who, it sounds like, encouraged you to write this book. Is that right?
[0:19:44] FC: He was absolutely relentless and insisting that I had to do this when I was really not at all sure. It was something that I was going to be good at it would want to spend the time on it. It's wrenching to try to write something like this, but he would not let up.
[0:20:01] JR: I love that so much. I love that. I did not email Tim in his final days. You did and got the best out-of-office message of all time. Can you tell our listeners what Tim's out-of-office message was?
[0:20:16] FC: Yes, roughly paraphrased. It says, “I'm sorry. I am not here because I am now in heaven and we don't use email here so you won't be hearing from me.”
[0:20:25] JR: There you go. All right, Dr. Collins, four questions we round out every episode with. The first one's a good transition from the topic of heaven. Fast forward to the New Earth, right? Christ has come and he's made all things new. Isaiah 65 says that we will long enjoy the work of our hands without the thorns and thistles of the curse. What work would you love for King Jesus to give you as an act of worship on the New Earth?
[0:20:52] FC: I love thinking about this from Isaiah 65. I want to be in the choir –
[0:20:57] JR: Really?
[0:20:58] FC: – or maybe the orchestra. I'm somebody who finds such joy in music, especially music that taps into my faith. And if I get to have that kind of a role, I'll take it and I'll just be part of the heavenly choir that must be just amazing. Science is cool, but being in the heavenly choir, that would be better.
[0:21:19] JR: Well, billions of years. You think we'll still be making scientific discoveries on the New Earth?
[0:21:24] FC: That's a really – I thought about that a little bit. I think it's all going to be known at that point. I mean, it's all what God, the Creator, has already put in place. It's known to God. When we're in the New Heaven and the New Earth, presumably the curtain is lifted and we and also perceive all of this amazing, awesome, beautiful, creative complexity that right now we're just sampling a little bit.
[0:21:49] JR: Yes, I've heard that argument. I've also heard another argument which is, no, we're going to continue to learn forever, right? Because if we didn't, we would be omniscient, right? And only God is omniscient. So yes, we'll continue to learn and make new discoveries. I don't know, but I'm excited to find out.
All right, Dr. Collins, if we opened up your Amazon order history, which books would we see you buying over and over and over again to give to friends?
[0:22:12] FC: There would be a few. Almost anything written by Philip Yancey would be there repeatedly.
[0:22:18] JR: What's your favorite Yancey book?
[0:22:19] FC: I guess, Where the Light Fell, his most recent one, which is really an autobiography, which is almost like a prequel for all the other books that he wrote, but also, Disappointment with God, I think is a book that a lot of people have been touched by when they're going through a tough time and feel like God is just somewhere else. Or What's So Amazing About Grace? All of these are just incredibly insightful, real wrestling with the fact that faith doesn't always make everything feel all rosy. Those are times just like your failed experiments where you get to learn something, but it isn't always what you wanted to have.
So, I would go there. I would also go because a lot of people ask me how do you put science and faith together. Tim Keller's book, The Reason for God, how science and faith and
rationality all fit together, or Tom Wright's book, Simply Christian. It's hard to find something a lot better than that unless you go back to Mere Christianity.
[0:23:15] JR: It's tough. It's tough to do better than simply – yes, exactly. That's a great answer. Dr. Collins, who do you want to hear on a podcast like this, talking about how the gospel influences the work they do in the world?
[0:23:25] FC: As a guy who founded BioLogos, which is this organization that brings together people who care a lot about rigorous science and Christian faith. I get to interact with some amazing people that you would probably really like to have as guests. Mention one, Praveen Sethupathy, who is a department chair at Cornell University. Highly regarded scientist in life science. He was once my postdoc, so I know him very well. And he has a remarkable story growing up Hindu, converting to Christianity in college in the US, and all the ways that has played out in his life. He's incredibly articulate, so you might sign him up.
[0:24:04] JR: I will look up Praveen. We've had a lot of BioLogos friends. Jennifer Wiseman, Deb Haarsma, Katharine Hayhoe, a lot of your friends on the show, but I will have to look up Praveen for sure. That's a great name.
All right, Dr. Collins, you're talking to this global audience of mere Christians who do a lot of different things vocationally. A lot of them are scientists, a lot of them are entrepreneurs, some of them are baristas and mechanics. What they share is a deep love of Jesus and a deep desire to do their work in ways that honors him. With that context, what's one thing you want to say or reiterate to that audience before we sign off?
[0:24:44] FC: Oh, it's to re-anchor ourselves to that foundation of love for everyone, our neighbors and our enemies at a time where there's so much tension between people. Have the courage then to reach out to somebody who really disagrees with you strongly about an issue and listen to them. Really try to understand where they're coming from. They're probably good honorable people but they've been somehow pigeonholed into, “Oh, I don't trust them or maybe they're bad.” No, they're not. They have a different view. Live out that particular recommendation and live out the other part of what Jesus calls us to, which is the truth. You will know the truth. The truth will set you free. Try to clean up your own portfolio of information to be sure that things haven't found their way in there that don't belong from various sources that are not honorable and loving and Christ-like.
[0:25:40] JR: That's excellent. Dr. Collins, I want to commend you for the exceptional work you've done throughout your career, for the glory of God and the good of others, for giving us today this three-dimensional case study of what it looks like to boast in weaknesses for the glory of God and the good of others, and for giving us some practical tools to help us work with more trust and wisdom.
Friends, Dr. Collins’ new book is exceptional. It's called, The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust. If you haven't already listened to it Go back to episode 200 of the Mere Christians podcast where Dr. Collins gave one of the most compelling case studies I've ever heard about what it looks like to love your enemies while at work.
Dr. Collins, thank you for coming back and joining us today.
[0:26:23] FC: Jordan, it's been a pleasure. Keep up all the great stuff you're doing here to get the word out there. We have a savior and we are so blessed in that way. We just have to hang on to all of the joys that we've been offered that way and not get distracted by the ways in which the world is trying to get in the way of our flourishing.
[0:26:41] JR: Amen.
[OUTRO]
[0:26:41] JR: Man, I love Dr. Collins so much. I hope you guys enjoyed that conversation. Hey, who do you want to hear on the mere Christians podcast? Maybe it's a plumber, like I mentioned in my introduction or a programmer. Whoever it is, let us know at jordanraynor.com/contact. Thank you guys so much for listening. I'll see you next week.
[END]