Francis Collins has overseen some of the most revolutionary science of the last few decades. He led the Human Genome Project that sequenced the entire human genome by 2003, and then in 2009, he became director of the National Institutes of Health, where he served under three presidents and led the agency’s research on a Covid-19 vaccine.

But nothing in his years leading biomedical research for the US government could have prepared him for the disruption at NIH over the past few months. Over 1,000 employees at the NIH were suddenly fired at the beginning of April. (Those firings are still being challenged in the courts, but as of now, the employees remain out of work.) Trump administration officials have barred researchers from studying certain topics like vaccine hesitancy or the health effects of wildfires.

“I had experienced transitions before, and those were bumpy sometimes,” Collins told me in a recent interview. “But I didn’t expect science to be under this kind of full-bore attack, which is really what happened almost immediately after inauguration day.”

In the past few months, Collins saw scientists placed under communications gag orders, restrained from speaking freely even when no media were present. “You were effectively muzzled,” he says.

Collins, who had stepped down as NIH director in 2021 and had taken over a lab studying diabetes, soon felt he could no longer do his job as a scientist should. He started to worry he might be pushed out. “So I pulled my folks together in a conference room. They didn’t know what was coming. And I told them, ‘By tomorrow night, I’m no longer gonna be here.’ And we all cried. I never thought it would end this way. My wife came to pick me up on that last Friday, and I just walked out of the building and got in the car and said, ‘I guess this is it. That’s how it ends?’”

Just four years ago, Collins was President Donald Trump’s NIH director. Now, in Trump’s second term, he’s resigning under pressure. How did we get from a world where the NIH was universally recognized as a jewel of scientific research to a world where the government is essentially tearing it down from the inside?

I spoke to Collins on Vox’s Unexplainable podcast about how so many Americans lost trust in science and how we might be able to get it back. Our interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I’m constantly hearing that Americans have lost trust in science. Is that fair to say?

I think it’s totally fair. You can look at all the surveys about trust. Americans........

© Vox