A Review of The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust

The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust

Francis S. Collins

Published by Little, Brown and Company in 2024

288pp / $27.99 / 978-0316576307

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If you’re a public health person, and you’re trying to make a decision, you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is, and that is: something that will save a life. Doesn’t matter what else happens. So you attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life. You attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recover from.
–Francis Collins and Wilk Wilkenson¹

This is not someone throwing stones – this is a self-criticism, coming from perhaps the foremost “public health person” during the COVID-19 pandemic. Former National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins said this during an onstage event in 2023. Collins describes this same event in the first chapter of his 2024 book, The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust (15-20).

One Sunday, I defended Collins to a public-health skeptic at my church, and I told my friend about the 2023 quote, but not the 2024 book. Onstage in 2023, Collins went the extra mile toward his critics and communicated genuine regret. In his 2024 book, Collins apologizes with more careful calibration, which blunts its effectiveness.

About a half-dozen times in the book, Collins mentions public health “mistakes” and takes personal responsibility: “I was part of that imperfect response” (17). How some public health ordinances “must have felt” to others far away “was not something I personally focused on – I assumed that other parts of the government were paying attention to that” (18).

After Chapter 1, The Road to Wisdom expands to an overwhelming diversity of topics: Collins defends climate change, the theory of evolution, and Anthony Fauci, while he debunks claims of 2020 election fraud and of links between cell phones and cancer. These short sections don’t give enough time to establish trust. There’s only time to preach to the choir.

I suppose I’m part of the choir. I’ve known about Collins since my pastor told Collins’s conversion story from the pulpit one Sunday, years before he became NIH Director in 2009. In 2014, I received an “Evolution and Christian Faith” grant from BioLogos, the organization Collins founded, then joined the BioLogos Voices speaker’s bureau. In 2020, I published essays for Biologos arguing patience for public health measures and looking forward to the COVID-19 vaccine.² I wholly support Collins’s approach to reconciling and proclaiming faith and science, which led to my Sunday conversation defending him.

“Faith” and “science” are still central to Collins’s work and are central to his book’s subtitle. Now those two words are surrounded by two new words: “truth” and “trust.” These four words also form the titles of the four central chapters of this six-chapter book. Here, two little words plus two more equals far more than four.

Chapter 2 is about “Truth,” in which Collins proposes organizing what you believe in a “web of belief” (another name for a radar chart). Collins shows his web of belief: “Jesus died for me,” “the resurrection is true,” and “science is trustworthy” are necessary truths at the center, while “vaccines are safe and effective” is a firmly established fact a little farther from the center, and “GMOs are safe” farther out, but not as far as opinions on the periphery (52). Collins found common ground with his onstage debate partner from 2023 by comparing their webs and finding matching points, especially their shared faith.

“Note that this web is not static,” Collins writes. “It’s always evolving” (52). The next chapter, “Science,” traces Collins’s academic evolution from young scientist to Human Genome Project lead to NIH Director during “the worst pandemic in more than a century” (103). Collins first describes the advances of gene therapy, then clinical trials and safety, then vaccine safety and skepticism.

Here Collins specifically describes vaccine critic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as “a lawyer who has no medical training.” (93) Since publication of the book, politics has continued to “evolve”: Kennedy is now head of the Department of Health and Human Services, which supervises the NIH. Kennedy oversees the new NIH Director, Jay Bhattacharya, who is also mentioned in Chapter 3, as one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, and the subject of another apology by Collins.

In 2020, Bhattacharya co-authored the Declaration to propose a policy of “Focused Protection”³ as opposed to Collins’s program, summed up as “masks, social distancing, lockdowns, and school closures” (110). The words Collins uses to describe the Declaration’s authors have evolved: in the 2020 email they are “fringe epidemiologists,” but in the 2024 book they are “apparently respectable epidemiologists” (109-110), and now Bhattacharya must be called “NIH Director.”

In 2020, Collins wrote an email urging a “quick and devastating published take down” (110) of Bhattacharya’s Declaration.⁴ In his 2024 book, Collins apologizes for his “intemperate language” (110) but defends his decision. Collins believes the Declaration “would have led to the unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands, or maybe even hundreds of thousands, of people” (110). But his objection in the book is primarily procedural rather than scientific: the proposal went directly to HHS Secretary Alex Azar (Kennedy’s predecessor) instead of waiting for peer review.⁵

Rigorous peer review never happened. Within a month, we got an opposing, short declaration, in the form of the “John Snow Memorandum” offered by 80 public health experts.⁶ This declaration’s website has still not fulfilled its promise (which you can still read today) that it “will soon be updated to act as an information repository, presenting the evidence and reasons why governments must do more to reduce transmission.”⁷ For every declaration, there seems to be an equal and opposite declaration.

There is some evidence given in The Road to Wisdom concerning COVID-19 policies, but it is uneven. Collins proposes that Sweden implemented something like the Great Barrington Declaration, with two pieces of evidence: 1. Sweden’s COVID death rate was higher than Norway’s from 2020 to 2022 (yet lower that many European countries’, as Collins notes); and 2. A Swedish commission concluded that Sweden’s policies should have been “more rigorous and intrusive” from “February-March 2020” (112). A skeptic could answer that the former argument cherry-picks countries, while the latter doesn’t apply to Fall 2020.

In the next section, Collins rightly argues against the anecdotal reports of vaccine injuries. But then he makes a problematic, nearly anecdotal, assertion of his own: he claims that the death rate from COVID was higher among Republicans than Democrats.⁸ The paper Collins quotes provoked two opposing comments a few months later in the same journal. Both comments are paywalled. There is a response to one⁹ by the original authors (also paywalled),¹⁰ while the other comment is not even indexed by Google Scholar.¹¹ I can’t even see all of this debate, much less decide who’s right, and I suspect confounders may lurk in this limited dataset. Whatever this is, it’s not the “thoughtful discussion” (111) Collins required before considering the Great Barrington Declaration. I don’t expect a popular science book to cover these topics in detail, but people like my skeptical friend would benefit from more pages given to COVID retrospectives, and fewer to other side topics.

One side topic in The Road to Wisdom has returned to relevance.  In Chapter 5, Collins specifically disputes the claim that cell phones cause cancer (200-205). In doing so, Collins pre-refutes Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who in 2025 claimed that carcinogenic properties are one reason phones should be banned from schools.¹² But in the end, I’m not sure it matters, because both Kennedy and Collins agree that phones should be banned – they just disagree about why.

In a Chapter 6 section titled “Help the Kids,” Collins literally calls for laws, arguing “serious efforts should be made to outlaw the use of phones during school hours” (231). Collins’s and Kennedy’s webs of belief both say that teenagers should use phones less. That Collins is right, and Kennedy is wrong about why phones should be banned, this seems a less important point.

The irony is that the current proposal to ban phones in 2025 is being imposed by the same institutions that required students to use phones and other screens for school in 2020. In 2023, Collins apologized onstage for his “narrow view” in implementing rules and regulations against a virus – yet in calling for an in-school phone ban, Collins again proposes a narrow rule. I understand why someone like my friend may be skeptical.

Narrow focus can be broadened. Collins uses internal “webs of belief” to broaden focus so that two people can find common ground. On a bigger scale, Charles Williams uses the same metaphor with an even broader focus: Jesus “took what remained, after the Fall, of the torn web of humanity in all times and places, and not so much by a miracle of healing as by a growth within it made it whole.”¹³

The one who held Williams together as he wrote this in wartime also held things together in pandemic time. He is wisdom itself, and “all things hold together in Him” (Colossians 1:17), from our own little webs of belief to the grand web of the cosmos. If someone wants to know how Collins holds all this together, I can recommend The Road to Wisdom for that. If someone really wants an apology for public health mistakes, I can recommend the video of the 2023 event for that. Wisdom can be found in either place for those with ears to hear it.

1. A Deplorable and an Elitist Walk into a Bar: Francis Collins and Wilk Wilkinson, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1eAvh1sWiw. (54:34)
2. See https://biologos.org/post/living-with-contagious-uncertainty (March 9, 2020), https://biologos.org/podcast-episodes/coronavirus-science-faith-in-pandemic-times (podcast interview on March 19, 2020), and https://biologos.org/articles/dare-we-test-god-what-new-experiences-experiments-temptations-and-trials-can-teach-us (April 23, 2020)
3. “Great Barrington Declaration and Petition,” Great Barrington Declaration, accessed May 1, 2025, https://gbdeclaration.org/.
4. Collins edits his own email to spell this as “takedown,” but the original email appears to have a space. See Editorial Board, “How Fauci and Collins Shut Down Covid Debate,” Wall Street Journal, December 21, 2021; Collins, The Road to Wisdom, 110.
5. Collins, The Road to Wisdom, 110.
6. Nisreen A. Alwan et al., “Scientific Consensus on the COVID-19 Pandemic: We Need to Act Now,” The Lancet 396, no. 10260 (October 31, 2020): e71–72.
7. “JOHN SNOW MEMORANDUM,” JOHN SNOW MEMORANDUM, accessed May 1, 2025, https://www.johnsnowmemo.com/.
8. Jacob Wallace, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, and Jason L. Schwartz, “Excess Death Rates for Republican and Democratic Registered Voters in Florida and Ohio During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” JAMA Internal Medicine 183, no. 9 (September 1, 2023): 916–23.
9. Patrick O’Mahen, “Discrepancies in Estimating Excess Death by Political Party Affiliation During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” JAMA Internal Medicine 184, no. 1 (January 1, 2024): 118.
10. Jacob Wallace, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, and Jason L. Schwartz, “Discrepancies in Estimating Excess Death by Political Party Affiliation During the COVID-19 Pandemic—Reply,” JAMA Internal Medicine 184, no. 1 (January 1, 2024): 119–20.
11. Christopher Dasaro, Alyson Haslam, and Vinay Prasad, “Discrepancies in Estimating Excess Death by Political Party Affiliation During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” JAMA Internal Medicine 184, no. 1 (January 1, 2024): 118–19.
12. “Kennedy Praises Cellphone Bans in Schools, Citing Mix of Science and Misinformation,” NBC News, March 22, 2025, https://www.nbcnews.com/health/kids-health/kennedy-cell-phone-bans-schools-rcna197347. Like Collins, Kennedy cited established links between social media use and depression and poor school performance. But, as Collins specifically refuted, Kennedy suggested that cellphones “produce electromagnetic radiation, which has been shown to do neurological damage to kids when it’s around them all day, and to cause cellular damage and even cancer.”
13. Charles Williams, The Image of the City: And Other Essays (Oxford University Press, 1958), 137.