On May 26, I testified in person before the U.S. Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Service (HHS), Education, and Related Agencies. The hearing was titled: National Institutes of Health’s FY22 Budget and the State of Medical Research. Joining me were several NIH institute directors, including Tony Fauci, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID); Diana Bianchi, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development; Ned Sharpless, National Cancer Institute; Gary Gibbons, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute; and Eliseo Perez-Stable, National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities.
Thanks to the group of U.S. senators that came out to visit NIH. It was a pleasure hosting the group, photographed here while touring the Dale and Betty Bumpers Vaccine Research Center (VIC) and learning more about NIH’s critical response to the COVID pandemic. The visit took place on May 17, 2021. Credit: NIH
Congratulations to Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier on sharing the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for the development of a method for genome editing.” Doudna, a biochemist with the University of California, Berkeley and a genome editing pioneer, has received continuous NIH funding since 1997. Charpentier is a French microbiologist and a fellow genome editing pioneer with the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, Berlin, Germany. Here, I am with Doudna on December 12, 2018 during a U. S. Senate NIH Caucus Meeting on CRISPR and Gene Editing. Credit: Berkeley News
As always, it was an honor to testify before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pension. The title of the hearing was “Vaccines: Saving Lives, Ensuring Confidence, and Protecting Public Health.” Also testifying was Jerome Adams, Surgeon General of the United States. The hearing was held on September 9, 2020 in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C.
It was an honor to testify before the U.S. Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies on July 2. The topic of the hearing was the President’s plan to develop and distribute a COVID-19 vaccine. Also testifying were Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Gary Disbrow, acting director of Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA). The nearly three-hour hearing allowed a productive exchange of information on this critical topic and many of NIH’s high-priority efforts to develop vaccines and therapeutics for COVID-19. Credit: C-Span.
Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D.
