July 8 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama named Francis S. Collins, the scientist who led the U.S. government drive to map the human genetic code, to be head of the National Institutes of Health.

NIH “stands as a model when it comes to science and research,” Obama said in a statement released by the White House today. “My administration is committed to promoting scientific integrity and pioneering scientific research.”

The president hailed Collins as “one of the top scientists in the world” and said his “groundbreaking work has changed the very ways we consider our health and examine disease.”

Collins, 59, will head an agency that Obama has made key to his plans for reviving the U.S. economy and overhauling health care. The 27 institutes and centers under the NIH umbrella employ more than 18,000 people and fund research at thousands of universities and medical schools.

Collins, a physician-geneticist, formerly headed the National Human Genome Research Institute, a member agency.

He became a driving force in the race to catalogue the 3 billion letters of the human genetic code. As director of the institutes, Collins will face calls to boost spending on cancer research and free science from politics as well as financial conflicts of interest.

‘Brilliant Researcher’

“The president has selected a brilliant researcher, able administrator and visionary leader with the experience to take on the challenges and opportunities that confront the NIH,” said Clyde Yancy, president of the American Heart Association.

The White House announcement said the genome effort under Collins “consistently met projected milestones ahead of schedule and under budget” and culminated in April 2003 with the completion of a finished sequence of the human DNA instruction book.

Collins’s own research laboratory, in addition, has discovered a number of important genes, including those responsible for cystic fibrosis, neurofibromatosis, Huntington’s disease, a familial endocrine cancer syndrome, and most recently, genes for adult onset (Type 2) diabetes and the gene that causes Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome, the White House announcement said.

Funding Boost

This year’s $787 economic stimulus package adds $10 billion in research funding for the institutes through 2010, expanding a budget that has averaged $29 billion a year since 2005.

Collins, who holds a Yale University doctorate in chemistry, grew up on a small farm in rural Virginia and was educated at home until the sixth grade. He received his undergraduate degree in chemistry from the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville, in 1970. He received his Yale doctorate in 1974 and a medical degree from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in 1977.

Collins has completed a new book, “The Language of Life: DNA and the Revolution in Personalized Medicine,” to be published by HarperCollins in early 2010, the White House said. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, from George W. Bush in 2007.

A guitar player known to be fond of motorcycles, Collins is also a one-time atheist who wrote a book in 2006 about his Christian beliefs. He took the title, “The Language of God,” from comments then-President Bill Clinton made at a 2000 ceremony, “we are learning the language in which God created life.”

“God is most certainly not threatened by science,” Collins wrote in the book. “He made it all possible.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Nicole Gaouette in Washington at ngaouette@bloomberg.net; Edwin Chen in Washington at echen32@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: July 8, 2009 16:27 EDT