Report: Collins is leading candidate for NIH job

Francis Collins, a pioneering geneticist, is the leading candidate for the top job at the NIH, according to a report in Bloomberg.

Quoting sources, Bloomberg says that Collins has the inside track on the job, which looks a lot more attractive now that the Obama administration is funneling billions of additional dollars to support scientific research work at thousands of labs around the U.S.

The NIH is immensely influential in drug research, operating a network of 27 scientific institutes and centers that employ 18,000 people. Collins ran the National Human Genome Research Institute as it cracked the sequence of the human genome.

"NIH is a huge enterprise, and I think Francis has very good experience with getting the best out of a huge enterprise from what he did in the genome project,"  biologist David Baltimore told Bloomberg in February. "He's also very well liked in Congress."

- read the report from Bloomberg

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