NIH Director has Big Plans for Autism Research

It's been just over two months since Francis Collins stepped in as the new head of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH).Collins was head of the National Human Genome Research Institute for 15 years, and led the high-profile Human Genome Project, so he is no stranger to the limelight. But as head of the NIH, in charge of a $31 billion annual budget, he is a powerful man with big ambitions.At the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago today, Collins told a packed hall that one of his major goals will be "to tackle questions that have the word 'all' in them": for example, what are all of the protein interactions in a cell, and what are all the ion channels in a given neuron?Read more at...SFARI, October 2009.