It's official. Francis Collins has been named, by President Obama, as the head of the National Institutes of Health, which Obama has "has made key to his plans for reviving the U.S. economy and overhauling health care."

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."

Obviously, this Collins guy is scientist, so — taking into account that science is an abomination before the Lord, not to mention elitist — at first blush, that's unfortunate. However, there's a good side and a bad side to this.

On the good side, Collins is a devout Evangelical Christian, and has been since he discovered the Holy Trinity hiding inside the wondrous beauty of a frozen waterfall while on a hiking trip…

I turned the corner and saw in front of me this frozen waterfall, a couple of hundred feet high. Actually, a waterfall that had three parts to it — also the symbolic three in one. At that moment, I felt my resistance leave me. And it was a great sense of relief. The next morning, in the dewy grass in the shadow of the Cascades, I fell on my knees and accepted this truth — that God is God, that Christ is his son and that I am giving my life to that belief.

The bad news is that he's actually a real scientist who really actually believes in real actual sciencey stuff like evolution and has even gone so far as to head the team of scientists who mapped the human genome. (As if a) God wanted us tampering with such sacrosanct information, or b) that was even a real thing even.)

Hard to tell what all this will mean for the NIH and Obama's precious health care for poor people. But let's just pray that Collins does the Christian thing and destorys the NIH utterly.