Trump keeps NIH director on despite political pressure

President Trump has announced that Francis Collins will continue as director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The physician-geneticist, best known for leading the international Human Genome Project, has been at the helm of the NIH since 2009. The formal appointment came despite opposition from more than 40 conservative Republicans who wrote to the president in May and urged him to fire Collins because of his perceived support for embryonic stem cell research.