On March 26, 2011, the Telegraph Magazine reported that well-known atheist Christopher Hitchens, suffering from cancer of the oesophagus, is undergoing treatment by Dr Francis Collins.

Many of my American readers will recognise Dr Collins as the Founder and President (2007-2009) of The BioLogos Forum, whose slogan is ‘Science and Faith in Dialogue’.  Not all of my readers from the other side of the pond will appreciate Dr Collins’s efforts in this area, and he has raised hackles in the US among more orthodox Christians.  Personally, I think he is doing wonders for both science and Christianity, although I recognise that I am not fully in tune with the zeitgeist of American evangelicalism and received my education at a different time in America’s history.  Enough said.

On the About page of the BioLogos site, we discover that Dr Collins was an atheist until sometime in his 20s

after realizing his perspective did not provide answers to profound questions about the meaning of life and was inconsistent with observations about the nature of the universe and humankind. He wrote about finding harmony between the scientific and spiritual worldviews in The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, which spent 20 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. Collins coined the term BioLogos to define the conclusions he reached about how life, or bios, came about through God’s word, or logos. DNA, therefore, may be considered God’s language.

Collins received a Bachelor of Science from the University of Virginia, a doctorate in physical chemistry from Yale University and a medical degree from The University of North Carolina. He was elected to the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences, and in November 2007 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor given by the president, for revolutionizing genetic research.

Collins gives frequent lectures about science and faith on college campuses that regularly attract more than 1,000 people. His book on personalized medicine, “The Language of Life” was published by HarperCollins in January 2010.

President Obama swore Dr Collins in as the 16th Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on August 17, 2009.  Collins had resigned from his post at BioLogos the preceding day.

Christopher Hitchens says that he is a

‘guinea pig’ for a new personalised medicine

which Dr Collins, a former director of the National Human Genome Research Project, helped to develop.

The two had often met in the past as adversaries in the debate about whether God exists.

Against the odds they had become friends.

Now Hitchens is one of the few people in the world who has had his entire genetic make up mapped and is receiving a new treatment that targets his own damaged DNA.

“I’m an experiment,” Hitchens said.

If successful, the treatment should attack the primary site of Mr Hitchens’s tumour.

“It is a rather wonderful relationship,’ said Hitchens.

“I won’t say he doesn’t pray for me, because I think he probably does; but he doesn’t discuss it with me.

“He agrees that his medical experience does not include anything that could be described as a miracle cure – he’s never come across anything.”

Hitchens, 61, originally from Portsmouth but now living in Washington DC, is an old Oxford University friend of the writer Martin Amis and has had a long journalistic career on both sides of the Atlantic.

In September 2005, he was named one of the “Top 100 Public Intellectuals” in the world by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines.

Despite the gravity of his illness, Mr Hitchens has not changed his views on God.  He has undergone chemotherapy but is now taking medication only once a day.  As such, he is relatively upbeat:

“At least it spares me some of the boredom of being a cancer patient because what I’m going through is very absorbing and positively inspiring,” he said.

“But if it doesn’t work, I don’t know what they could try next.”

He remains hopeful, although he has been told that of 1,000 men of his age and in his condition, half could expect to be dead within a year.

Yet, he is hesitant about fellow atheists becoming too optimistic about his chances for success:

Hitchens said that he is constantly contacted by other atheists telling him he can beat the cancer and this in itself makes him feel “alarmed to be a repository of other people’s hope”.

It seems as if Dr Collins might be the ideal physician for the redoubtable unbeliever.  It takes one to know one.  And Dr Collins might just, in the end, effect more than a remission from cancer for Mr Hitchens.  That would be an even greater story.