Dream gig grants him freedom to explore

James Collins is restless. It's impossible not to notice, whether you're looking at his career, or the way he fidgets in a chair. He's got the mind of an explorer in the body of a runner, and a chosen field - research science - in which you can't exactly race from one idea to another. A stroke of inspiration must be followed by years in the lab, and then it could turn out to be nothing.

"I get bored easily, but it's interesting to see how you get pushed and dinged in life," he said. "You run into someone who challenges you, you have a friend with a problem, and a whole new space opens up."

Collins makes restlessness work. Already, at 43, he's followed his ideas to contributions in a number of different scientific "spaces" - a word he uses a lot to describe the many areas in which he thinks.

Recently, Collins's work in synthetic and systems biology at Boston University got him named the first Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator in BU history. For a medical researcher, being an official investigator is a dream gig. Not only is it big research money for at least five years - the Institute reportedly spends about a million a year on its investigators - but it affords the freedom to explore new questions, because the money is an investment in the scientist and not a particular experiment. This makes Collins happy.

Not that his intellectual curiosity has gone unsupported in the past. He was a Rhodes scholar coming out of Holy Cross in the 80s as a physics major, and went to Oxford to study medical engineering because he wanted to develop technology for the disabled - in particular, his two grandfathers, one blind, the other grappling with a series of strokes.

He went straight from Oxford to BU, and set up a lab. There, his worked has shifted from a whole-body focus to the cellular level. He has developed such things as vibrating insoles that are designed to give 75-year-olds the balance of a 20-year-old by stimulating the nerves on the bottom of their feet.

In 2003, for his "proclivity for identifying abstract principles that underlie complex biological phenomena," Collins was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, better known as the "Genius Award." And last year, he received the National Institutes of Health's Director Pioneer Award, which is another big lump of five-year funding to "creative scientists."

Collins admits he's in a nice position now. He's been able to buy equipment and put more people in the lab; he's able to do large-scale expensive experiments he's never done.

On a recent day, his lab was the sound of chemistry in action - clattering glass and open flames. One grad student was working with vials that are part on one of Collins's latest big "spaces" - super antibiotics. Collins is trying to create a supplement he hopes will make antibiotics more effective at lower doses and help to prevent drug-resistant strains of bacteria from developing.

His engineering background and work in a wide fleet of subjects has given Collins an ability to look at science that is almost "unique in the field," said Graham Walker, a biology professor at MIT.

"It's his ability to combine these interdisciplinary approaches that's led to what I would consider some really quite remarkable insights," said Walker, who calls the investigator appointment a "made in heaven opportunity for him to blaze new fields."

As a result of being named a Howard Hughes investigator, Collins, who grew up in Nashua, was asked to toss out the first pitch at Fenway this summer.

His throw wasn't exactly over the plate - "If there were a lefty up there, he would have gone to Beth Israel with a head injury," he says - but "at least it didn't hit the dirt."

He became a scientist, he says, because he was lousy at sports.

But the real satisfaction of his new status is that he thinks he'll now be able to get his ideas from the lab bench to the bedside, which he hasn't done before.

"The goal is to make a difference, to see those vibrating insoles helping the elderly, to see that pill you're taking with your penicillin - that's really the motivation," he said. "And I think we're getting close."

Fact sheet

Hometown: Born in Queens, N.Y.; grew up in Nashua, N.H. ; lives in Newton.
Education: Bachelor's in physics from the College of the Holy Cross, 1987; doctorate in medical engineering from Oxford University, England, in 1990.
Family: Wife, Mary McNaughton Collins, is a primary care doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital; daughter, Katie, is 9; son, Danny, is 7.
Hobbies: Running, playing sports with the kids, reading, and having deep discussions with friends.