Posted on behalf of Meredith Wadman

US President Barack Obama today announced that geneticist Francis Collins will be his nominee to direct the National Institutes of Health (NIH.) The announcement caps months of waiting, watching and speculating by NIH groupies who, like the authors of this Nature editorial, were getting restive about the White House delay in naming a permanent chief for the $31 billion agency.

The president’s announcement that he intends to nominate Collins, who from 1993 to 2008 directed NIH’s National Human Genome Research Institute (called the National Center for Human Genome Research until 1997), came during what has already a big week for the NIH; two days ago, the agency issued its final guidelines on human embryonic stem cell research. Collins, an MD-PhD who turned 59 in April, will find their implementation in his inbox, along with the shepherding of a crush of stimulus-incited grant applications through an overburdened peer review system.