BEIJING, July 9 (Xinhuanet) -- U.S. President Barack Obama Wednesday nominated geneticist Francis Collins as head of the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

    "My administration is committed to promoting scientific integrity and pioneering scientific research and I am confident that Dr Francis Collins will lead the NIH to achieve these goals," said President Obama in a written statement released by the White House.

    "Dr. Collins is one of the top scientists in the world, and his groundbreaking work has changed the very ways we consider our health and examine disease," the statement said.

    Collins, 59, first came to spotlight in 1989 when he and his colleagues at the University of Michigan announced that they had discovered the defective gene that causes cystic fibrosis. He had developed a technique, called positional cloning, that allowed researchers to scan large segments of the human genome looking for disease-producing genes even when they did not know the function of the genes in question.

    Using that technique, he and his group subsequently identified the genes for Huntington's disease, neurofibromatosis, multiple endocrine neoplasia type 1 (a tumor of the parathyroid and pituitary glands) and the M4 type of adult acute leukemia.

    Collins replaced James Watson as head of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) at the National Institutes of Health in 1993. He remained in this office until 2008.

    (Agencies)