Varmus, Harold

HAROLD ELLIOT VARMUS is an American scientist who is currently the president and chief executive officer of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. He was a corecipient, with J. Michael Bishop, of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1989 for their work on the genetic mechanisms underlying cancer.

Varmus grew up in Freeport, New York, and majored in English literature at Amherst College. He subsequently did graduate studies in English at Harvard University on a Woodrow Wilson fellowship before attending medical school at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University. He completed his internship and residency at Columbia-Presbyte-rian Hospital and then worked in the lab of Ira Pastan at the National Institutes of Health as a clinical associate. In 1970, he started a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco, under J. Michael Bishop. Varmus became a faculty member at University of California, San Francisco, in 1972 and professor in 1979. Much of his research has been on characterizing the behavior of retroviruses (a virus composed of RNA instead of DNA), such as their replication cycle and their ability to cause genetic change. Together with Bishop, Varmus conducted research on bacterial gene expression and tumor virology. They found the cellular origins of the oncogene (a gene that contributes to the production of cancer) of a chicken retrovirus. This finding led to discovery of genes that normally control development and growth but that can cause cancer when mutated.

Harold Elliot Varmus is the president and chief executive officer of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.

[Page 989]In 1993, Varmus was named by President Clinton to serve as the 14th director of the National Institutes of Health, a position he held till the end of 1999. Under his directorship, the institutes made changes in research programs, recruited leaders for important positions, and underwent a 5-year doubling of the budget. Since 2000, Varmus has served as the president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City and has contributed to the expansion of scientific and research training programs as well as new clinical facilities at this center.

Varmus has published over 300 scientific papers and is a strong advocate for an open-access system for scientific papers; he is the cofounder and chairman of the board for a nonprofit open-access publisher, Public Library of Science. He has received numerous awards including the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award (1982), the Alfred P. Sloan Prize from the General Motors Cancer Foundation (1984), the Gairdner Foundation International Award (1984), and the National Medal of Science (2001). In addition, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences(1984)and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1988).