J. Michael Bishop

J. Michael Bishop, born in 1936, virologist, biochemist, cancer researcher, and Nobel Prize winner, born in York, Pennsylvania. Bishop received an M.D. degree from Harvard University in 1962. He did his internship and residency at Massachusetts General Hospital (1963-1964) and then spent three years at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as a postdoctoral fellow. In 1968 he started work as a faculty member at the University of California in San Francisco. In 1970 he added American virologist Harold Varmus to his research team, and together they performed the research on oncogenes (genes that may cause cells to become cancerous) that led to their 1989 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine.

Beginning in 1970, Bishop and Varmus studied a group of cancer-causing viruses called retroviruses. Early on, they narrowed the scope of their research to the Rous sarcoma virus, which causes tumors in chickens. This retrovirus invades the genes of normal cells and causes the cells to become cancerous. Only some genes can be infected in this way, however, and these are called oncogenes. At the time that Bishop and Varmus began their research, it was thought that oncogenes were regular genes that had been infected and altered by viruses at some time in their evolutionary past. According to this hypothesis, these altered genes could later be triggered by a virus in the cell's environment, and could then change the cell into a cancerous one.

Bishop and Varmus and their fellow researchers established that all animals had oncogenes and that oncogenes were not caused by viral infection. The team found that the oncogene starts as a regular gene, with a normal function in a cell, but at some point is activated by a carcinogen in the cell's environment, setting in action the chain of events that leads to unchecked cell growth and multiplication, initiating cancer. This discovery may one day help scientists find a cure for cancer, because researchers may discover ways to block the actions of oncogenes.

Bishop has received many honors, including the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award (1982). He serves as chancellor at the University of California in San Francisco.