Harold Eliot Varmus

Harold Eliot Varmus, born in 1939, virologist, cancer researcher, and Nobel Prize winner, born in Oceanside, New York. Varmus received an M.D. degree from Columbia University's medical school in 1966, completed his residency at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, and then moved to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to work for two years. In 1970 he joined virologist J. Michael Bishop's research team as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California in San Francisco. There he and Bishop performed the research that would earn the pair the 1989 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. In 1972 Varmus was given a regular faculty position at the university.

He and Bishop worked on a group of viruses, called retroviruses, that can cause cancer. They quickly focused their research on the Rous sarcoma virus, which causes tumors in chickens. This virus infects the genes of normal cells and turns them into cancer cells. Only certain genes, called oncogenes, can be infected in this way. At the time that Varmus and Bishop began their work on retroviruses, researchers believed that oncogenes had at some point been regular genes, but had become infected and altered by viruses sometime in their evolutionary past. Though these altered genes usually do not harm the body, they can be activated by the retrovirus and cause the cell to become cancerous.

Varmus and Bishop and their fellow researchers learned that all animals have oncogenes and that oncogenes were not caused by viral infections. These oncogenes start out as normal genes with normal functions in the cell. At some point, though, a carcinogen in the cell's environment activates the gene, starting the cycle of events that leads to cancer. This discovery may help find a cure for cancer; researchers may discover ways to block the actions of oncogenes.

Varmus has continued his research on viral cancer genes. From 1993 through 1999 he served as director of the NIH. In 1999 he became president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.