Harold Elliot Varmus

Harold Elliot Varmus
(1939)

American virologist and cowinner (with J. Michael Bishop) of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1989 for their work on the origins of cancer.
Varmus graduated from Amherst (Mass.) College (B.A.) in 1961, from Harvard University (M.A.) in 1962, and Columbia University, New York City (M.D.), in 1966. He then joined the National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Md., where he studied bacteria. In 1970 he went to the University of California, San Francisco, as a postdoctoral fellow. There he and Bishop began the research that was to win them the Nobel Prize. Varmus remained on the faculty of the University of California, where he became a professor of biochemistry and biophysics in 1982. In 1993 he was appointed director of the National Institutes of Health.

Varmus and Bishop found that, under certain circumstances, normal genes in healthy cells of the body can cause cancer; these genes are termed oncogenes. Oncogenes ordinarily control cellular growth and division, but, if they are picked up by infecting viruses or affected by chemical carcinogens, they can be rendered capable of causing cancer. This research, carried out with the aid of colleagues Dominique Stehelin and Peter Vogt in the mid-1970s, superseded a theory that cancer is caused by viral genes, distinct from a cell's normal genetic material, that lie dormant in body cells until activated by carcinogens.