Bishop, J. Michael (1936-…), is an American physician and cancer researcher who revolutionized scientists’ understanding of how cancer develops. Bishop and his colleague Harold E. Varmus discovered that normal growth-regulating genes could undergo changes that lead to uncontrolled cancerous growth. For their discovery, the two researchers shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine.
Previously, scientists had speculated that cancer-causing viruses inserted their own genes into normal cells, turning the cells cancerous. Bishop and Varmus, studying a virus called the Rous sarcoma virus, discovered that the virus’s cancer-causing gene is a modified copy of a normal gene. Genetic damage may transform normal genes into oncogenes, genes that cause malignant tumors by allowing cells to grow wildly. A number of environmental factors, including toxic chemicals, viruses, and radiation, may trigger the change.
John Michael Bishop was born on Feb. 22, 1936, in York, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Gettysburg College in 1957 and received an M.D. degree from Harvard Medical School in 1962. After serving his internship and residency at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, he did research in virology (the study of viruses) at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, from 1964 to 1968.
In 1968, Bishop moved to San Francisco to teach and do research at the University of California Medical Center. He became a professor there in 1972. He and Varmus conducted their research on cancer genes at the Medical Center in the mid-1970’s.
