Varmus, Harold Eliot (1939-…), is an American physician and cancer researcher who revolutionized scientists’ understanding of how cancer develops. He and his colleague J. Michael Bishop 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. But Varmus and Bishop, 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.
Varmus was born on Dec. 18, 1939, in Oceanside, New York. He graduated from Amherst College in 1961 and received an M.A. degree from Harvard University in 1962 and an M.D. degree from Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1966. From 1968 to 1970, he worked as a clinical associate at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland.
In 1970, Varmus moved to San Francisco to teach and do research at the University of California Medical Center. Bishop was already on the faculty there, and the two scientists began their study of cancer genes in the mid-1970’s. Varmus gained the rank of professor in 1979. In 1993, he left the university to serve as director of NIH. Varmus resigned his position at NIH in 1999 to become president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, a private research and treatment institution in New York City. In 2010, President Barack Obama appointed Varmus to serve as director of the National Cancer Institute, a division of the NIH.
