Harold Varmus

Origins and early life

Harold Eliot Varmus was born in Oceanside, on Long Island, on 18 December 1939, the son of Frank Varmus, a doctor, and Beatrice Barasch, a social worker, and grew up in nearby Freeport, New York. He called himself a product of the early twentieth-century emigration of Eastern European Jewry to New York: his parents were children of immigrants, from a village near Warsaw on his father's side and from around Linz, in Austria, on his mother's.

Work and career

He entered Amherst College in 1957 meaning to become a doctor like his father, but turned to English literature, and took a master's degree in English at Harvard in 1962 before going back to medicine. He qualified as a doctor at Columbia University in 1966, and in 1968 joined Ira Pastan's laboratory at the National Institutes of Health, which settled him on a career in research. In 1970 he joined Michael Bishop at the University of California, San Francisco, and the two directed a research group together through the nineteen-seventies and early eighties, studying retroviruses and how some of them cause cancer.

They showed that the cancer genes carried by retroviruses come from normal cells, which carry near-identical genes, proto-oncogenes, in species from yeast to humans, genes that can cause cancer when altered.

Recognition

The 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded jointly to Bishop and Varmus “for their discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes”. He directed the National Institutes of Health from 1993 to 1999, the first Nobel laureate to hold the post, then led the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York from 2000 to 2010. He helped create PubMed Central, co-founded the Public Library of Science, and directed the National Cancer Institute from 2010 to 2015 before returning to New York as a professor at Weill Cornell Medicine.