Harold Varmus
Nobel Laureate, Medicine
Harold Varmus, president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, received the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly with Michael Bishop, his former colleague at the University of California, San Francisco, for their discovery of cellular genes that are progenitors of retroviral oncogenes.
His current research at the Sloan-Kettering Institute mainly addresses molecular mechanisms of oncogenesis, using mouse models of human cancer. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine and has received the National Medal of Science, the Vannevar Bush Award, and several honorary degrees. He is also the former director of the National Institutes of Health.
He was recently appointed by Barack Obama as co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). His memoir, The Art and Politics of Science (W.W. Norton), was published in February.