Background

Harold Eliot Varmus was born on December 18, 1939, in Oceanside, New York, United States, to Jewish parents of Eastern European descent. His father, Frank Varmus, was a family physician, and his mother, Beatrice Varmus, was a psychiatric social worker.

Education

Varmus attended Freeport High School. Majoring in English, Varmus graduated from Amherst College in Massachusetts in 1961 with a bachelor's degree. Twenty-three years later, Amherst would award him with an honorary doctorate. In 1962 he received his master's degree in English literature from Harvard University. In 1966 he got his Doctor of Medicine degree from Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City. During his time as a medical student, he spent three months in northern India at a mission hospital. In 1970 Varmus joined J. Michael Bishop's laboratory at the University of California in San Francisco (UCSF), as a postdoctoral fellow and began his long, continuing study of tumor viruses.

Career

Varmus served as intern and resident at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York. He then served as a clinical associate for two years at the National Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic Diseases, where he did research with another physician, Ira Pastan, on bacterial genetics. In 1970 he became a faculty member at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). In 1979 he was named a full professor and in 1984 became the American Cancer Society research professor of molecular biology.

His specialties at UCSF were microbiology, biochemistry, and biophysics. His research concentrated on genes that cause cancer, known as "oncogenes". While investigating a retroviral gene, v-src, which causes tumors in chickens, Varmus and J. Michael Bishop, his colleague from the University of California at San Francisco, found a nonviral src gene, which closely resembles v-src, to be present in the normal cells of birds and animals. In the course of studying breast tumors in mice, Varmus uncovered data relevant to the study of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) and human breast cancer. His work focused particularly on the biochemical character of the AIDS virus. Varmus and Bishop, working with Dominique Stehelin and Peter Vogt, helped to prove the theory that cancer has a genetic component, demonstrating that oncogenes are actually normal genes that are altered in some way, perhaps due to carcinogen-induced mutations. Their research focused on Rous sarcoma, a virus which can produce tumors in chickens by attaching to a normal chicken gene as it duplicates within a cell. Since then, research has identified a number of additional “proto-oncogenes” which, when circumstances dictate, abandon their normal role of overseeing cell division and growth and turn potentially cancerous.

In the mid-1980's Varmus was chairman of the subcommittee of the International Committee on the Taxonomy of Viruses when it designated the AIDS virus as human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

Varmus was nominated by American President Bill Clinton to the directorship of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and was confirmed in November 1993. The director of the NIH plays a vital part in setting the course for biomedical research in the United States. Varmus’s nomination was strongly supported by biomedical scientists, but there was some opposition from AIDS activists. They — as well as others who were concerned with the health of women and members of minority groups — were concerned that Varmus would be more interested in basic biomedical research than in applied studies and feared that the medical research related to their specific concerns might be neglected. Varmus has argued that basic research in science, especially investigations of the fundamental properties of cells, genes, and tissues, could eventually lead to cures for many diseases, such as AIDS and cancer.

At NIH, Varmus set to rest initial fears that his directorship might be compromised by his lack of prior large-scale administrative experience.

He was able to restore morale and to initiate programs to reduce paperwork, open labs to outsiders, toughen standards of tenure review, and introduce innovation as a major criterion in the grant application peer review process. He successfully recruited top scientists to administrative positions by creating a depoliticized decision-making environment and by offering them their own labs on the NIH campus. This policy allowed them to continue their research and retain a sense of being active researchers, a policy which did evoke some Congressional criticism about conflicts of interest.

Varmus's strong committment to tilting NIH more strongly toward investigator-initiated basic research at the expense of applied and targeted research set him at odds with aging and AIDS activists, who had lobbied against his nomination. He consistently voiced concern to Congress that federal budget cuts would affect research at the NIH and at teaching hospitals around the United States as hospitals considered eliminating research to cope with the cuts.

In 2010, Varmus became the 14th Director of the National Cancer Institute. He started new administrative centers for cancer genomics and global health. There he renamed the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research and started an initiative there to study ras oncogenes. On March 2015, Varmus retired from that position, announcing his intention to return to New York City as the Lewis Thomas University Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and as a Senior Associate at the New York Genome Center.

Additionally, Varmus and his two colleagues, Patrick Brown at Stanford and Michael Eisen at UC Berkeley, were co-founders and leaders of the board of directors of the Public Library of Science (PLOS), a not-for-profit publisher of a suite of open access journals in the biomedical sciences.

Varmus is also author or editor of four books and hundreds of research papers. With Robert Weinberg he wrote Genes and the Biology of Cancer for the Scientific American Library, a book for general audiences. He served as an editor for several professional journals, and on review and advisory boards for government offices and biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies. When the Department of Defense (DOD) received $210 million to assign for studies of breast cancer, Varmus served on the committee of the Institute of Medicine to advise DOD on assigning the funds.

Achievements

• Varmus achieved international recognition as an authority on retroviruses, the class of viruses that cause a range of cancers in animals and AIDS in human beings.
  
  During the 1980s, Varmus began to accumulate a number of prestigious honors for his research, including the 1982 California Academic Scientist of the Year Award and the 1983 Passano Foundation Award. He was also the co-recipient of the Lasker Foundation Award. In 1984 Varmus received both the Armand Hammer Cancer Prize and the General Motors Alfred Sloan Award, and the American Cancer Society made him an honorary professor of molecular virology. These honors were followed by the Shubitz Cancer Prize. In 1989 Varmus and Bishop shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for showing that oncogenes can develop from normal cellular genes called proto-oncogenes. Varmus also received the Vannevar Bush Award in 2001. He earned the Double Helix Medal and Glenn T. Seaborg Medal, in 2011 and 2012 respectively.
  
  An expert in several fields of medical research, he served as a director of the National Institutes of Health, as well as a director of the National Cancer Institute. He also became the first person to have served as Director of an individual NIH Institute after being Director of the entire NIH.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Genes and the Biology of Cancer

    (The book shows how scientists have explored the questions...)

    1992
  • The Molecular Basis of Blood Disease

    (This edition includes new chapters such as signaling and ...)

    2000
  • Retroviruses 1999
  • The Art and Politics of Science 2009
  • Mammary-Specific Gene Transfer for Modeling Breast Cancer 2000
  • Ninth Special Report to the U.S. Congress on Alcohol and Health from the Secretary of Health and Human Services 1997
  • Rna Tumor Viruses: Molecular Biology of Tumor Viruses/Supplements and Appendixes 1985
  • Readings in Tumor Virology 1983
  • Investing in Our Future: A National Research Initiative for America's Children for the 21st Century 1997

Politics

In the early 1990s, Varmus became active in the politics of science, working principally with University of California colleagues. He also co-chaired Scientists and Engineers for Clinton-Gore.

Varmus declared his support for Barack Obama's quest for the Presidency early in 2008 and chaired the campaign's Science and Technology Committee. Following Obama's election, he was named by the President-elect as one of three co-chairs of PCAST (the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology).

Varmus has been a frequent advisor to the United States government, foundations, academic institutions and industry.

Views

Quotations: "When I read about genetics, I see breakthroughs every day. And while I'm trying to learn more about behavioral science, I must say that I don't feel I get tremendous intellectual stimulation from most of the things I read."

"Science can improve lives in ways that are elegant in design and moving in practice."

Membership

A licensed physician in the state of California, Varmus is a member of numerous professional and academic associations, including the National Academy of Sciences, the American Society of Microbiologists, the American Society of Virologists and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

• 

  He was elected as a Foreign Member.

  Royal Society , United Kingdom

  2005

Personality

Varmus's ideal summer day routine is reading on the porch.

Quotes from others about the person

• "We are delighted that Dr. Varmus will be our new NIH director – the first NIH director to have won a Nobel Prize – because he is one of the world's most eminent and most honored biomedical scientists. He has been working at the cutting edge of modern cell and molecular biology, and he has had an active relationship with NIH for some 30 years, as NIH intramural scientist, grantee, and public adviser. He has taken a leading role in national discussion of science policy issues." - Donna E. Shalala

Connections

Varmus married Constance Louise Casey, a book reviewer and editor, on October 25, 1969. They have two sons, Jacob and Christopher.

Father:

Frank Varmus

Mother:

Beatrice Varmus

Spouse:

Constance Louise Casey

Son:

Jacob Varmus

He is a jazz trumpet player and composer.

Son:

Christopher Varmus

He works as a social worker in Brooklyn.

References

• Prix Nobel 1989: Nobel Prizes, Presentations, Biographies and Lectures