Harold E. Varmus

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Harold Elliot Varmus (b. December 18, 1939) is an American Nobel prize winning scientist. He was a co-recipient (along with J. Michael Bishop) of the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes.

Varmus was born to Eastern European Jewish immigrant parents in Freeport, New York ^{[#endnote_Nobel]}. In 1957, he enrolled at Amherst College, intending to follow in his father's footsteps as a medical doctor, but eventually graduating with a B.A. in English literature ^{[#endnote_Nobel]}. He began graduate school in English at Harvard University in 1961, but changing his mind once again, applied to medical schools ^{[#endnote_Wired]}. In 1962, he entered the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University and later worked at a missionary hospital in Bareilly, India and the Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital ^{[#endnote_Nobel]}. Seeking to avoid the draft for the Vietnam War, Varmus joined the Public Health Service at the National Institutes of Health in 1968 ^{[#endnote_Wired]}. Working under Ira Pastan he researched regulation bacterial gene expression by cyclic AMP. In 1970, he began post-doctoral studies in Bishop's lab at University of California, San Francisco ^{[#endnote_Nobel]}. There, he and Bishop performed the oncogene research that would win them the Nobel Prize. He became a faculty member at UCSF in 1972 and a professor in 1979 ^{[#endnote_Nobel]}.

From 1993 to 2000, he served as Director of the National Institutes of Health. As the NIH director, Varmus was credited with nearly doubling the research agency's budget ^{[#endnote_Wired]}. Since January, 2000, he has served as President of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.

Beginning during his tenure as NIH director, Varmus has been a champion of an open access system for scientific papers, arguing that scientists should have control over the dissemination of their research rather than journal editors ^{[#endnote_Wired]}. He has advocated a system in which journals make their articles freely available on PubMed Central six months after publication ^{[#endnote_Wired]}. He is co-founder and chairman of the board of directors of the Public Library of Science, a not for profit open access publisher.

References

• ↑ Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1989, Editor Tore Frängsmyr, Nobel Foundation, Stockholm, 1990.
• ↑ Jamie Shreeve. "Free Radical." Wired Magazine. June 2006. Issue 14.06. [link]

External links

• [Harold Elliot Varmus biography from Access Excellence]
• [Harold Varmus biography from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center]
• [Harold Varmus profile from the Public Library of Science]
• [Harold Varmus Nobel Foundation Profile]
• [Harold Varmus debates the Open Access journal model]

 

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