Harold E. Varmus
Harold Elliot Varmus ( born December 18, 1939 in Oceanside, Nassau County, New York) is an American virologist, known for research on oncogenes.
Life
Varmus studied at Amherst College first English Literature ( bachelor's degree, 1961), continued her studies at Harvard University continues ( Master's degree MA 1962), but then switched to medicine. Since he was rejected at Harvard, he studied at Columbia University (MD degree in 1966 ) and was then at a mission hospital in India ( Bareilly ) and at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York City, where he completed his residency training ( internship, residency ). As an alternative to military service, he was in 1968, where he worked at the National Institutes of Health with Ira Pastan of gene regulation in bacterial cells. In 1970 he went as a postdoctoral fellow at the laboratory of J. Michael Bishop at the University of California, San Francisco ( UCSF ). Together with Bishop he discovered there the first human oncogene. The joint research earned them the Nobel Prize later. In 1972, Varmus Assistant Professor at UCSF and in 1979 professor.
1993 to 1999 he was director of the National Institutes of Health, a sub- agency of the U.S. Department of Health. From 2000, he was president of the Memorial Sloan -Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. In 2010 he became director of the National Cancer Institute.
In addition to the mechanism of tumorigenesis ( oncogenes studied with retroviruses ), he also examined viral replication, the HIV virus and hepatitis B virus, breast cancer tumors in mice.
Varmus is committed to open access to scientific journals and in this context is co-founder of the Public Library of Science, and in the Council by BioMed Central ( Open Access journals for a publisher ). He has been married since 1969 and has two sons.
Awards
Varmus received the Melanie Bronfman Award in Breast Cancer and a 1984 Gairdner Foundation International Award.
In 1982 he was awarded the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research, 1984 with the Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. Prize. In 1989 he received along with J. Michael Bishop the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine " for their discovery of the cellular origin of the potentially carcinogenic retroviruses ".
In 2001 he received the National Medal of Science. In 2010 he became an honorary doctorate from the University of Massachusetts Medical School. In 2012 he received the Glenn T. Seaborg Medal.
Varmus is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Society for Virology and the American Society for Microbiology.