Harold E. Varmus

Harold Eliot Varmus is an American Nobel Prize-winning scientist and physician, born in 1939. He studied English at Harvard before turning to medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, and in 1968 he joined the Public Health Service at the National Institutes of Health. In 1970 he began postdoctoral research in the laboratory of J. Michael Bishop at the University of California, San Francisco. He was a co-recipient with Bishop of the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He later directed the National Institutes of Health from 1993 to 1999 and the National Cancer Institute from 2010 to 2015, and he is the Lewis Thomas University Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine.