J. Michael Bishop

John Michael Bishop was an American immunologist and microbiologist, born in York, Pennsylvania, on February 22, 1936. He attended Gettysburg College as an undergraduate and then Harvard University Medical School, where he earned an MD in 1962. He began his career at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, spent a year at the Heinrich Pette Institute in Hamburg, and in 1968 joined the faculty of the University of California, San Francisco, where he remained, directed the Bishop Lab and served as the eighth chancellor from 1998 to 2009. During his tenure he oversaw a major period of growth including the expansion of the Mission Bay development and unveiled a campus-wide strategic plan to promote diversity. He shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Harold E. Varmus and was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 2008. He died on March 20, 2026.