Harold E. Varmus
Harold E. Varmus
Harold Eliot Varmusis an American Nobel Prize-winning scientist and was the 14th Director of the National Cancer Institute, a post to which he was appointed by President Barack Obama. He was a co-recipientof the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes. He is currently the Lewis Thomas University Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and a Senior Associate at the New York Genome Center...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth18 December 1939
CountryUnited States of America
Harold E. Varmus quotes about
There are three great themes in science in the twentieth century : the atom, the computer, and the gene.
I'm used to being surrounded by really smart 22-year-old students who have no problem saying that something I suggested is not a very good idea.
I had learned of Gertrude Stein's bon mot that medicine opened all doors. This prompted me, in different moods, to view my future life as literary psychiatrist, globe-trotting tropical disease specialist, or academic internist.
I saw my friends in medical school seeming to be more engaged with the real world. That provoked a sort of jealousy, and I decided to go to medical school after all.
Just after graduation in 1966, like many of my contemporaries, I applied for research training at the National Institutes of Health. Perhaps because his wife was a poet, Ira Pastan agreed to take me into his laboratory, despite my lack of scientific credentials.
Some growths can be detected early, making for increased accuracy in diagnosis. Some can be cured and others controlled.
In the 1960s and '70s, there wasn't much evidence at all. We knew vaguely the causes of cancer, but methods like genomics were very new.
When I was the NIH director, I often expressed envy of institute directors: they had the money and ran the scientific programmes.
I was born in the shadow of World War II, on December 18, 1939, on the South Shore of Long Island, a product of the early -wentieth-century emigration of Eastern European Jewry to New York City and its environs.
In preparation for a career in academic medicine, I worked as a medical house officer at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital from 1966 to 1968 and then joined Ira Pastan's laboratory at the National Institutes of Health as a Clinical Associate.
The NCI scientific programme leaders meet regularly to ensure that we are not ignoring highly original proposals and that we are not creating an unbalanced grant portfolio.
A major feature of life at the NIH in late 1960s was the extraordinary offering of evening courses for physicians attempting to become scientists as they neared thirty.
As an undergraduate at Amherst College, I was devoted to Dickensian novels and antiestablishment journalism while marginally fulfilling premedical requirements.
Cancer is a collection of many diseases with common principles, and each disease will have to be understood and more effectively controlled on its own terms.