Harold E. Varmus

In 1969 Varmus married journalist and book critic Constance Casey. They have two sons, Jacob and Christopher.

Harold Eliot Varmus was born on December 18, 1939, in Oceanside, New York, U.S. to Jewish parents who had descended from immigrants who had arrived from Poland and Austria at the beginning of the century. His father, Frank Varmus, was a physician while his mother, Beatrice,, was a social service worker.

He graduated from Freeport High School in Freeport in 1957. As a youngster he was deeply interested in literature and writing, and planned for an academic career in literature. Following this dream, he earned an MA degree in English at Harvard University in 1962 with a focus on Anglo-Saxon and metaphysical poetry.

Armed with an English degree, he changed his mind and decided to pursue medical studies. He applied to, and was rejected by the Harvard Medical School following which he was accepted into the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University in New York in 1962. He received his MD in 1966, which included a three-month internship at a hospital in northern India.

Varmus worked as a medical house officer at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital from 1966 to 1968 following which he joined the Public Health Service at the National Institutes of Health where he was employed as a Clinical Associate in Ira Pastan's laboratory.

In 1970, he began postdoctoral research in J. Michael Bishop's lab at University of California, San Francisco. He became a Lecturer shortly thereafter, and in 1972, became a regular member of the faculty in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the university.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Bishop and Varmus together directed a research group which made several major discoveries regarding cancer causing viruses. The duo demonstrated that nearly-identical versions of cancer-causing genes (oncogenes) carried by retroviruses are present in the genome of normal, uninfected cells in a wide range of species, including humans.

Varmus steadily rose through the ranks in the UCSF and was promoted to professor in 1979 and became an American Cancer Society Research Professor in 1984. His collaborative research with Bishop shed light on the functioning of the retroviruses and contributed immensely to the understanding of cancer cells.

One of Varmus and Bishop’s biggest achievements was the identification of a cellular gene (c-src) that gave rise to the v-src oncogene of Rous Sarcoma Virus, a cancer-causing virus first isolated from a chicken sarcoma in 1910. The duo was honored with the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries.

Harold E. Varmus, in collaboration with J. Michael Bishop performed pioneering cancer research and is credited with the discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes. Their studies in cancer-causing genes (oncogenes) carried by retroviruses shed new light on several questions on cancers that had been puzzling scientists so far.