Harold Varmus

Harold Varmus "has been the President and Chief Executive Officer of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City since January 2000. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English at Amherst College and Harvard University, and is a graduate of Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. He now serves as a trustee of Columbia University. His scientific training occurred first as a Public Health Service officer at the NIH, and then as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California, San Francisco.

"Much of Varmus’ scientific work was conducted at the University of California, San Francisco, where he and Dr. J. Michael Bishop and their co-workers demonstrated the cellular origins of the oncogene of a chicken retrovirus. For this work, Bishop and Varmus received many awards, including the 1989 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. In 1993, Varmus was named by President Clinton to serve as the Director of the National Institutes of Health, a position he held until the end of 1999.

"In addition to authoring over 300 scientific papers and four books, including an introduction to the genetic basis of cancer for a general audience, Varmus has been an advisor to the Federal government, pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms, and many academic institutions. Recently, he has served on the World Health Organization’s Commission on Macroeconomics and Health, task forces at the Council on Foreign Relations, advisory committees on electronic publishing, and planning groups to enhance scientific activity in the developing world. He is also a founding member and Chairman of the Board at Public Library of Science, a new publisher of free access online papers in biological and medical sciences. He has been a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences since 1984 and of the Institute of Medicine since 1991."


 * Former member External Advisory Board, Earth Institute
 * CoChair, President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology
 * Advisory Board, DefCon

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